In the last week of June 1993, Angelo Perkins and his wife, Cathy, left their Killeen, Texas home to go to their high school reunion in North Carolina.
Their only child, 20-year-old Montrel, stayed home.
“I remember that day we left, the wife and I spoke to him at — we was at home leaving out the door, I remember that,” Angelo told Dateline. “We just said, ‘Hey, be good,’ and, ‘We’ll see you when we get back.’”
Angelo and Cathy had Montrel when they were 18 and 16 years old, respectively. Raising a child together was one of the greatest joys in their relationship. Angelo says his bond with Montrel was unlike a traditional father-son relationship. “It was almost like brothers, ‘cause I had him so early,” he said. “He pretty much grew up with us.”
Angelo describes Montrel as an upstanding, respectful young man, not the type to get into trouble.
So, when Montrel didn’t answer his father’s pages during the last three days of the reunion, Angelo didn’t panic. His son had never given him a reason to worry before. “I knew he was a good kid, you know? I really wasn’t worried at all,” he said.
Trusting their son was safe somewhere away from his pager, Angelo and Cathy enjoyed the rest of their trip. They returned to Killeen on Monday, July 5.
The moment Angelo opened the door, their lives changed forever.
“As I walked in, I spotted a body laying on the floor,” Angelo said. It was Montrel. “Somebody shot him.”
It was a harrowing scene. Montrel was lying face-down on the living room floor, his blood on the carpet. Even 31 years later, Angelo remembers it clearly. “I’ve been through war — but I haven’t seen nothing like that,” he said. Angelo served in the U.S. Army for 20 years, but he says that moment rings in his memory as the most horrific thing he has ever seen. “It was worse than anything I did in the military, that was — I was exposed to.”
Angelo immediately called the police and took his wife outside. “Naturally, I had tried to do some quick thinking because my wife — you know, you wanna try and protect your wife,” he said.
The police arrived quickly. Commander Anthony Lourence of the Killeen Police Department, who was not with the force at the time of Montrel’s murder, told Dateline the department responded to the 3000 block of Paintrock Drive in Killeen. “They discovered [Montrel] deceased in the residence,” he said.
According to Commander Lourence, Montrel was shot “at least one time,” though it is possible that he was shot more than once. The department suspects he was also beaten before he was killed. “There were some injuries — physical injuries — on him that appears to me have been a struggle prior to that. But that is — it’s not certain,” he said. “It looks like there’s injuries that are indicative of being struck with something.”
Commander Lourence said the house did not appear to have been broken into or robbed. “It appears that the individuals that were in the house that murdered Montrel were there specifically to do that,” he said. He later clarified that it is unknown how many people were involved in the murder.
One thing, however, was clear to investigators. “The person or persons that killed Montrel were familiar with him,” Lourence said. “They knew him and he knew them.”
Angelo told Dateline that he couldn’t think of anybody who would want to hurt his son. “I don’t know why this happened to him, ‘cause he was no problem child at all,” he said. “I don’t know about him having any bad friends, ‘cause I knew all his friends — most of them come to the house.”
According to the initial investigation, the last time anybody saw Montrel alive was at a club in Killeen sometime after his parents left for their reunion trip, though there is no record of the exact date. Commander Lourence said more than 70 people were interviewed in connection to the case.
Eventually, Montrel’s case went cold. “Once the investigator — investigators assigned to the case at the time had done interviews — done the entire investigative process — they hit a point where there was nothing else to follow up on,” he said. “At which time it appears that the case went cold — or they stopped following up on leads.”
After Montrel’s murder, Angelo and Cathy stayed with her parents for a little while since they couldn’t bear being in the house where their son was killed. Within two months, they moved to North Carolina. They had Montrel buried there so he would be close to them. “I’m not a cemetery person, but she wanted to go to the cemetery to visit,” Angelo said. “So I went with her.”
Angelo Perkins now faces the loss of Montrel alone. Cathy, who had been by his side since they were teens, died in 2015. She was buried beside their son. Angelo says he visits both of them on their birthdays and the anniversaries of their deaths.
Toward the end of her life, Angelo says that he and Cathy would talk about Montrel “every once in a while,” though the memory of their son was difficult for her to revisit. “It affected her to all the way until she died,” Angelo said.
He says he finds it hard to navigate his own life now, consumed by the disorienting grief of losing the two most important people in his life. “The wife and I, we helped each other, you know, get through this,” he told Dateline. “And then when God took her, I was like, ‘Man, you left me without a family.’ That’s a bad place to be at.”
It’s a place made worse by the lack of answers in his son’s murder. Angelo believes someone out there knows what happened and can help shed light on what happened to Montrel. “I would like to know who and why,” he said. “Those are my two questions.”
Commander Lourence would also like to know who and why. “I’m hoping that, as the years pass by, anybody who may have some information or have seen something or know something, you know, as they mature and as they get older will see it and go, ‘You know what? I know something, let me say something now,’” he said.
In his interview with Dateline, the commander also said he will assign a new detective to the case. “I’m going to have that detective re-evaluate the evidence that was collected to see if there is anything that we can send off for DNA analysis or fingerprints or any type of forensic analysis that could give us another lead.”
Anyone with information about Montrel’s case is asked to contact the Killeen Police Department at 254-501-8830.
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