Man, 26, Fatally Shot During Robbery of Card Game in His Yard

Paul Trevon Blackwell was playing spades in his Prince George's County back yard with four friends when two masked men approached them and demanded that they empty their pockets and get on the ground.

Jared Jackson, who was playing in the game Thursday evening, said he thought it was a joke. Then he saw that one of the men was holding a handgun.

Everyone did as they were told, Jackson recalled yesterday. Still, Blackwell, 26, was fatally shot in the side of his upper body while turning to lie on his stomach, Jackson said.

A witness told county police that he saw the masked men flee in a white Ford Taurus.

Detectives investigating the homicide, in the 100 block of East Mill Avenue in the Capitol Heights area, said the motive was robbery.

Yesterday, Olivia Blackwell, 54, and her husband, Paul Love, 64, remembered their son, who went by Trevon or "Tre," as a homebody. He was unemployed and had diabetes, friends said.

As his parents sat on the front porch of the two-story brick house where they have lived for 22 years, they recounted the shooting.

Inside, the television he was watching before he walked outside to play cards, about an hour before the robbery, was still on. Muted, just as he left it.

In the back yard, playing cards were still on the table, along with two beers and a milkshake. His mother had brought him the shake and a cheese pizza that night.

Olivia Blackwell said her son, her only child, avoided dangerous places by staying home.

"He said there wasn't anything but trouble out in the streets, and he didn't want to be bothered by it," she said.

On Thursday, that trouble came to him.