CLEVELAND, Ohio — An excited Antonio Parra called his mother Aug. 28 and told her that he got a new job at a restaurant in downtown Cleveland and that he was going to buy new clothes for his first day.
Three hours later, Andrea Parra got a call from one of her son’s friends saying that someone gunned down her 30-year-old son the middle of the day on the side of a busy street in Cleveland’s Stockyards neighborhood.
Andrea Parra took the news hard, but in the weeks since the deadly shooting, she’s become increasingly concerned that her son’s killers will not be brought to justice. Her concern is that Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley named Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson’s grandson as a “leading suspect” in the case and several anomalies have so far plagued the investigation.
“I just want to get to the bottom of this,” she said in a telephone interview Friday with cleveland.com. “If [the mayor’s grandson] has something to do with it, I don’t want it to be swept under the rug. Because they gunned him down in daylight, I feel like I’m cheated. That was my youngest child, and it’s a bit too much to swallow.”
Parra was shot and killed by two men. Witnesses told police they watched a car registered to Frank Q. Jackson speed away from the scene with the shooters inside.
Cleveland police officers went to Mayor Frank Jackson’s home later that night. The mayor told the officers his grandson would give a statement to police the following morning and officers did not take him into custody.
The initial investigators also did not take certain evidence, including gunshot residue tests from Frank Q. Jackson’s hands that could have showed if he recently fired a gun.
O’Malley has called for the police department to ask for an outside agency to investigate the remainder of the case. Experts told cleveland.com that asking for an outside agency to investigate the case is the proper way to quell the appearance of a conflict-of-interest in the case.
“I do want justice for him and my family, and his daughter,” Andrea Parra said. “We don’t like what happened and we need to what happened and why he was killed.”
Antonio Parra was the father of a 10-year-old girl. His mother described him as a doting and gentle father. She said his daughter is struggling to come to terms with his death.
“She was really numb at first and then she broke out real hard with the funeral," she said. “I’m working with the school. She doesn’t want to talk about."
Antonio Parra, known as “Biskit” to his family, grew up on the West Side of Cleveland and went to school in the Maple Heights, Shaker Heights and Cleveland school districts. He studied business at Cuyahoga Community College after high school.
He loved to read, especially The Wall Street Journal, and was writing his own book titled “Urban Stories.” He meditated every day, was a vegetarian and was a fitness enthusiast, sometimes working out with his mother.
“He was a serious person,” Andrea Parra said. “When he spoke, he talked about knowledge.”
Antonio Parra was working at figuring out what he wanted to do with his life after his July 22 release from prison, his mother said.
Antonio Parra was sentenced to three years in prison for gun possession after he fatally shot a Cleveland man in self-defense in 2017 in Barberton.
After his release, he got a job at Areway metal finishing plant in Brooklyn. He liked the job but was looking for something closer to downtown. He interviewed for a job at Zanzibar in downtown Cleveland, and had just learned he was hired shortly before he was killed, his mother said.
He planned on working at the restaurant while working to get his real-estate license. Once that happened, he was going to move out of Cleveland.
“It’s been very difficult, I’ve tried to stay home, but I went back to work because I’ve got to stay busy to keep my mind clear and open.”