SAN BERNARDINO >>
More than 1,000 attended an emotional memorial service Saturday for a father and his son who were killed by gunfire in front of a San Bernardino liquor store earlier this month.
During the service at the Way World Outreach Church in north San Bernardino, Pastor Marco Garcia asked those in the audience to turn away from thoughts of revenge and anger and replace them with God.
Anger and revenge will bring only more destruction to the family, he said.
San Bernardino residents Travon “Hefty” Lamar Williams, 26, and his son Travon Williams Jr., 9, along with Samathy Mahan, 25, were killed outside Superior Liquor on July 8.
The younger Williams was the first one shot, with a single bullet to the head, said the night manager of the store, located at 2950 Del Rosa Ave. The two men were each shot multiple times, he said.
A suspect, Trayvon Eshawn Brown, 26, of Rialto, was taken into custody in connection with the triple homicide.
Sherman Moten, of Carson, a retired Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, said incidents like what happened to Williams and his son “is a horrific thing for family.”
“This hurts, this really hurts,” Shimia Williams, 25, of Colton, said of the loss of Travon Williams and his son.
Unrelated to the family of Travon Williams, Shimia Williams said she drove to the service alone because she valued the friendship she and Travon Williams developed while working together at the Amazon Fulfillment Center in San Bernardino.
“He would just light up the workplace with jokes, a big smile and by always dancing to the music (that was piped into their workplace),” she said.
The camaraderie made the 10-hour days leading up to Christmas 2012 go by quickly, she said.
After Travon Williams left Amazon in 2013, the two kept in touch by email, Shimia Williams said.
First cousin Anthony Holmes, 25, said he could be calm at Saturday’s service because he “got out all the emotion” on his drive to San Bernardino from Sacramento, where he now lives.
“We grew up together from preschool on,” Holmes said.
Holmes remembers a time when then teenagers Travon Williams and his twin brother Traveil Willliams did gymnastic-like flips off the rooftop of Maple Elementary School in Fontana, the city where they lived at the time.
Traveil Williams was fatally shot in late June 2006 in a dispute over a cell phone.
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Almost exactly a decade later, his twin brother was also fatally shot in San Bernardino, Holmes and other family members noted.
Holmes said one of the things he will miss about Travon Lamar Williams is his ability to cut hair: “He was an artist,” Holmes said, adding that his cousin would cut hair of many male Williams family members.
Empress Monay Williams remembers her older brother “Hefty” as the only one in her family that would comfort her when she woke up from a “horrible nightmare.”
“He would come in my room, pray with me and tell me ‘everything gonna be OK Huggles,’ ” she said at the service.
Travon Jr., nicknamed TJ, was born to Travon Williams and his mother Ebony Newman, also of San Bernardino, on Sept. 16, 2006.
His favorite academic activities were reading and working out math problems, according to the pamphlet handed out before the memorial service.
Both were buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Riverside.