Think about what it means to inherit something. Most people think of a house, a last name, or maybe some money. But what happens when what you inherit is a war? When the thing passed down from father to son is a gang? This is the story of Andrew Bender III, a kid from Compton who grew up in the shadow of a man the streets knew as Lil Bubz.
He played football and had dreams to maybe one day play pro. However, his reality was quite different. By the time he was 19 years old, he was shot 10 times in the back on a quiet street in Bellflower, California, on a Wednesday morning, 9 days before his 20th birthday. And what makes this story different from a hundred other stories like it is that the gang that got him killed was the same gang his father built his entire identity around.
Andrew didn’t find the streets. The streets were already in his home, and that’s where everything starts to shift. Cedar Street, Bellflower, California. Wednesday, January 27, 2016. Just before 9:00 in the morning, the sun is barely up, cutting thin lines of pale light between the bungalows lining the block.
The air is cool, almost still. The kind of morning where you could almost believe the neighborhood is peaceful if you didn’t know better. 19-year-old Andrew Bender III steps out of a nearby liquor store alongside his boy Adel, known in court records as Yudell Cooper, carrying sodas, a bag of chips, laughing about something small the way young men do when they’re not thinking about what’s coming.
Andrew is lean, smooth-featured with the kind of easy confidence that comes from growing up knowing how to read a block. He knows this street. He’s been walking it his whole life. He thinks he knows what kind of morning this is. At 8:51 in the morning, a security camera from a nearby home captures the two of them moving down Cedar Street.
As they pass one particular house, they clock a man named Cornell Dunlap standing outside on his grandmother’s porch. The question comes fast, and in gang culture, it always means the same thing. Where you from? Andrew doesn’t flinch. NHood, he says, flat and fearless. Neighborhood Compton Crips. Dunlap replies that he’s from Nutty Block.
No beef. The gangs don’t have issues. Andrew and Adel keep walking. What Andrew doesn’t notice, or maybe doesn’t register as a threat in the moment, is the gold Dodge Avenger pulling over to the side of the street nearby. At 8:57, surveillance footage shows Cornell Dunlap get into that car. 6 minutes.
That’s all it takes for the world to change. On their way back from the store, Andrew and Adel are just retracing their steps. Maybe Andrew’s thinking about going to his mother’s house for breakfast. Maybe he’s thinking about Siyana, his girlfriend, about the baby coming in June, about work later that night. He doesn’t hear the footsteps behind him.
He doesn’t hear someone closing the distance quickly, deliberately, from across the street. And then the silence of Cedar Street breaks apart. 10 shots. That’s what court records confirm. 10 rounds from a semi-automatic pistol fired at close range into Andrew’s back and chest. Neighbors woke to the sound.
One man, an off-duty security guard, looked out his window and saw a figure running down the street with a silver handgun, while another man lay still on the ground. A woman named Monica Chavez saw someone rushing toward a yellowish four-door car, grabbing at his waistband, then disappearing as the car sped away. Adel ran.
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He looked back once, long enough to see the shooter standing over Andrew before sprinting to the Avenger. When Adel finally reached safety, he called 911. Police and paramedics arrived within minutes. They found Andrew Bender III lying on the pavement he had known his entire life. He had been shot 10 times. He still had a pulse, barely.
They rushed him to the hospital, put him on life support, and for 2 weeks, his family prayed. He never woke up. On February 9th, 2016, Andrew Bender III was pronounced dead, 9 days shy of his 20th birthday. And this is where the story takes a darker turn because what happened on Cedar Street that morning wasn’t random.
It wasn’t a case of wrong place, wrong time. It was the end result of a history that started decades before Andrew was even born. To understand what happened to Andrew Bender III, you have to understand who Andrew Bender II was, the man the streets called Lil Bubz, the foundation of everything.
Andrew’s father was a well-known member of the Neighborhood Compton Crips, NHCC, a set that originated on the East Side of Compton in the late 1960s, operating between Long Beach Boulevard and Pannes Avenue. By the time Andrew II was coming up, this wasn’t just a gang, it was an institution. It had history. It had enemies.
It had its own mythology, its own language, its own rituals, its own code. And Andrew Bender II was deeply embedded in all of it. Neighbors who knew him described a man who commanded a certain kind of respect. Tall, lean, with a scar running down his jaws. Old-timers nodded when he drove through. Younger men stepped aside.
