A killing in a bad neighborhood

College student, Eagle Scout David Pimentel paid the ultimate price, just for standing on a Pleasant Grove street corner one night

Story by Christina Hughes Babb | Photos by Danny Fulgencio

Gail Pimentel says she knows her son David had forgiven his murderer before his body hit the ground.

“That’s what I would tell them if I could talk to them,” she says of the killers. “And I would tell them that I am not that big a person. I am not as forgiving as him. You took the only thing that was truly good in my life. That is what I would say.”

She also wants to tell people things she probably shouldn’t need to say — that David’s life mattered and that he didn’t deserve to die.

“People want to know why he was there, in that part of town. They think he was on drugs and got himself killed,” she says. “The truth is he was visiting a friend, a friend who’d been his classmate at Bishop Lynch. They’d been to the gym and played basketball and had just finished dinner with his [friend’s] family. No, he was not on drugs. He was good. The best person I’ve ever known.”

For David, hanging out with friends and their families was typical. People loved being around him and he enjoyed many close relationships, recalls his former teacher Pat Thompson, who also oversaw David’s Boy Scout troop.

“He and that group of boys from scouts were always together,” she says. “David always had a smile on his face. He was selfless — would help anybody.” Thompson also sponsored David as he worked to become an Eagle Scout. Completing the compulsory Eagle Scout service project is no small feat, she says. David was the rare strong, smart and focused type of teenager who could pull it off.

His death at age 22 was something no one could have anticipated, she says.

“We were neighbors, too. The night he died, Gail showed up on my doorstep, holding their little dog. I was dumbfounded.”

Life cut short

David Pimentel grew up in a house across the street from Wallace Elementary School, where he and his buddies often shot hoops. He started school in East Dallas at St. Bernard’s before transferring to St. Patrick Catholic School in Lake Highlands, where he joined Boy Scout Troop 719. He excelled on the soccer team at Bishop Lynch High

School, where he graduated in 2010. He was fast, a natural athlete. He was quiet and a good listener, his friends say, quick-witted, always ready with a joke or quip, but never at the expense of another’s feelings.

“David was a true friend who never spoke anything but kind words and loved to laugh,” his friend, Nick Bedenkop, told an overflowing crowd at David’s funeral. issue

Before his death, David was earning a double major in finance and accounting at University of Texas at Dallas, while working fulltime as a supervisor at Kohl’s department store.

In her grief support group, Gail learned about the stigma attached to murder, she says. It’s like this: People