![]() ![]() He didn't know that the page's screening only included checking someone’s profile to make sure he or she is a real person.Ī few minutes passed, and a black Chevy Tahoe pulled up and parked next to Crews. Crews also figured the private gun-trading Facebook group where he met the buyer had also vetted members before allowing them to join. ![]() Not that he expected it to go bad he vetted the buyer on Facebook before he agreed to meet, and saw he was a 22-year-old Army veteran. But on this Saturday afternoon, in early 2014, he brought his stepdad with him just in case. He usually met with the buyers and sellers alone, typically fitting the deal in during his lunch break. He picked up the AK-47 in the trunk about six months earlier, in a parking lot behind a pancake house in Bedford. He’d been buying and trading firearms out of the back of his car in parking lots across North Texas since 2012. Members often meet in parking lots and at flea markets to complete their transactions.Ĭrews chose a parking lot because he felt it was a safer meeting place than his nearby three-bedroom yellow brick home. These have names like NYS Weapon Photography, DFW Gun Traders or Tarrant County Gun Traders. Facebook users across the nation have been buying, selling and trading guns in private Facebook groups. The buyer must be at least 18 years old for a rifle, and 21 years old to buy a handgun.īesides, Crews wasn’t the only one doing it. Despite its apparent seediness, it was perfectly legal in Texas for individuals to sell guns from their private stock out of the back of their cars as long as the buyer is a Texan. He’d met the buyer in a private gun-trading Facebook group and set the deal up in this parking lot. A 24 percent interest rate called for desperate measures. He came to make a quick $600 to pay off a payday loan he borrowed to buy plane tickets to Mexico for his girlfriend. He didn’t come to Target to shop for removable wallpaper for his practice room, an inexpensive bookcase for his mostly bare living room or a gold-side table to set his bong on. Sporting short blond hair and a beard in need of a trim, Crews spent his days working at his uncle’s car dealership and his nights playing drums in his ska band (monkeysphere). The 24-year-old watched people enter and leave the Target to pass the time while waiting for his customer to arrive. He’d parked away from other cars, but not too far away, when he arrived just a few minutes earlier on this Saturday afternoon in Carrollton. Parked in a 2005 gold Impala, Colton Crews waited in a busy Target parking lot, an AK-47 in the trunk of his car. ![]()
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January 2023
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