DAYTON — UPDATE @ 4:56 p.m.
Dayton Police held a press conference Tuesday asking for anyone with information in the Saturday evening shooting of Sherrell Wheatley to please come forward. Police informed a possible witness described a silver car fleeing shortly after gunfire. Police did not release a person of interest, suspect, or any leads. Detectives still identify Wheatley as an innocent bystander and called this homicide a, “Heinous crime.”
Update@4:17 p.m.:
Jackie Allen, Wheatley’s niece, flew to Dayton from Atlanta as soon as she heard about her aunt’s death.
“It’s disgusting, this violence, taking innocent people away from their families and stuff,” she said. “You took a lady from our family but you also took a grandmother who took care of 10 and 11-year-old boys.
Update@1:43 p.m.:
Antwand Warren, Wheatley’s son, said Monday that he can’t fathom why anyone would shoot his mother. She was a wholesome person who helped everyone and had no enemies or no flaws, he said.
“That was my mom, I loved her,” said Warren, who is a quadriplegic. “She was my angel, she was my everything, and somebody snatched that away from me.”
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Warren said one of the t hings he will miss most about his mother is her cooking. She cooked everything Southern style, he said she he choked up.
“ I want justice. That’s all, I want justice,” he said.
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Wheatley had previously been the victim of violence. Four years ago was stabbed multiple times in her neck and other parts of her body. She told police then that she and Warren were attacked by her husband Stanley Wheatley, 48, because she wouldn’t give him money to buy crack.
Stanley Wheatley was sentenced to prison for the attacks.
Update@12:13 p.m.:
Wheatley, a grandmother, had just fed some neighborhood dogs and was walking back to her home when she was shot, neighbors said Monday. She died about a half block from home, neighbors said.
There’s a makeshift memorial where Wheatley died, and it continues to grow.
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Meanwhile, a man called 911 after hearing shots fired and seeing Wheatley lying on the ground, according to the 911 recording.
“Someone just got shot on Euclid... a lady is lying on the sidewalk,” the unidentified man said, later adding that he heard 12-15 shots.
First report:
An innocent bystander was fatally shot Saturday evening when she was walking near a house targeted by a drive-by shooting, police said.
Sherrell Wheatley, 62, of Dayton was the woman shot and killed, according to the Montgomery County Coroner’s Office.
Wheatley was an innocent bystander who suffered at least one gunshot wound as she was walking in the 800 block of North Euclid Avenue around 6:10 p.m. She was taken to Miami Valley Hospital, where she succumbed to her injuries, Dayton police Sgt. Creigee Coleman said.
“A vehicle driven by a male had another male inside the vehicle, and that male fired several rounds towards an unknown house in an attempt to probably cause damage to that house,” Coleman said.
The passenger fired five or six rounds, he said.
Aaron Taylor said the woman was his great aunt.
“I just happened to pull up, see my auntie in the grass dead,” he said.
He described his aunt as a sweet lady and matriarch of his family and the community.
“Definitely innocent bystander walking up the street,” Taylor said.
Police are searching for a silver Ford Taurus or similar four-door car, and also are asking for the public’s help to come forward with any information.
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“Now this is a situation where a person was indiscriminately firing a weapon, a large-caliber weapon from what I’ve been told, at a house and a person who was innocent just happened to be walking by and got hit by a bullet that has no eyes,” Coleman said.
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