Two days after Los Angeles police led one of South Los Angeles's best-known violence interrupters away in handcuffs, prosecutors have decided he committed no crime they can charge — and have instead charged his 19-year-old son with murder. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office said late on Friday afternoon, November 6, that no charges are being filed against Clifford “Skipp” Townsend, 62, the co-founder of the gang-intervention nonprofit 2nd Call, who was arrested on Wednesday on suspicion of conspiracy, and jail records indicate Townsend was released from custody on Friday evening, The LA Local reported. In the same announcement, the district attorney's office charged his son, Kody Townsend, 19, with the murder of Reginald Foreman, 51, a 2nd Call colleague who was shot and killed on August 6 while working on a community project in Hyde Park. Every charge in this report is an allegation: no one named here has been convicted, and Kody Townsend has not been arrested on the new charges.
Source: The LA Local
Kody Townsend remains at large, the District Attorney's Office said, and an active arrest warrant is out for him, according to reporting of the DA's announcement. He is charged with murder, conspiracy to commit a crime and possession of a firearm by a felon, MyNewsLA reported from the DA's Office. The filing carries a special-circumstance allegation of lying in wait, together with allegations that he was an active member of a criminal street gang and that the killing was carried out to further the activities of the gang. A second man, Jeremiah Abdelhameed, 25, was charged with one count of being an accessory after the fact, for allegedly helping Kody Townsend avoid capture after Foreman's killing; he was expected to be arraigned in downtown Los Angeles on Friday afternoon and was being held in lieu of $50,000 bail, according to jail records cited by MyNewsLA.
Source: MyNewsLA
What prosecutors allege happened on August 6
Reginald Foreman, 51, a former gang member who had turned to anti-violence work, was shot near South Crenshaw Boulevard and West 59th Street in the Hyde Park area of South Los Angeles on August 6, 2026. He was taking part in a cleanup and streetscape project with other members of 2nd Call when he was killed, MyNewsLA and The LA Local both reported. Investigators say Kody Townsend walked up to Foreman and two other 2nd Call employees and shot him with an AR-style rifle, according to the district attorney's account reported on Friday. Prosecutors said Foreman, though reformed, had ties to a rival gang to Kody Townsend's, and described the killing as gang-motivated, involving rival subsets of the Crips; the DA's office released no exact motive beyond that, MyNewsLA reported.
Source: MyNewsLA
District Attorney Nathan Hochman said in the DA's press release, as reported Friday: “Gang violence doesn't just claim lives; it robs entire communities of their sense of security and safety. Mr. Foreman worked for 2nd Call, a restorative justice and gang prevention program, and was carrying out his duties in the community when the defendant allegedly shot and killed him.” Hochman also wrote, in The LA Local's account of the release: “This kind of violence has no place in our communities and will not be tolerated.” If convicted as charged, Kody Townsend faces life in prison and Abdelhameed faces up to seven years, according to the DA's office as reported Friday — penalties Awaaz Punjab reports as the DA's statement of the charges' exposure, not as any prediction of an outcome.
Source: The LA Local
Kody Townsend is charged, not convicted, and he had not been apprehended as of Friday afternoon. The gang and lying-in-wait claims are prosecutors' allegations. Skipp Townsend, by contrast, was released with no charge filed at all — prosecutors declined his case, a decision his attorney says should never have needed making.
The earlier development: Wednesday's arrest outside 2nd Call
This decision reverses the story Awaaz Punjab reported earlier this week. At about 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday, November 4, LAPD officers arrested Skipp Townsend outside the 2nd Call office in the 5100 block of Obama Boulevard; video posted on social media showed him being led in handcuffs to a patrol car. The LAPD said he was booked on suspicion of conspiracy — the Los Angeles Times reported the suspicion as conspiracy to commit murder, with the intended victim then unknown — and he was held in lieu of $2 million bail, booked into a county jail in Van Nuys, The LA Local reported. Four other people were arrested in the same investigation: Lenita Sinna Dee Lewis, 28, and Shamond Bennett, 49, and, as alleged accessories after the fact, Nichole Aaliyah Smith, 23, and Jeremiah Abdelhameed, 25, MyNewsLA reported from the Times' account. Workers at 2nd Call told community activist Najee Ali that police also raided the nonprofit's offices on Wednesday and took a modem from a computer, The LA Local reported.