He was, in the truest sense of that world, an OG, a man who had survived the crack epidemic, survived the wars, survived long enough to become part of the neighborhood’s mythology. And at home, he was Andrew’s father. That’s the contradiction that defines this entire story because the elder Bender did, in his own way, try to warn his son.
He would sit with Andrew on the porch, blue rag hanging from his pocket, and tell him to do better. He’d talk about the nights he spent in a cell, the loneliness, the money he’d made and lost. He would say, focus on school. Do better than me. He meant it. You can believe that he meant it. But the problem was that the lesson was being delivered by a man who, on those same mornings, was cleaning a pistol at the kitchen table, counting cash from street deals, laughing with OGs about old missions.
Actions speak louder than words, and Andrew was watching every single one of them. By the time Andrew was 9 years old, he could identify the make and model of an unmarked police car. He knew which streets was safe to walk and which ones weren’t. He knew the unwritten rules. Never call the police.
Never cooperate with them. Never show fear. He had already seen men shot. He had already learned to drop to the floor when he heard pops in the night. His childhood classroom was the front porch of a Neighborhood Compton Crips household, and his teacher was a man who told him to go to school while teaching him everything he needed to know to survive in the gang.
But here’s what makes this story different from the kind of story people want to tell about gang life because Andrew Bender III was never just a gang member. He was, from the very beginning, somebody who could have gone either way. He started playing sports at 5 years old.
When he found football, that was it. He would play in two leagues at once. He loved the game with the kind of full-body devotion that only kids have before life starts making things complicated. His goal, from as far back as his mother Tiffany could remember, was to make it to the NFL. Not a vague dream, a real plan.
Something he was working toward. And Tiffany, who saw everything, who watched her son being pulled in two directions at once, made a decision that only a mother who truly understood the stakes would make. When Andrew was in 10th grade, she moved the family out of Compton entirely. She enrolled him at Long Beach Poly High School, one of the best football programs in the state.
She was trying to physically remove him from the environment before it consumed him. It almost worked. Andrew joined the team as a fullback in 2012 and was doing well. The new environment, the new discipline, the new identity of being a student athlete rather than a Compton gang member. But what made this story different is that the escape was never clean.
He had back problems his senior year. He couldn’t play. The thing that was supposed to be his way out physically, literally, broke down. He graduated in 2014 and enrolled in Long Beach City College, but then his girlfriend Siyana told him she was pregnant, and Andrew made the kind of decision that says something real about who he was.
He dropped out, got a job as a security guard, started working nights, 7:00 in the evening to 4:00 in the morning to provide for his family. He was doing the right thing, working, trying. His mother, Tiffany, later told a reporter, “I would be lying to say he wasn’t part of that click, but he wasn’t the type who stood on the corner with his pants hanging down, doing nothing.
He was busy doing things all the time. He was playing football, he was going to school, he had a job.” But here’s where the pull starts becoming undeniable. The week he died, Andrew had a couple of days off work. He wanted to visit friends. Tiffany tried to keep him away from Compton. She said, “Andrew, you’re working and doing good.
” And he said, “Mama, let me be your man.” He wanted to spread his wings. He never made it back home because leaving Compton physically is one thing. Leaving it in every way that matters, in reputation, in identity, in the enemies your father made before you were born, that’s a different thing entirely.
And Andrew Bender III never really got the chance to figure that out. To fully understand why Anthony King walked up behind Andrew Bender III on Cedar Street and fired 10 rounds into his back, you have to understand the war that was already in motion long before that morning. And this is where the story gets complicated because this wasn’t just Neighborhood Compton Crips versus Atlantic Drive Compton Crips.
This was a war between people who used to be brothers. The Neighborhood Compton Crips, the Atlantic Drive Compton Crips, the Kelly Park Compton Crips, and the Southside Compton Crips were once, not long ago, tightly connected, bound by family ties, friendships, and decades of fighting back-to-back against Piru gangs and other rivals.
These four sets had close ties. People had relatives on all sides. They went to the same barbecues, attended the same funerals, moved through the same world. And then, in the early 2000s, it fell apart. People say it wasn’t one single incident. It was a slow accumulation of disrespect, of grievances left unresolved, of small things that added up until they couldn’t be ignored anymore.
