THE market

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Dallas Eyeworks is expanding and moving to better serve you and your family. Stay tuned new address will be 7324 Gaston Ave. Ste. 310 -across from The Fresh Market on the upper level. Call for an appointment. And we thank you for your support! -Dr. Meyer have a fundamental need to believe that if we follow certain rules, bad things will not happen, and, so, when some one is murdered, it is because the victim did something wrong.

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NMLS # 415561 go [to that part of Pleasant Grove] due to the danger, but he loved the De La Pax family, and they treated him as their own.”

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It happened at 9:30 p.m. July 28, 2014 outside the family home of Charber De La Pax. David and Charber were standing at the corner of Utica Drive and Tillman Street, just 100-feet from the De La Pax’s front door, when a car slowed as it passed.

Detective Tim Stewart, the 30-year veteran of the Dallas Police Department who is investigating the case, says he wishes the boys had taken notice of that car and gone inside.

Do I believe she knows something? Yes.

“You see a car roll slowly by in that neighborhood, you have to pay attention. They didn’t.”

Moments later, the car returned, two men emerged, at least one of them brandishing a gun.

“It was dark, so all our witness saw was two black men, one tall, the other kind of short,” Stewart says.

They demanded wallets and phones. David handed his property over promptly. Charber had nothing to give. In a second, the armed robbers and the victims were fleeing their separate ways, but Charber began hollering at his father to help, to call 9-1-1, Stewart recounts.

Stewart guesses the thieves didn’t like that, and one opened fire, probably not intending to kill.

“If they had meant to shoot them, they would have. This was a fluke shot. It hit the street and fragmented. The bullet hit Pimentel in the back, and the jacket hit the other kid in the leg.”

The suspects ran and hopped in the vehicle, a white, four-door sedan, according to Charber De La Pax’s testimony.

Early on, Stewart says he followed a few leads. Detectives located what they believed to be the getaway car; it was involved in a crime at NorthPark Cen- ter earlier on the same day David was killed. Detectives brought the owner, a woman, in for questioning, but she refused to talk.

“Do I believe she knows something? Yes,” Stewart says. But there is this code of silence in high-crime neighborhoods.

“Sometimes someone who gets jammed up will tell something they know [in exchange for leniency], but seldom does anyone just snitch. That is still looked down upon in these neighborhoods.” At that point, Stewart says, the case hit a dead end.

There was no evidence that the woman was in the vehicle and at the crime scene. Aside from a fractured bullet and a casing, police have no forensics to lead them to a suspect.

“The case is open, not considered a cold case yet, because I have not given up on it,” Stewart says. But he is frank about the prospect of finding a killer a year and a half after the crime — not good.

High- versus low-profile murder

A friend of Gail Pimentel contacted the Advocate shortly after police arrested the suspected killer of 18-year-old Lake Highlands resident Zoe Hastings last October.

She believed telling David’s story might help police find his killer. “Very little press coverage has been given to the Pimentel case,” she says.

David’s murder was reported only in the Dallas Morning News, sharing a single column with another southern Dallas shooting.

The story of Zoe Hastings, who was abducted and murdered in the White Rock area, dominated headlines, TV broadcasts and social media feeds for two solid weeks as five detectives and an entire city searched for her killer and raised tens of thousands of dollars to support her family, which includes four siblings.

Grieving mother Gail Pimentel does not begrudge them. She feels only sorrow and empathy for parents who have suffered the loss of a child.

But she is very angry, she says — at

13th Annual 3-on-3

Basketball Tournament

benefitting Lake Highlands area schools

When: Saturday, April 2nd

Where: Highland Oaks Church of Christ

For Girls and Boys in grades 1-8 $100 per team, 4 players per team

On-time registration ends March 16. Late registration with fee of $120 is open until March 24.

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OPEN TO THE PUBLIC the scum who killed her son, at the police who haven’t tracked him down, at a city that fails to fix South Dallas’ crime problem, at gossipy parents who implied David provoked his own death and the fact that his murder received so little attention.

Everyone is invited to come watch the competition and enjoy entertainment and a Fun Zone!

Stewart says publicity doesn’t help as much as you might think.

“Yes, you get a ton of tips coming in, which is, by the way, why you have to bring in extra detectives, because you have to follow up on every tip, but it is not usually a tip that solves a case. Hardly ever, in my experience,” says Stewart.

In the Zoe Hastings case, he explains, detectives had solid DNA evidence to work from. That is how they caught the Hastings suspect, he says.

“I’m not saying it can’t help. We want public help, we follow up on all leads, in few cases it does lead to an arrest,” he says. And there is reward money available for information leading to an arrest in the Pimentel case, he adds.

Finding closure in a cold case

A murder of a young woman in our neighborhood captured more public attention than that of a young man in South Dallas. But the pain felt by a parent who loses a child is limitless, no matter the circumstances.

Gail Pimentel’s Lake Highlands home is crowded. She calls her hoarding tendencies “my pathos.” But there is an order to the wood-carved statues of saints and angels, stacks of books (one called “God is in the tough stuff” is stacked near a vintage Nancy Drew mystery), children’s toys and sprawling colorfully painted canvasses. She has cut a careful path through the middle of everything, to her bedroom, where an urn containing David’s ashes rests on a bedside table, surrounded by pictures of the handsome, smiling, glowing child.

If David’s case goes unsolved, Gail is left to live alone, without her only child and with no one at whom to direct her rage. She and David’s father divorced when David was little, and, she says, they do not speak much. She knows she needs to keep living, keep fighting, but how?

She has her faithful dog, Reeses, who is always at her side, inching closer to her anytime she seems upset.

“David loved this dog; this dog loved David,” she says.

She bounces from anger to wistful memories as she talks, sometimes through tears, about her son — how they would watch the skyline over White

Rock Lake on the way to school, and discuss the weather; how every year before his birthday they would talk about the worst and best moments of the past year; how he wanted to earn a master’s degree and teach sports to his own kids someday.

She goes as often as she can — maybe once a month — to the Grief and Loss Center of North Texas sessions at Wilshire Baptist Church. She has a few good, supportive friends. She is an artist, and finds some catharsis in creation.

On a piece of paper, she has written down a Shelly Winters quote. She hands it over and says she likes to jot down quotes that describe how she feels.

“Life, even with its misery, is still life,” it reads. “You must relish and fight through its pain and conquer it, grow, and then joy will come again.”

HAVE INFORMATION? Anyone with information related to the David Pimentel murder should call 214.373.TIPS or the Dallas Police Department Homicide Unit at 214.671.3661.