Gary, Ind. – A Chicago man who recently moved to Gary, Indiana to try and turn his life around, lost it over a pair of sneakers.
Sergio Pinex, 18, was returning from a store with a friend Thursday morning, walking down 23rd Avenue in Gary, when two vehicles pulled up next to them and stopped. A man with a gun got out and demanded money and the men’s shoes.
“It was the other guy’s shoes. They took the shoes off the other guy and he didn’t have no money on him, I don’t know if they took his wallet or not, but he refused to get down when they told him to get down,” the victim’s grandmother Frances Pinex said.
Pinex’s friend gave up his shoes and wallet and lived. The killers took nothing from Pinex. Just his life. He would have turned 19 next week.
Now his family is planning a funeral instead of a birthday party.
His family said he had just moved to Gary to get a fresh start on his life with a new job and a new apartment. Now they are trying to understand why a simple robbery had to cost him his life.
His mother struggles to understand the senseless nature of what happened to her son.
“He didn’t deserve this, he didn’t deserve it,” Angela Pinex asid.
Police in Gary are looking for a purple PT Cruiser and a white Cadillac involved in the shooting. But this neighborhood has no surveillance cameras and so investigators are looking for help from the public.
“It’s so hard, so hard to believe that he’s gone,” Frances Pinex said.
Pinex’s family is looking for justice.
“There’s no explanation, but all I know is whoever did it, please turn yourself in,” Angela Pinex said, “because my son did not deserve this.”
Sergio Pinex was known as a handyman who could fix almost anything. For his family there is no one who can fix their heartache and sense of loss.
