15-year-old gunned down after Facebook posts, police say
Three days before 15-year-old Calixto Logan was gunned down on a sidewalk just a few yards from his Northwest Miami-Dade home, his house was hit by gunfire during another drive-by shooting in which no one was injured.
Calixto was killed, police said, after the shooting suspect tried to communicate with one of Calixto’s female friends through a Facebook post less than two hours before. Police made that claim in the two-page arrest warrant for Christopher Stewart, 17, who was charged last week with Calixto’s death.
Police said the female friend, who is not identified, accessed the message sent from Stewart’s Facebook page, which led them to his identity.
A witness identified Stewart from a photograph “as the person who shot ‘the victim’ [Calixto] by leaning out the passenger-side window of a black BMW,” Miami-Dade Police Detective Wilbert Sanchez said in Stewart’s arrest warrant.
Calixto was shot to death on Jan. 31 just a few hundred feet from his home on Northwest Sixth Avenue near 107th Street. He was walking home from a corner convenience store with some friends, when police say Stewart leaned out the window of the BMW following them and fired his weapon.
Surveillance video obtained by Miami Herald news partner CBS4, shows Calixto inside a Chevron gas station a few minutes before he was killed. Calixto, wearing a black beanie and blue sweatshirt, stayed in the store for eight minutes while his sister applied for a job.
After he left the store on foot, a black vehicle is seen on the video also departing. Calixto, a student at an Opa-locka alternative school, was shot and killed less than a half block from his home.
On his Facebook page, Calixto remembers several friends apparently lost to gunfire. There is also a video of him singing in the “So Gone” Challenge that has been spreading across the internet from a song by singer Monica. Friends have taken to Facebook expressing sadness and outrage. A GoFundMe page set up after the teen’s death raised thousands of dollars.
Florida Department of Law Enforcement records show a lengthy rap sheet for Stewart that goes back to his early teens.
He was first arrested in March 2013 when he was 14, charged with unarmed robbery by Miramar police. He pleaded not guilty. He was arrested again in a robbery seven months later. It wasn’t clear what became of the cases.
The records show that twice in 2014 he was charged with burglary of an unoccupied dwelling by Miramar police. One of those cases was dropped; the status of the other wasn’t immediately clear.
Then in January, February and March 2015, FDLE records show that Stewart was charged with battering someone while in jail. One of the charges was dropped. He pleaded no contest in the other two. It wasn’t clear Thursday why Stewart was jailed when those attacks took place.
Though police haven’t uncovered any beef between Calixto and Stewart on Facebook, the teen’s death adds to a growing list of Facebook chatter that has ended in gunfire, too often with deadly results.
The most high-profile, at least in South Florida, was the February 2016 shooting death of Van E. Blanton Elementary School first-grader King Carter, 6. Carter was killed by a wayward bullet at his apartment complex after a Facebook fight between three teens escalated to gunfire.
This story was originally published February 8, 2017 at 11:51 AM with the headline "15-year-old gunned down after Facebook posts, police say."