A teenager is dead, a south Fort Worth neighborhood is shaken, and police still don’t have a suspect. That’s where things stand more than a week after a drive-by shooting claimed the life of 15-year-old Prince Washington in the early hours of a Thursday morning.
Washington was killed around 1:30 a.m. on Thursday, April 2, 2026, in the 6700 block of Glenbrook Lane in south Fort Worth. Investigators say a vehicle opened fire in what authorities are treating as a targeted drive-by shooting. Washington, a student at South Hills High School, was pronounced dead at the scene. He was 15 years old.
A Community Left Searching for Answers
His father, James Washington, didn’t mince words when he spoke to reporters in the aftermath. “This is something that he didn’t deserve,” he said, the kind of statement that’s simple and devastating all at once. No parent should have to say those words. And yet, here we are.
Fort Worth police confirmed the shooting but have not publicly identified any suspects as of this writing. The investigation remains active. That silence — no arrest, no named person of interest — is its own kind of weight on a community already absorbing a gut-punch loss.
South Hills High School, where Prince was enrolled, serves a predominantly working-class stretch of south Fort Worth. It’s the kind of school where teachers know their students by name, where hallways fill fast and loud between periods. This week, at least one of those hallways is quieter than it should be.
The Broader Picture: Youth Violence in Fort Worth
How bad has it gotten? Youth gun violence in Tarrant County has drawn increasing scrutiny from local officials and community advocates over the past several years. A teenager shot dead before dawn — during what should have been a school week — is not an isolated data point. It’s part of a pattern that residents and city leaders have struggled to interrupt.
Still, each case carries its own particular grief. Prince Washington wasn’t a statistic before Friday morning’s headlines. He was a kid — fifteen, with whatever a fifteen-year-old’s life looks like. Friends, maybe a sport or a hobby, a phone full of texts, a family that expected him to come home.
He didn’t.
What Investigators Are Saying — And What They’re Not
Fort Worth PD has kept details close to the chest, which isn’t unusual in active homicide investigations. What they’ve confirmed is that a vehicle was involved and that the shooting was not random in the conventional sense — though investigators have stopped short of explaining any suspected motive publicly. Neighbors in the Glenbrook Lane area have reportedly been cooperative with police, though no witnesses have been publicly identified.
That’s the catch with drive-by shootings in residential areas: witnesses exist, but coming forward carries its own risks. It’s a dynamic law enforcement agencies across the country have wrestled with for decades, and Fort Worth is no exception.
Anyone with information is being urged to contact Fort Worth Police or submit an anonymous tip through Crime Stoppers of Tarrant County at 817-469-8477. A reward may be available for information leading to an arrest, though officials have not publicly specified an amount at this stage.
A School, a Family, a Neighborhood Grieving
South Hills High School has not issued a lengthy public statement, but counseling resources are expected to be made available for students processing the loss of a classmate. That’s become something of a grim routine in American schools — grief counselors, a moment of silence, an empty desk. None of it fills the gap.
James Washington has urged the public not to let his son’s death fade into the background noise of a busy news cycle. And he’s right to push back against that. There’s a tendency — understandable, maybe unavoidable — for these stories to spike briefly and then recede. A week later, two weeks later, the name gets harder to find in the headlines.
But the investigation doesn’t close just because attention moves on. And for the Washington family, it never really moves on at all.
Prince Washington was fifteen years old. Somebody out there knows something. And until that somebody talks, a killer is still driving around south Fort Worth — free, and apparently unbothered by what they did before sunrise on an April morning.