The four sets split into two sides, Neighborhood and Kelly Park on one, Southside and Atlantic Drive on the other. People tried to bring them back together. Those efforts failed, and the violence began. In April of 2007, an 18-year-old named Jamiel Shaw and his brother, Matthew, got into it with Southside members at a party.
There was a park fight set up, one-on-one matches. Matthew knocked out a Southside member named Albert Beckley, known as Bluebird. A few weeks later, on May 14th, Jamiel and Matthew were on Pauline Street in Neighborhood territory when a silver car came rolling through. Albert Beckley leaned out the window with a gun and opened fire.
A woman was grazed. Jamiel was shot in the chest and died at the scene. Albert Beckley and the driver, Darrell Fan, were both arrested, each sentenced to 50 years to life. Then came February 7th, 2009. Atlantic Drive member Anthony King, the same Anthony King who would later put 10 bullets into Andrew Bender III, pulled a gun on a Kelly Park member named Will and threatened him.
That set off a chain reaction. Will and another Kelly Park member tracked down a 21-year-old Atlantic Drive associate named James Hampton, known as Tiny C, sitting in his car at a liquor store. Will approached with an AK-47 and shot James Hampton to death in the parking lot. Both Will and his associate were convicted and sentenced to decades in prison.
By the time 2013 rolled around, Neighborhood had built an alliance with Santana Block Compton Crips, one of Southside’s worst enemies. A music video that year captured a moment in time. Rappers from Anzac Grape, Neighborhood, and other allied sets coming together in a visual show of force. Andrew Bender III can be spotted in that video, throwing up Neighborhood signs, calling out rivals.
He was 19 at the time, already deep in the identity his father had handed him. And then, May 5th, 2014, two Southside members, 18-year-old Omar Williams and 20-year-old Jason Pena, were driving down the street when an SUV pulled up alongside them. Someone inside opened fire. Both men were hit multiple times.
Their car lost control, crashed into other vehicles. Omar Williams was dead at the scene. Jason Pena died at the hospital. Investigators believe members of Neighborhood and Santana Block were responsible. This is the war Andrew stepped into, not as an outsider, not as a recruit being pulled in, but as a son of the set, a young man who had inherited every enemy his father ever made.
By the time he took that walk to the store on Cedar Street in January 2016, the war had been going for years. Bodies had been dropping on both sides. And someone had decided that Andrew Bender was next. This is the part of the story that stays with you because what happened to Andrew Bender III wasn’t a case of a lost kid falling into the wrong crowd.
It wasn’t peer pressure in the traditional sense. Wasn’t a desperate search for belonging from someone who had nothing. It was something more specific, more insidious, and in some ways more heartbreaking than any of that. Andrew followed his father into the same gang.
He took on the same nickname, Bubs, just like his father was Lil Bubs. He affiliated with the same set, ran with the same people, operated in the same territory. He didn’t join the Neighborhood Compton Crips because he was recruited. He joined because the Neighborhood Compton Crips was already in his house, already in his name, already in the air he breathed from the day he was born.
Sociologists call this situated learning, the idea that children learn not from textbooks, but from participation, from watching and imitating the people around them. And in Andrew’s case, the person he was watching most was his father, a man who told him to do better while modeling something completely different.
A man who, by being both a loving father and a gang figure, blurred the line between cautionary tale and instruction manual in his son’s mind. Research on generational gang involvement is brutal in its clarity on this point. Studies have found that for every unit increase in family gang involvement, a child’s likelihood of joining a gang increases by nearly 20 times.
20 times. Not because of genetics, not because it’s inevitable, but because of environment, because of identity, because of what a child learns about themselves from the people they love most. And there was another layer to it, one that often gets left out of these stories, the weight of reputation. When you are the son of an OG, the expectations are different.
Everyone on the block knows your lineage. You’re expected to uphold it. You carry the name, you carry the respect that comes with it, and you carry the targets that come with it, too. For Andrew, having his father’s name, literally being Andrew Bender III, being called Bubs, just like his father, wasn’t just a nickname.
It was a statement about who he was and where he stood. His mother saw what was happening. She moved the family. She enrolled him in a new school with a football program. She tried to physically change the environment. And when Andrew ended up back in Compton on his days off, visiting friends, being a young man, she was terrified because she knew something that Andrew may not have fully understood himself, that the streets remember, that the enemies his father made don’t distinguish between generations.
