Staff photo by JOHN WHARTON
Phyllis Clark holds a photograph of her son, Deondre Augustus “Gus” Hawkins.
Before he was found shot and dying last month in a car at a trailer park off Great Mills Road, Deondre Augustus “Gus” Hawkins visited a local college to try to enroll in classes, his mother said, and he eventually returned that evening to their home in Lexington Park.
“At 10 o’clock, he said, ‘You didn’t cook? I’m going to McDonald’s,’” Phyllis Clark recalled this week. “He said, ‘I’ll see you.’”
The phone calls started coming in about a half-hour after midnight from her 20-year-old son’s friends, who said they had heard he had been in a car accident. Clark later learned that police had found her son in the wrecked car at 11:30 p.m., that he had a gunshot wound in his upper torso and that he died at St. Mary’s Hospital.
“This is not a phone call that you expect to get,” Clark said Wednesday evening as she sat with three friends of her son at a restaurant in Callaway.
Capt. Terry Black of the St. Mary’s Bureau of Criminal Investigations said Thursday that no arrests have yet been made in the Aug. 24 case. “We’re working with the leads that we get,” Black said, “and it’s a very active investigation.”
Clark, a 45-year-old St. Mary’s native, said her son was born and raised in Charles County, where he was entrusted to mix batches of a local barbecue stand’s secret sauce when he was 14. By then, he already was into cars.
“He was 14 and drove up in the yard and said, ‘I’ve got a car,’” Clark said. “It was a blue ... old, old Cadillac,” that he’d gotten from one of his cousins.
Hawkins played football in middle school and high school in Charles County, his mother said. She got a job in 2007 at an apartment complex in Lexington Park, and they moved the next year to St. Mary’s Patuxent Woods neighborhood.
Her son worked jobs at a fast-food burger restaurant, the Walmart in California and at a marina in Tall Timbers during the three years that followed, but he also made time to get his GED and get more involved with motor vehicles.
“He had a gift for gab. He could talk somebody down on the price of a car, and [after he bought them] everyone would want to buy his cars,” Clark said. “He would trade for different cars. I kept saying I’m going to have to get a dealer’s license from the MVA.”
Hawkins was laid off from his marina job last winter and was looking this year for a new job, his mother said. In the days just before he died, he went several times to the College of Southern Maryland trying to arrange to become a student. On that Wednesday, he also fixed a family friend’s car window in Solomons before he came home, and left that night in a blue 2000 Lincoln Town Car he purchased last spring.
He was seen buying gasoline at a convenience store on Route 235 in Lexington Park at about 10:30, Clark said, before she started getting phone calls about the car’s crash into a tree off Sell Drive at the St. Clement’s Crossing neighborhood, located along Great Mills Road.
“How he got over on Great Mills Road, I don’t know how or why,” Clark said.
Online records indicate that Hawkins at one time lived at the trailer park. Black said Thursday that it is not clear if Hawkins was arriving or departing from the trailer park when the crash occurred. “It could have been either way,” the captain said, because the neighborhood’s roads all connect at a horseshoe-shaped street.
Clark said her son is buried in Waldorf, and that she plans to move to Landover in Prince George’s County. “I just feel like he didn’t belong here. He stayed to himself because he didn’t like any trouble,” Clark said. “I’m from here, I know that they’re very territorial in St. Mary’s County. You just have to pick sides every time. You could very easily be at the wrong place at the wrong time down here.”
She added, “If you’re not from down here, you don’t fit in. I regret every day taking that child down here.”
Detectives have requested that anyone with information or who may have witnessed the incident contact detective R.J. McCoy at 301-475-4200, ext. 9119, make anonymous tips to Crime Solvers at 301-475-3333, or text a tip to “TIP239” plus the message to “CRIMES” (274637).
jwharton@somdnews.com