14-Year-Old Killed by Gang in Suburban Maryland

June 8, 2009 — -- Christopher Jones, 14, lived in a Maryland suburb that was seemingly so orderly that his neighborhood regulated the color of the shutters.

But the Crofton boy died the afternoon of Saturday, May 30, just blocks away from his home in a manner more fitting to the most dangerous parts of the country -- the victim of a brutal gang beating that left him bleeding and dying on the street, police said.

It was a violent fate that the boy's mother, Jenny Adkins, had been fighting to prevent for weeks ever since her son told her he had been threatened by a neighborhood gang at school.

According to Jones' aunt, Adkins contacted her son's school to tell them about the threats more than a month ago. Then Adkins moved the boy to a different school and kept in close contact with him through text messaging.

"I talked to him every half hour, literally every half hour to the point where he was feeling suffocated by me, because I wanted to make sure that I knew where he was every minute of every day," she told "Good Morning America."

The day Christopher Jones was killed was no different, except that around 4 p.m., her son didn't respond to her text message or repeated phone calls.

"I felt uneasy," Adkins said. "I heard sirens. I called again. I heard an ambulance."

Witness Barbara Hartman was one of the first to run to Jones' aide.

"His wounds were severe and he was bleeding from everywhere," Hartman said. "I knelt down. I started telling him to hang on, help is on the way. I grabbed his hand to hold it."

According to witnesses, the boy had been surrounded by six young men while he was riding his bike. Two of the young men started hitting him repeatedly, the witnesses said.

"The witnesses that saw him say he continued to pedal as he was unconscious until he fell and hit his head on the street," the boy's mother Jenny Adkins said.

Jones was pronounced dead at the hospital.

"I begged them to put him on life support and they did but he was already dead," Adkins said. "He was already dead. He wasn't coming back. So my daughter came into the room and said 'Mom, let him go.'"