“It Just Hurts”: Father Speaks Out After 15-Year-Old Son Killed Over a Pair of Jeans.

It started with something small—a pair of jeans—but ended in a tragedy that no one could have imagined. Inside a home in Raleigh, North Carolina, a place meant to be safe, a 15-year-old boy lost his life in a matter of minutes, leaving behind a father struggling to make sense of what happened.

Around 11:50 a.m. on March 20, officers were called to Springshire Court near Sunnybrook Road. When they arrived, they found a teenage boy suffering from a gunshot wound inside the house. He was rushed to the hospital, where doctors worked desperately to save him. Despite their efforts, he later died from his injuries.

The victim was identified by family as Cayden Alston, also known as Cayden Alston-Arnold. He was just 15 years old—at an age where life is still unfolding, not ending.

According to his father, Courtney “CJ” Alston, the situation began with a dispute over a pair of jeans Cayden was trying to sell. Two boys had come to the house, but the exchange didn’t go as planned. They refused to pay. Cayden refused to give the jeans away. What should have been a simple disagreement quickly escalated into something far more serious.

“I literally told Cayden the night before, ‘They can’t come back over here. You can’t have no company,’” his father said.

But the next morning, they came back anyway.

Doorbell camera footage captured moments before the shooting—details that now haunt his father. The video allegedly showed the boys acting suspiciously, walking around to the back of the house and asking which window belonged to Cayden. According to timestamps, they arrived at 11:36 a.m. Within 15 minutes, police were already on the scene.

Somewhere in that short window, everything changed.

According to Alston, when Cayden stood his ground and refused to hand over the jeans without payment, one of the boys pulled out a gun and shot him inside his own home.

What happened after the shot is something his father says he will never forget.

Cayden didn’t collapse immediately. Instead, he tried to move. He tried to survive. His father later described seeing signs that his son had been running through the house, leaving behind traces of blood as he went—from the bathroom to the closet door, into the kitchen.