This wasn’t a recruitment. This was an inheritance. The gang was the family, and the family was the gang. And for Andrew Bender III, those two things had never been separate. Leaving would have meant abandoning everything he knew about who he was. And that’s a thing that’s almost impossible to ask of a 19-year-old kid who is still figuring out what his identity even is.
Let’s go back to Cedar Street because now we know who was in that gold Dodge Avenger. And now we know why Andrew Bender III was targeted. Anthony King, also known as A-Wall, was 36 years old at the time of the shooting. A member of the Atlantic Drive Compton Crips, a set that had once been allied with Neighborhood before the early 2000s fall out.
He had a history with members of both neighborhood and Kelly Park. According to investigators, he and Andrew had a prior confrontation in the year before the shooting. In the logic of this war, Andrew wasn’t just any neighborhood member, he was the son of Lil Bubbs. Killing him sent a message that reached further than most.
The mechanics of how it happened are devastating in their simplicity. Cornell Dunlap, the man Andrew and Adele spoke to on their way to the store, was standing in front of his grandmother’s house. His grandmother lived one house away from Anthony King’s in-laws. King was there that morning. When Andrew and Adele walked past, Dunlap apparently recognized Andrew, or at least recognized the significance of the encounter, and got into his Avenger.
At 8:57, the camera shows him pulling over down the block. Moments later, King runs from across the street and opens fire. When Adele looked back, the shooter was standing over Andrew, standing over him, letting what he had done be seen. Then he ran to the Avenger and the car sped away. Detectives went to work immediately.
A neighbor gave them a description of a silver handgun. Monica Chavez told them about the yellowish car. Adele, who initially didn’t want to be involved, who laughed at the photo lineup when they first showed it to him, who said, “Break off numbers five and six and y’all do the rest, man.
” Eventually identified King as the shooter while being transported to court in early 2017. He would recant at trial, citing fear, but his earlier identification was already on record. Then there was Cornell Dunlap. Initially, he denied everything, said he wasn’t in the area, but when investigators told him that witnesses had placed him there and that they had him on video getting into the Avenger and driving the shooter away, he changed his story.
He admitted to being in the car. He said King had run up and asked for a ride to the grocery store and he didn’t know about the shooting until later. Three days after the shooting, Anthony King was arrested. He denied everything. Investigators obtained a search warrant for his phone and found he was near Cedar Street at the time of the shooting.
In jail, he called his wife Sandy and those calls became critical to the case. Sandy told him investigators had only found one of his phones. She had the others. Four days later, when detectives brought Sandy in, she admitted she had thrown the phones into a fire pit. And then King called her again and said he didn’t know why he kept his phone, that he should have thrown it into the ocean that day and if he had, there would be nothing to worry about.
He convicted himself on a recorded phone call. On October 16th, 2018, Anthony King was sentenced to 80 years to life in prison for the murder of Andrew Bender the III. When the news reached Andrew’s family that he had been shot, his mother Tiffany arrived at the hospital still in her work scrubs, hands shaking.
The elder Bender came minutes later, pacing the corridor, making calls, barely holding himself together. Doctors came out with the kind of faces that say everything before they say a word. Catastrophic damage to the spine and organs, coma, unlikely to recover. For 2 weeks, the family sat with him.
His friends gathered outside, some in blue rags, some in school uniforms. They lit candles. They wrapped quietly in the parking lot. When Andrew died on February 9th, the chaplain offered a blessing while Andrew’s father punched the wall and wept. His girlfriend, Sayana Stevens, who had been with Andrew since they were sophomores in high school, who he told back then, “Someday, you’re going to be my girlfriend and we’ll have a family.
” was pregnant with their daughter. She had woken up with a bad feeling on the morning of January 27th and tried calling him. He didn’t answer. Then his mother called and said Andrew had been shot. Sayana gave birth to their daughter a few months after Andrew died, a child who would grow up knowing her father only through the stories people told about him.
Tiffany Moore, Andrew’s mother, pushed through her grief and helped identify his killer. She got a photo of Anthony King and asked Adele, “Is this the man that killed my son?” And Adele said, “Yes.” Tiffany passed that information to investigators, and then she had to live with the fear that comes with that.
