“Fourteen, runnin’ round, I was snatching jewels,” go the lyrics to one song. “I got older since then, never sober / Runnin’ from your crib, show up like Jehovah.”  Mr. Collazo’s father, who was addicted to heroin, served nearly two years in state prison for drug sales. His parents separated when he was in his early teens.  “My pops wasn’t there, man I think he a crackhead,” Mr. Collazo rapped in the same song. “And my mom by herself, and that hurted me the most.”  He got a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver after the 2012 slashing, a necessary precaution, friends and relatives said, for anyone being chased as Mr. Collazo was. It was in his left pocket, loaded with two live rounds, when police officers answering a 911 call for a man shot in November 2013 pulled Mr. Collazo out of a group matching a description of the perpetrators.  They also found, in his right pocket, a sandwich bag of marijuana. The gun was confiscated and he faced several serious weapons possession charges. “I got stabbed and robbed a month back so I carry these for protection,” he told Officer Yurantz Assade as he was arrested, according to court papers.  But Mr. Collazo was coy, even with close friends, about why people wanted to hurt him. When Ms. Soto asked how she could help, her son acknowledged being in trouble but insisted: “No questions.”  When he was sent to jail on Rikers Island, his father, also named Alfredo Collazo, was already there, having been locked up four days earlier on drug charges: In spite of the elder Mr. Collazo’s urging him to do differently, his son had followed his path.  “I’m trying to show you and close doors and tell you, ‘Don’t do this, don’t get into no gang,’” the father recalled telling his son.  Ms. Soto bailed her son out, but he did not listen to other relatives’ warnings, either. “Leave those people alone,” his grandfather, Agustin Soto, recalled telling him about his street friends. “He said, ‘Yes, Grandpa, I will do what you told me to, Grandpa.’ But it never happened.”  Mr. Collazo was curious about forging his own allegiances on the street and unafraid of straying from the loose boundaries of his crew. His boldness made him enemies.  A song by Freddy Collazo, recorded under the name Felony Fredo, detailed a history of drug use and his father’s absence.  He had expensive tastes in clothes, favoring name-brand polo shirts. On Facebook groups for selling merchandise he offered a “real Rolex” for $800, size 9½ Air Jordans and G-Star jeans that would have been long for his 5-foot-11 frame. He saved money by leaving cash at his mother’s apartment.  “‘I need some chicken,’ or ‘I need bread,’” Ms. Soto recalled her son saying, using slang for money.  He popped prescription pills, including Percocet, smoked marijuana in the lobby of his apartment building and sold drugs, sometimes under the banner of Forest Over Everything but just as often on his own.  “People just care for him too much, so they always made sure he was protected,” said Mr. Collazo’s right-hand man, who spoke on the condition that he not be named and who said he had sold drugs with Mr. Collazo near the Forest Houses.  Mr. Collazo dropped out of Herbert H. Lehman High School in the 11th grade, though his mother begged counselors for a way to force him to stay enrolled. His father had a daughter with a different woman, and was living with them in Mr. Collazo’s childhood home, further straining his relationship with his father. He moved in with his mother near 180th Street for short periods, but was always drawn back to the Forest Houses, a more permissive atmosphere, where he helped care for the great-grandmother who raised him, and who was battling uterine cancer.  Mr. Collazo was arrested again in April 2014, this time for marijuana, but he was required only to pay a fine. He walked around as if he were invincible, friends said, relying on his crew for protection as his street feuds piled up.  His ability to avoid prison time created suspicions among his crew when, later that month, nearly three dozen members of Forest Over Everything and a rival group, Six Four Goons, were arrested in a roundup and charged in a string of attempted murders and firearm purchases, some planned on Facebook.  Mr. Collazo appears in the 80-count indictment under his Facebook name, Freddy Staysmack, messaging with a fellow crew member about a gun in June 2012. “U got da 25,” the other crew member, who was charged with conspiring to commit murder, says to Mr. Collazo, according to the indictment. But Mr. Collazo dodged charges.  “People from his own crew felt like they couldn’t trust him,” the “right-hand man” said, alluding to speculation that Mr. Collazo was cooperating with the authorities. “That was never the case; he was never working with the cops.”  But the episode stoked Mr. Collazo’s paranoia about who might be after him.  “He realized the streets either bring jail or death,” his 18-year-old sister, Ñeca, said. “He wanted something better. He wanted to live.”  The southernmost police precinct in the Bronx has the largest public-housing population in the city.  Last May, Mr. Collazo entered a residential drug-treatment program in Brooklyn run by Phoenix House, a nonprofit rehabilitation organization, telling people that he would keep getting in trouble if he stayed on the streets and that the program would help him avoid prison.  He won a relapse-prevention award in September as he received help with his marijuana habit. A counselor in a course on healthy relationships, Lydia Peterson, recalled his making juvenile jokes early on, but eventually asking serious, if somewhat cryptic, questions about women.  “Well, what if I trusted somebody and they betrayed me?” Ms. Peterson said he asked.  By October, he had earned a chance to leave each morning to study for his high school equivalency diploma, at the Isaacs Center in Manhattan.  He had left a similar program two weeks earlier because he was not allowed to wear a hat, but he was desperate enough to plead for a second chance after a counselor believed — in error, it turned out — that he had been involved in a fight during orientation.  “He cried, he cried, and said to please give him another chance because he knows if he’s not here — if he doesn’t get this opportunity — he won’t do it anywhere else,” the counselor, Ana Dominguez, recalled.  On long walks he told Ms. Dominguez he was trying to overcome a past clouded by difficult family ties and a “beef here and there.” His anxiety ran so deep that Mr. Collazo once badgered a new student who he thought had been looking at him too much. Ms. Dominguez suspended him for a day and asked him to explain himself in a letter. She said he wrote about dreams of a big house with a wife and children, and when he returned to school he insisted on moving into a more difficult reading group.  “Sometimes it’s hard for me to live life, but I will if I have to,” she said he wrote on the double-sided note.  On a collage he made for Thanksgiving, he wrote, “I am thankful to still be alive after everything I been thru.”  But he also told his counselors that the streets of the South Bronx were still what he knew best, and that he did not know where else to go.  Neighborhood crews sometimes begin more as groups of friends than as criminal enterprises. But the stakes rise as crew members obtain guns and move to protect turf.
The killing of Freddy Collazo remains unsolved, and the silence that frustrates detectives and torments his family seems to be holding, spawning rumors and threats of revenge.