Four Charged in 7-Year-Old Boy's Slaying

Police say it appears to be a gang-related shooting

Four people face murder charges in the slaying of a 7-year-old Pop Warner football player, killed as he sat in his mother's car, authorities said Tuesday.

On Thursday, an FBI and LAPD fugitive task force arrested Tradel Faniel, 28; Windell Faniel, 24; Paul Jamar, 19; and Danielle Peters, 31, police said. All four face murder charges in the death. Tradel Faniel also faces charges in the slaying of a 17-year-old boy in a separate case.

"The detectives that are on the case right now, they told me from the beginning...'We're gonna make sure that these individuals, be brought to justice,' the victim's father Abu Taalib Hussain said. "And they fulfilled what they told to me. So I'm very grateful and thankful for that."

Taalib Pecantte was shot Dec. 2 in the 1900 block of Corning Street in Mid-City.

The boy's mother and her friend, a 31-year-old man, were also struck.

The mother was grazed in the leg by a bullet and her friend was shot in the back, but survived.

At the time, police said the assailants got out of a white four-door car, walked up to the mother's car and fired about 20 rounds.

"They knew my baby was in the car -- all the lights were on," the boy's mother, Sawan Berlin Mock, said at the time. "I can't believe that someone would do that to my baby.

"You cannot think it was OK. You should turn yourself in because that was not OK."

The shooting was gang related, police said, although the family was not involved with gangs.

Taalib's father said that as of Monday, the family was losing hope.

"We was just curious and wondering, will these gentlemen won't be brought to justice? You know. That was my main thing, for these individuals to be brought to justice," Hussain said. "And somehow, someway, you know, our prayers was answered."

City officials had offered a $75,000 reward to help find the killers. Details about that reward were not immediately known.

"I just hope we've got the right people off the street and maybe we save some other lives in the future," LA City Council President Herb Wesson said.

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