One year later: Dadeville and Camp Hill still recovering from storm, mass shooting

A year ago, Jesse Francis wondered if he was cursed.

First, the storm came. On an early Sunday morning last March, hail the size of tennis balls smashed up the camper where he was living with his family. It felt like a thousand rocks thrown at their home, Francis said. It broke through their skylight and left a giant hole in their roof. It left a crack in the frame of his truck.

The family went to live with their in-laws while they tried to find a tarp to cover the hole in the ceiling.

Then, another disaster.

K.D. Heard, Francis’ stepson, was about to graduate high school and really wanted to go to a Sweet 16 birthday party. His mom was nervous, but Francis thought that it was important that Heard become a grown-up.

His phone flashed and woke him up that night. There were multiple messages from their in-laws. There had been a mass shooting. They went to the nearby hospital. It was packed like a concert. Blood and helicopters were everywhere.

“I thought I was in a bad dream,” he said. “Like is this really happening? We just had this happen.”

No one expected it to happen at a Sweet 16 party. But at a party in a Dadeville dance studio that Heard attended on April 15, several people began firing into the crowd. Four people — Marsiah Collins, 19; Philstavious “Phil” Dowdell, 18; Corbin Dahmontrey Holston, 23 and Shaunkiva “KeKe” Smith, 17 – were killed. At least 28 were wounded.

Heard was left paralyzed from the waist down. In the wake of the shooting, every day, Francis would work his shift and then go immediately to Heard in the hospital in Montgomery. When he was moved to a facility in Birmingham, Francis went on weekends.

At first, he said, Heard was depressed and didn’t want to leave the house. Now, Francis said he’s mad, but his stepson is motivated and doesn’t let it keep him from having fun.

“This year, he’s out there, and I love that about him,” he said.

Twin tragedies

The shooting and the storm devastated Dadeville and neighboring Camp Hill, a town of about 1,000 people 20 miles north of Auburn with a median household income of around $29,000 a year.

A year later, the communities are still struggling to recover. Aid has been slow to come in, and the first trials over the shooting could be months away.

Messiah Williams-Cole, the mayor of Camp Hill, said in a recent interview that the storm did somewhere around $1 million in damage to the public property in town, though he said he could not put an exact estimate on it.

But locals said the twin tragedies did not lead to an outpouring of help. The county was included in a FEMA disaster declaration that led to some federal aid. But the declaration came in May, weeks after the storm.

Warren Tidwell, organizer and head of ACROSS (Alabama Center for Rural Organizing and Systemic Solutions), who has been working to help local victims, said that this event was the first time he had seen a dual mass shooting and environmental disaster receive so little attention.

“I just can’t believe that we would be left to fend for ourselves,” he said.

Six people, aged 15 to 20, have been charged in connection with the shooting: Johnny Letron Brown of Tuskegee, who was 20 at the time; Willie George Brown Jr. of Auburn, who was 19 at the time; Tyreese “Ty Reik” McCullough, 17 at the time, and Travis McCullough, 16 at the time, and Wilson LaMar Hill, Jr. of Auburn, who was 20 at the time. One of the six defendants was a 15-year-old; a hearing was held in July on whether to try him as an adult.

Among the adult defendants, the attorney for Willie Brown declined to comment. Messages sent  to attorneys for Johnny Brown and Wilson Hill were not returned. Contact information for the McCulloughs’ attorney could not be found.

Mike Segrest, the district attorney for Tallapoosa County, said in a recent interview that investigators are still working on collecting forensic evidence and sharing it with attorneys for the defendants. Bullet and bullet projectile fragments that were not recovered immediately from victims had to be sent to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) for analysis.

The defendants have asked to be tried separately. Dadeville has two weeks of jury trials in June and December. Each trial, Segrest said, will likely take the full two weeks. If the first trial begins in December, it could take three years to get through all of them, unless they hold sessions of court outside those times.

He said his office will be involved in anniversary events.

“It’ll be an emotional time for them and everybody just reliving it,” he said.

‘A great kid’

The families of the victims are trying to find ways to memorialize their loved ones.

KeKe Smith’s grandfather, Clifford Toney, said she was a charming person who excelled at volleyball and put together food and snacks for baseball games. She could make people laugh easily, he said.

“It was always KeKe,” he said.

Smith planned to attend the University of Alabama Birmingham to study nursing. Her mother, Miranda Turner, said that she wanted to be a neonatal nurse because she was born premature.

“She felt she would be a good nurse,” she said.

Turner said that there would be a scholarship unveiled in her name for four people who are studying nursing.

Martin Collins, the father of Marsiah Collins, said he will tell people about his son in every room that he enters. He talks about their road trips. He describes his son as a scholar and as someone who used to play video games late at night.

“I tell them that my son was killed in a mass shooting in Dadeville, Alabama,” he said. “I explained to them what happened. I told them that he was a great kid. That he was an amazing son, that he was a funny kid, a loving kid. I tell them that his dream was cut short, his life was taken from him. He didn’t know he was going to die. He didn’t expect to be killed.”

Collins said that Marsiah Collins knew about gun violence, and he knew to be safe.

“‘Don’t go to the cemetery before you go to college, son,’” Martin Collins recalled telling his son. “And he was being safe. Who would think the Sweet 16 party would be violent?”

No legislative action

Next month, Collins will graduate from law school. As part of his law degree, he had to create a draft of a bill. His was about comprehensive gun control.

In the year since the shooting, Collins said that nothing has changed.

“It’s despicable, and I hate to say this, but the racial climate that we live in in this country fuels a lot of this resistance to address the underlying issue,” he said.

Alabama has one of the highest rates of gun violence in the nation. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Alabama’s homicide rate in 2021, the most recent data available, was 15.9 per 100,000 people — the third-highest in the nation.

And that year the state’s rate of death from firearms — a category that can include suicides and homicides, and other sorts of fatalities — was 26.4, the fourth-highest in the country. In fact, Alabama had more gun deaths that year than New York State, which has four times the population.

“Children still die,” Collins said. “Our children, American children, still dying.”

The Republican-controlled Legislature has not acted.

Democrats in the Legislature introduced several bills aimed at reducing gun violence in the wake of the Dadeville shooting, but they failed to advance. Sen. Merika Coleman, D-Pleasant Grove, introduced a bill that would have created a “red flag” law allowing courts to issue protective orders requiring people at risk of harming others or themselves to surrender firearms. The legislation did not move out of committee.

“I’m not even sure, in that particular situation, if it could have saved those lives, but I do still think that we need to move forward with some type of tools for law enforcement that they can use to get these guns out of people’s hands that don’t need them,” she said.

Collins said he says he understands the reality of what happened.

“The reality is these kids were able to get their hands on guns, had access to weapons, made horrible decisions and ruined their lives and took four lives,” he said.

Local recovery

With relatively few outside resources to draw on, people in the area did what they could to recover. On a recent trip, new decks and ramps could be seen around Camp Hill, as well as shiny new roofs on many homes and buildings.

Both Williams-Cole and Tidwell said the community came together after the storm to rebuild.  Rufus Vines, who runs a kitchen in the local community center, made at least 7,000 hot meals.

“That’s the one thing that we can do,” said Tidwell.

Mary Brooks said that Tidwell and ACROSS had helped her a lot. The storm, she said, left her home looking like someone had taken a large club to it. Her deck was redone, and Tidwell delivered a new walker to her.

“I appreciate them and everybody involved,” she said.

Williams-Cole said that he wants people to know that the town of Camp Hill exists. He said it’s still a safe place where people ride bikes and doors are unlocked.

“We’re still here,” he said. “We’re always going to be here.”