ONLY ON ABC7NEWS.COM: Parents speak out after police announce update in Oakland teen's murder

OAKLAND, Calif. (KGO) -- An arrest has been made in the murder of a teenager in Oakland. The police chief told reporters about the suspect on Thursday afternoon. But nobody told the boy's parents until ABC7 News called the family for reaction. Davon Ellis was killed on Saturday night.

The 14-year-old's parents came to the makeshift memorial very shortly after learning a person of interest had been taken into custody. The parents tell ABC7 News they expected one day that Davon would bury them. Instead, they're heading to a funeral home to look at his body. As they work through their pain, they say there's a small amount of relief that the person suspected of shooting their son is off the streets.

"It hurts, cause that's the smile that I woke up to every morning and I can't see it no more," said Christopher Ellis while holding a picture of his son. "And there's nothing I can do about that. What's done is done."

It's grief still too raw to control. Ellis says the past five days without his son Davon have passed in a blur.

"I haven't been able to eat, sleep," he said. "And nothing's been right in my life, not knowing who killed my son."

"They took something that was precious from me, they took my only son," said Davon's mother, Marquita Brown. "You feel, 100 percent. They took one third of my world."

Then Thursday, a moment of relief for Davon's parents when they learned police had a person of interest in custody.

"I just cried, I prayed to God, got on my knees, and I thanked the lord for the good news," Ellis said.

Davon's mom praised the police

"I thank them for working so diligently hard on my baby," she said.

Still, Ellis is haunted. He dreams of asking the suspect: "Why, why did you kill my son?"

"For him to do that, he already proves he's a coward," he said. "I doubt he would ever look me in my face, I really doubt it."

And he knows that even if the man responsible for the freshman football star's death explains why, nothing will bring 14-year-old Davon back.

"It doesn't change anything," he said. "I won't ever have my son, everybody knows me in this neighborhood knows what I feel about my son. They know I was the guy at the Dynamite games with the Gatorade and the bags and my son's asthma pump, and I was that dude. And I can't have him back."

And that's what hurts more than anything.

Oakland police and Crime Stoppers are issuing a $20,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. Anyone with information is asked to call Oakland police at (510) 238-3821.