A shooting on her birthday left Alexis Dowdell’s 18-year-old brother, Philstavious “Phil” Dowdell, and three others dead, along with another 32 injured, some critically.
Alexis Dowdell’s Sweet 16 birthday party ended with her kneeling beside her fatally wounded brother on the blood-slicked floor of a dance studio in small-town Alabama, the bodies of other wounded teens scattered around them.
She tapped her brother’s face, begging him to, “stay with me.” “I wasn’t crying at the moment because I was trying to be strong instead of panicking. And so I said, ’You’re going to be all right. You’re a fighter, you’re strong,” she recalled. Saturday night in Dadeville, about an hour’s drive northeast of Montgomery, began as it should have, with “everybody dancing, vibing to the music,” Alexis Dowdell said. Keenan Cooper, the DJ at the party, told WBMA-TV the event was stopped briefly when partygoers heard someone had a gun. He said people with weapons were asked to leave, but no one did.Dowdell said she dove to the floor near the DJ as the dozens of revelers ran.
Once outside, she found her mother and stepfather. “Where are my cousins, where are my friends? Where is my brother?” Dowdell pleaded. “When they came in, I said ‘Can you check on my brother?’” Alexis Dowdell recalled. “And he checked my brother’s pulse and I was like, ‘Is he alive or is he dead?’ And the people didn’t want to tell me, so they just gave me, like, a certain look. And I just knew he was just gone.”
Smith was so excited about finishing high school and starting college that when a former neighbor asked her about it, Smith responded with the exact hour she was supposed to graduate.Amy Jackson, an older cousin of Smith’s who said she was more of an aunt to the teenager, recalled her “million-dollar” smile.
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