Published on June 1, 2022 in the Tulsa World
TAFT — “It’ll never be home again, and that’s the sad part.”
That was the thought going through D’Antai Wallace’s mind as he walked on crutches along Seminole Street in Taft on Tuesday, steps away from where he and seven others were shot during his hometown’s annual Memorial Day festival early Sunday.
Sherika Bowler, 39, Wallace’s cousin, died after being shot in the head. The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation reported that her first name is spelled Sharika, but public records show the spelling Sherika.
“Being here, I’ll never look at it the same,” said Wallace, who now lives just outside of Muskogee. “The moment I walk across here or drive through here, the only thing I can remember: ‘That’s where (his cousin) died. That’s where I was lying.’”
He’d been at the festival only about 30 minutes when the shooting began.
With only a few seconds of warning from a friend who first saw the gun, Wallace started running away from a group of people who were arguing just as gunshots erupted.
As he ran, a sharp pain in his right thigh told him he’d been shot.
“Once I got hit, another one flew right past my face,” Wallace said. “I just kept telling myself, ‘Keep going. Keep going.’ I hopped right over (to the intersection) across the street and fell over in that ditch” at Main and Seminole streets.
The bullet was still in his leg on Tuesday.
Looking at the ditch and at the memorial of flowers and candles on the street where Bowler was killed, Wallace shook his head in anger.
Growing up in Taft, Wallace said there would occasionally be arguments and squabbles between neighbors, but nothing like Sunday’s shooting.
“I never thought I’d get shot in my hometown,” he said.
It made him mad “more than anything because there were too many kids; too many families out here. My kids were basically traumatized because they didn’t think I was coming home.”
While Wallace was there, several community members stopped by to see how he was recuperating.
Tiffany Walton, owner of the Kountry Queens food truck, which debuted at the festival, hugged him.
“Look who it is,” she said to her Facebook friends in a livestream showing her friends that Wallace was OK. “Look who is up and walking.”
She couldn’t keep the smile off her face from seeing him out and about.
After the rain of bullets stopped Sunday morning, Walton, who is a nurse, had jumped out of her food truck and gone into action.
“I jumped out, didn’t know where to go because there were so many gunshot victims, and I went right to him lying in the ditch,” Walton said.
Derrick Smith, another cousin of Wallace’s, was one of the people trying to help Bowler after she was shot, and he said the sight of her fatally wounded will never leave him.
A former volunteer firefighter, Smith lives right across the street from where the shooting occurred.
“Lying down to sleep at night, I can’t sleep,” Smith said. “I gotta wake up every morning and look at these flowers” at the makeshift memorial for Bowler.
Lelia Foley-Davis, the founder of the Memorial Day event in 1970 and the first Black female mayor in U.S. history when she was elected mayor of Taft in 1973, arrived later Tuesday evening and laid flowers at Bowler’s memorial, as she’s done each day since the shooting.
She, too, has hardly been able to sleep since Bowler died.
“(Bowler) was 39 years old, and they ripped that flower from us,” Foley-Davis said. “They should be made to pay for funeral expenses, hospital bills. No one knows how angry I am.”
Skylar Dewayne Buckner, 26, turned himself in after the shooting and was arrested on a first-degree murder warrant. He was denied bail on Tuesday and will have his initial court appearance on Friday afternoon.
Muskogee County District Attorney Larry Edwards said he will not file charges until he receives all the reports from law enforcement officials on Friday, but he said the charges likely will be first-degree murder and shooting with intent to kill.
He said he hopes to find other people involved in the argument that led to the shooting, but investigators haven’t found any so far.