When will the violence stop? Two Louisville teenagers, Larry Ordway, 14, and Maurice "Reece" Gordon, 16, were brutally murdered on May 24, and the mother's gang-affiliated boyfriend, Brice Rhodes, is being charged with murder, tampering with evidence, and abuse of a corpse in the crime.

Rhodes pleaded not guilty to the crimes on Wednesday and his bail was set at $1 million. 

The teens’ mother, Marie Wren, said she believes her sons witnessed a murder Rhodes committed and told her they were scared. “I ain’t gotta answer to no newscast or none of y’all, I saved y’alls kids lives from this monster who did this sh** to my kids,” she said. She added that her two sons were good students, and not gang-affiliated. She also said that Rhodes was trying to recruit them to do his dirty work.

"This is about Reece and Larry resting in peace," the victims' mother said when talking to a newscaster. "They were brutally beaten, do ya'll understand that?" 

Police have said that Rhodes stabbed the two boys to death and then burned their bodies. Lt. Todd Kessinger, who heads the homicide unit, added, “There are pieces of information that we are not going to release at this point, motive being one of them."

He continued to remember the two young victims. “They were doing well, they were doing well in school and they made choices of who they were running around with and then it leads to something like this,” Kessinger said.

Wren remembered the last words she heard from her sons were, “I love you.”