Source: MyNewsLA (Nov 5 arrest report)
On Friday that arrest unravelled as a criminal case. The DA's office declined to charge Skipp Townsend, citing a lack of evidence, and its spokesperson said no other charges are being filed for anyone else in the case beyond Kody Townsend and Abdelhameed — meaning Lewis, Bennett and Smith also face no charges from Wednesday's arrests. Townsend's attorney, Fre'Drisha Dixon, said: “There was never any reason for him to have been questioned or held in relation to any crime.” Jail records indicate he was released on Friday evening, The LA Local reported. A prosecutorial decline is not a court ruling and does not by itself decide any civil claim, but as a criminal matter the case against Skipp Townsend is closed unless prosecutors later file on new evidence, which they have not announced.
Source: The LA Local
Awaaz Punjab first reported Skipp Townsend's arrest on Wednesday, when he was held on $2 million bail and no charge had been filed. Friday's decision — no charge for him, a murder charge for his son — is the development reported here. Read the earlier arrest report
“Shock waves throughout our community”
Najee Ali, a community activist who has worked alongside Skipp Townsend for three decades, said he was shocked and saddened by the allegations against Kody Townsend, but also angry that Skipp Townsend was arrested in the first place. “Anyone who knows Skipp realizes he would never help orchestrate anyone's murder,” Ali said. The day after the arrest, Ali had said: “This has created shock waves throughout our community. This is not the Skipp Townsend we know.” For Skipp Townsend, the personal loss underneath the case is older than the arrest: he told The LA Local in August that he had known Foreman for three decades, had brokered neighbourhood peace agreements alongside him, and had hired him at 2nd Call about two months before his death. “He was a really good person,” he said in August. “I was grateful I got to spend the last two months of his life with him.” Those who knew Foreman describe a warm, dedicated man who had worked for years to redirect his life, The LA Local reported.
Source: The LA Local
Background: 2nd Call and the work both men came from
2nd Call describes itself as a “community based organization designed to save lives, by reducing violence and assisting in the personal development of high-risk individuals, proven offenders, ex-felons, parolees and others who society disregards.” Skipp Townsend was a documented gang member for nearly 30 years before he helped found 2nd Call in 2005, and he has since worked with the city's Gang Reduction Youth Development program, the Southern California Cease Fire Committee and a Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office advisory council, training gang-intervention workers and law enforcement officers and teaching life skills to young people and to inmates in California prisons, MyNewsLA reported from his DA's Office biography. Foreman had made the same turn from gang life into intervention work. The organisation has now lost two workers to gunfire in five weeks this summer: another 2nd Call worker, Eric Washington, 37, was fatally shot on the Fourth of July while trying to break up an altercation at an apartment complex in the 700 block of West Laurel Street, and rewards totalling $70,000 are offered for information leading to his killer, MyNewsLA reported.
Source: MyNewsLA
What happens next
The criminal case now splits in two. For Kody Townsend, everything waits on an arrest: he remains at large on an active warrant, charged with murder with a lying-in-wait special circumstance, and Awaaz Punjab will not speculate about where he is or when he may be taken into custody. For Abdelhameed, the next step is arraignment in downtown Los Angeles on the single accessory count. For Skipp Townsend, there is no next court date — he is a free man with no charge pending — and the open questions are institutional rather than criminal: what evidence led homicide detectives to arrest a violence-prevention leader at his own office on a $2 million bail hold that prosecutors then declined within two days, and what the episode does to 2nd Call's work in the neighbourhoods it serves. Awaaz Punjab will update this story when Kody Townsend is apprehended or arraigned.