Alabama Mass Shooting: Four Dead, 28 Injured, Shooter At large

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Category: Crime

Published on Monday, 17 April 2023 12:27

Written by Janet Walker

Authorities from Dadeville, Alabama, the site of Saturday's mass shooting that left four dead and more than two dozen injured, have released the names of those murdered while attending a Sweet Sixteen party at the Mahogany Masterpiece studio.

Murdered by the unknown shooter are Philstavious "Phil" Dowdell, 18, who had just graduated high school and had earned a football scholarship to attend Jacksonville State University, Marsiah Collins, 19, also just graduated and had planned to attended LSU in the fall, where his father is attending law school, KeKe Nicole Smith, 17, a high school and manager of the basketball and track & field teams, and Corbin Holston, 23, who did not attend the party but somehow heard there was trouble and arrived to help out his family members.

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"Keenan Cooper, the DJ at the party, told WBMA-TV that the party was stopped briefly when attendees heard someone had a gun. He said people with guns were asked to leave, but no one left. Cooper said when the shooting began sometime later, some people took shelter under a table where he was standing, and others ran out," APnews.com reported.

Five minutes. According to witnesses, five full minutes of gunfire began at 10:34 pm Saturday night at the Mahogany Dance studio, where a Sweet 16 celebration was taking place. When the gunfire ended, four teens would be dead, and 28 others injured. Family members waited more than ten hours for medical status updates before learning of their deaths.

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Where were the Dadeville police? Did anyone place a 911 call? By Monday, the Dadeville fire department were using high powered fire hoses to wash away the blood that ran into the street. What was the response time?

Police have not made any arrests in the shooting that took the lives of four promising African Americans although statements from the police indicate they have "solid" leads on the suspect. The scrutiny confronting Dadeville, the latest mass shooting to strike America, will be intense.

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Dadeville, Alabama is a small rural town about one hour from Montgomery, Alabama, and although removed from big city violence, the internet does bring the worst of it home. Kids are no longer immune to knowledge; however knowing and intimate knowledge are two entirely different things.

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Images of the mixed population town on Sunday, as news of the shooting reverberated, show a community, united by violence and an unthinkable tragedy, the latest municipality to be left to piece together the shattered fragment of pre-tragedy lives.

Gun violence is a plague on our nation; a plague that does not discriminate, it has no demographic boundaries. Gun violence reaches into every corner of every city, in every town, everywhere in America. We are numb from the violence.

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A nation operating under PTSD, we walk each day, pushing the thought out of our minds that the next person we encounter could be a shooter, until, violence rears itself again and we name another town, more dead, more lives tragically, and without thought or concern, taken, lives who will never realize their full potential, and families that will never be the same, towns that will always be remembered for the mass tragedy that unfolded.

So here we are again. Another week, another headline, another mass shooting, and our elected officials defend the right to bear arms, sub-machine guns, AR-15s, every weapon available, because as everyone knowns when the Second Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1791, the men that were signing the documents realized that sometime in the future Americans would need weapons that fired more than 100 rounds per minute to protect their homes. Or so the Supreme Court and Second Amendment advocates would have us believe.

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So, the next time you hear of a mass shooting or visit the grave of your dead child remember the Second Amendment advocates that allow rapid fire machine guns to be purchased legally without boundaries or common sense reforms.