Authorities determined that the shooting that killed a 17-year-old returning home from a Houston Astros game with his father and brother earlier this week was an act of road rage, police said Friday.
David Xavier Castro died Wednesday after being shot in the head and spending time on life support, according to his father, Paul Castro.
"One of the gentlest souls to walk the earth was taken from us," the father said in a Facebook post Wednesday. "David will be missed by a world that barely got to know him."
David was leaving an Astros game about 11 p.m. Tuesday. Paul Castro was driving back home with his sons when they encountered a man in a white, four-door Buick LaCrosse with a sunroof, police said during a news conference.
The driver exchanged hand gestures with David’s father as they were stuck in slow-moving traffic.
Police allege the driver followed the Castro family for several miles on Interstate 10 before shooting at their truck shortly after both vehicles exited the freeway. Paul Castro and David’s brother were not injured during the shooting.
Justin Brown, a detective with the Houston police homicide division, said the Buick’s driver had been driving aggressively and swerving around vehicles when he got stuck in traffic. When the driver unsuccessfully tried to merge into the same lane as Castro’s truck, he opened his door and yelled at Castro, he said.
Police have released a composite sketch of the suspect.
The vehicle had a temporary paper license plate on the back and no plate on the front. The vehicle’s tires had distinctive rims with seven holes, and the headlights had an unusual yellowish color, police said.
“That’s why we’re putting out this information to see if anyone has seen anything. Anything would help at this point,” Brown said, adding that there is a $10,000 reward in exchange for any information that leads to the driver's arrest. Police say it’s possible the driver does not live in the Houston area.
Paul Castro, who has worked over 26 years in education as a teacher and principal, said he has attended children’s funerals before "and I remember feeling the pain of those losses as they buried their child and just wishing to God that I would be spared from that and I wasn't," he told reporters on Friday.
The grieving father remembers his son as someone who "was worried about global warming, the environment, gun violence ... He wanted to do something with his life that would make the world better.”
For that reason, he also asked for people to perform random acts of kindness in his son’s memory.
“If the world were better," Paul Castro said, "maybe this man who was obviously angry at something, maybe he would not have made that decision."
