By Brian Rogers of the Houston Chronicle
(Feb. 2) – Dazie Williams called her 22-year-old son’s cell phone to tell him to be careful picking up high-dollar sneakers at Willowbrook Mall just before Christmas 2012.
The young man and a friend already had navigated the frenzied scene that morning at the mall’s Air Jordan release event, bought three pairs of $185 shoes and were headed home.
Just 12 minutes after that call, Dazie Williams’ phone rang and a friend said her son was shot and had been in a wreck just blocks away. She went to the scene and tried to get the lifeless body of Joshua Woods out of the car.
“I told him, ‘You have to help me help you,’ ” she told reporters outside a Harris County courtroom on Tuesday. “That’s why I’m here fighting for him. I want justice.”
Justice, for Williams, means more than bearing witness to the capital murder trial of Neal Bland, one of the accused gunmen.
It means going after Nike, the company that has for decades ginned up an insatiable desire among urban youth to spend hundreds of dollars on sneakers.
Read Rogers’ full story in the Houston Chronicle here.