DALLAS — Danielle Brown called her son “Big Man” from the moment he was born.
Soon it became "Biggie."
And for seven years, Kyrie Barnes answered to that even though he was just a small boy.
He was born on Christmas Eve in 2015.
And he died July 5, 2023, in what Dallas police believe was random celebratory gunfire outside the family’s apartment near Interstate 30 and Buckner.
The shots were fired July 2. Kyrie survived in the hospital for three days.
“I was praying for him to make it. But I just feel like maybe he was too good for the world,” Brown said.
Kyrie would have entered second grade in the fall at a new school.
Brown had just moved her three children – Kyrie was the middle – from Garland.
Fireworks lit up the sky outside their new apartment complex two nights before the July 4 holiday.
Brown said Kyrie wasn’t interested in looking at them.
He was at the foot of her bed playing a video game.
She and her other kids were in the bedroom, too, when the sound of fireworks suddenly became the sound of bullets.
One shot traveled through a wall, entered their apartment, and hit Kyrie.
“It was just reckless shooting because of the fourth of July and it wasn’t even on the fourth of July,” Brown said, shaking her head.
The memories of what happened next are too painful for her to talk about.
She hasn’t stepped back inside that apartment, and she isn’t sure she ever will.
So, friends and family members are raising money to help the family move.
The non-profit organization No More Violence organized a vigil and balloon release in Kyrie’s memory at a park in Mesquite.
He was remembered as a little boy who loved Spider-Man and whose favorite color was red.
“Put the guns down and pick up a bible,” one of Kyrie's cousin said to the crowd. “This has got to stop.”
One by one, mothers and fathers who’d lost loved ones took the microphone to tell Brown and Kyrie’s father, Larry Barnes, Jr., that the pain never goes away.
The family continues to beg anyone with information about what happened that night to come forward.
“It could be your son, your family member – anything,” Brown said.
But she knows even if there is an arrest, it can’t bring her baby back.
“This shouldn’t happen to nobody’s kid,” she said. “It’s just an innocent kid.”