In a world where cooperating with law enforcement can get you labeled a snitch, where the streets have long memories. Andrew was buried in Compton. The pews overflowed. The choir sang. People wore blue. Outside, lowriders idled and motorcycles revved in salute. The preacher asked everyone in the congregation who had lost someone to gun violence to stand, and nearly everyone rose.
And even in that moment of collective grief, there was already talk of retaliation. Because in this world, funerals are sometimes the beginning of the next chapter of violence, not the end. Five years passed. Anthony King was in prison. The case was closed in the eyes of the courts.
And Andrew Bender the II, Lil Bubbs, the father, the man who started all of this, was still alive, still in Compton, by all accounts trying to move forward. Older now, weathered, aware that he has survived things most people don’t survive. He had lost his son. He said he was done with the streets, but the streets were not done with him.
December 5th, 2021. Andrew Bender the II drove to Marlon’s house in Kelly Park territory to get some work done on his car. Michael, a mechanic who lived in a trailer behind Marlon’s house, was the man handling the repairs. It was a well-known hangout for Kelly Park members. Bender had been there before.
He thought he was safe. At around noon, a 49-year-old Kelly Park member named Lawrence Stackhouse walked up to Andrew in the driveway, and he said something that had been sitting in the streets for years. “I heard you killed my father.” Andrew Bender the II, a man who, by his own account, had been riding alongside killers for decades, chose honesty in that moment.
He said, “I didn’t kill your father, but I was in the car with the men that did. But that’s past me now. I’m moving forward. I don’t want to talk about that no more.” He was trying to close the chapter. Stackhouse walked away, but the conversation had already opened a wound that wasn’t going to close. That afternoon, when Andrew and Michael were driving to an auto parts store, Andrew reached into the center console and put a gun on the side of his seat.
Michael asked what was wrong. Andrew said, “Nothing.” But he knew. On some level, in the way that men who have lived this life develop a kind of radar, he knew. The next morning, December 6th, 2021, Andrew came back to Marlon’s house early to finish working on the car. Police were active in the area, so he put his gun in a plastic tub and covered it with some clothes.
Maybe he thought that showed good faith. Maybe he thought that disarming himself would de-escalate things. At around 8:30 in the morning, Michael heard the sound of Lawrence Stackhouse’s Dodge Charger coming down the street. The car drove past the house, made a U-turn, stopped in front of the driveway.
Lawrence Stackhouse got out with a gun in his hand and started walking toward Andrew. Andrew ran. Stackhouse fired once, hitting him in the back. Andrew turned around and put his hands up, unarmed, hands raised. Stackhouse walked toward him calmly and shot him three more times, in the stomach, in the chest. Andrew fell to the ground.
He died during emergency surgery at the hospital. Doctors determined that three of the four gunshot wounds were fatal. He died almost exactly the same way his son had died 5 years earlier. Shot from behind, hands raised, trying to get away. Both of them unarmed when the shots came. Lawrence Stackhouse was arrested in August of 2022.
He claimed self-defense at trial. He said Bender had gone for a gun. Witnesses, including Michael, testified that Bender was unarmed, that his gun was in a plastic tub under a pile of clothes across the yard. The jury didn’t believe Stackhouse. On February 8, 2023, Lawrence Stackhouse was sentenced to 29 years to life in prison for the murder of Andrew Bender the Tiffany Moore lost her son and watched the father of that son die the same way.
Siyana Stevens lost the boy who told her at 15 years old that someday they’d have a family. This is what the pipeline costs, not in abstract statistics, in people, in grief that doesn’t have an end, and children who are born into wars they didn’t start and spend their whole lives trying to survive them.
Some people join gangs because they go looking for them. They seek it out, they find it, they make a conscious decision to step into that world. But Andrew Bender III didn’t go looking for anything. The gang was in his house the day he came home from the hospital as a newborn. It was in the conversations he heard before he could understand language.
It was in his name, the third, the continuation of something that started before he existed. He didn’t inherit money, he didn’t inherit property, he inherited enemies, and he never really got the chance to leave. Some people join gangs, others are born into them, and for those people, for the Andrews of this world, the question was never really whether they would be part of the life.
The question was only ever how long they’d survive it.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
