When Phyllis Colbert’s phone rang Saturday night, an urgent voice on the line told her that her daughter had been shot. “You got to go up there,” the person said, offering an address.
Stunned and confused by the call, which she thinks was placed by one of her daughter’s friends, Colbert enlisted a friend for help. They drove from Colbert’s home in Southeast Washington to Howard University Hospital, then over to MedStar Washington Hospital Center.
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Donnetta Dyson wasn’t at either.
Then Colbert headed to the Brightwood Park address the caller had given her, but police and crime scene tape blocked her way. Colbert, 56, told a police officer who she was, and that she needed answers. “The officer couldn’t look me in the face,” she said. “And then I knew.”
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Dyson, her 31-year-old daughter, was dead. Two men Dyson knew from when her family had lived near Brightwood Park years ago, Keenan Braxton, 24, and Johnny Joyner, 37, also had been fatally shot. Three other people were wounded.
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As grieving families planned funerals, police on Wednesday afternoon had not yet made any arrests in the shootings, which they said happened about 7:30 p.m. Saturday when at least one person got out of a black Honda Accord and fired into a crowd in the 600 block of Longfellow Street in Northwest. A police reward reached $110,000, with additional money coming from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The shooting jolted a city already reeling from gun violence and a climbing homicide count, and unnerved residents living nearby who have become accustomed to hearing gunfire but not with such deadly consequences.
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Left behind outside tidy rowhouses: bullet casings, shattered glass and two handguns. The three slain victims were pronounced dead at the scene.
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A man who identified himself as a relative of Braxton said the family did not want to talk. Efforts to reach Joyner’s relatives were unsuccessful. Police said they do not yet know of a motive but suspect the shooter or shooters were targeting one or more people in the crowd, and they are trying to determine if street crews were involved.
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Police Chief Robert J. Contee III called the shooting emblematic of a “sickness that we’re seeing in our community.”
Blame for the surge in killings in the District — up 13 percent over the same time last year — shifts depending on the viewpoint: cuts in police staffing, efforts to restructure the force amid social reckoning, the proliferation of illegal firearms, failures of the criminal justice system, agencies other than police unable or unwilling to help, allowing the underlying factors such as poverty and inequality to fester.
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Colbert blames the people themselves.
“There is nothing the mayor or the chief of police can do,” she said Tuesday after returning from a funeral home to plan burial details. “The people have to change their mind-set. We got to figure out where they’re getting these violent tendencies from.”
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“You can take one gun off the street,” Colbert said. “You can bring the death penalty back. They’re going to do the same damn thing.”
Relatives remembered Donnetta Dyson as a loving mother and a hard worker at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. She had recently been promoted from the emergency room to the operating room, where she took patients to and from surgery and later, to the hospital entrance to be discharged.
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The hospital put Dyson’s photo — in turquoise hospital scrubs — on its Facebook page, noting the patient services assistant’s “kind heart” and her tireless work ethic treating patients “with grace and dedication.”
One patient remembered Dyson, posting a comment on the hospital’s Facebook page saying he met her in June when he underwent surgery for a carpal tunnel injury. One of her teachers at her junior high school in Shaw posted his condolences on Colbert’s Facebook page, noting Dyson had been in the choir he directed.
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A sister, DaNia Dyson, said her sibling “did everything in her power to make sure people under her care were taken care of,” including her patients at the hospital and her two children, a son, 16, and a daughter, 12.
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DaNia Dyson said that while growing up, the family frequently moved around the District. Donnetta Dyson graduated from Coolidge Senior High School, and at the time lived near Brightwood Park, where she met friends she stayed in touch with in later years.
Most recently, Donnetta Dyson lived with her two children in Northeast Washington, though her mother said she had taken initial steps toward applying for a first-time homeowner loan to buy a house in Maryland.
“She loved her job” at the hospital, said Colbert, a home heath aide. Dyson was raising her children alone. Her son’s father died last year in a car crash in Maryland, and Colbert didn’t want to discuss her granddaughter’s father.
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Colbert said her daughter “liked to have fun. When she worked, she worked hard. When she played, she played hard. I will remember her as a kind, sweet, hard-working, loving mother.”
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That’s not to say the two always agreed. In one of their last talks, Colbert said she objected to her granddaughter’s outfit. “I didn’t like it,” Colbert recalled. “I told her to take it off. My daughter just told me, ‘Just chill out, old lady.’？”
Colbert laughed, calling the phrase “old lady” an inside joke between them, an endearing comment that cheered her up. “I will miss her saying that so much,” Colbert said. “It was so funny.”
Colbert said that when she arrived on Longfellow Street on Saturday, she tried to burst through the crime scene tape to look for her daughter, but police held her back.
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The mother of another victim confirmed her worst fears, she said.
Colbert said she didn’t know the two men who died, or their families. She just knew they were her among her daughter’s friends or acquaintances. She doesn’t believe her daughter was targeted.
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But Colbert said she wants to know details of how her daughter died. “I want to know, did my daughter suffer? Was it fast? Was she gasping for air? I want to know her last words. I want to know. It’s important to me.”
Alice Crites and Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.
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