For the families of the three people killed Aug. 26 at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville’s New Town neighborhood, thoughts pivoted amid the grief and the loss on the tragic what-ifs, the random ugliness and senselessness of what had just happened.
How was it that the daily moment-to-moment routines of their innocent loved ones’ lives would cross — for such a brief, deadly few minutes — with the movements of a racist armed with an AR-15-style rifle and a handgun, someone bent on killing people simply because they were Black.
“My brother shouldn’t have lost his life,” Latiffany Gallion said at a vigil the day after the shooting. “A simple day of going to the store, and he’s taken away from us forever.”
Jerrald De’Shaun Gallion, who was preparing to pick up his 4-year-old daughter was shot as he entered the Dollar General with his girlfriend while the rampage was going on.
Angela Michelle Carr, the killer’s first victim, was shot as she sat inside her Kia sedan in the store’s parking lot.
Her son Chayvaughn Payne told The New York Times that his mother had dropped off a friend at the store moments before she was killed.
“This is really hard to process,” he said. “To lose a mother for nothing.”
Two days after the shooting, outside his family’s house not far from the store, Quantavious Laguerre spoke of the heartbreak of the senseless killing of his brother Anolt Joseph “AJ” Laguerre Jr., a teenage Dollar General employee.
“I never thought I’d have to bury my baby brother,” he said, according to The Associated Press. “They say don’t question God. But I just want to know why.”
Following are the stories of these lives lost and families forever impacted.
Angela Carr
Carr, 52, who had three children and 14 grandchildren, regularly took her family to church, where other members became her second family, said her pastor, the Rev. David W. Green Sr. of Saint Stephen A.M.E Church.
“She was just a loving, caring mother,” Green said. “She was a person who was a provider. She provided for her family.”
Payne said his mother was someone who would invite people to cookouts and other family events. “She would give her shirt off her back for people,” he told the New York Times.
Carr worked as an Uber driver, company spokesperson Sarah Casasnovas confirmed to USA TODAY. Carr had completed her last trip more than an hour before the shooting and had logged off the app.
A cousin, Kawana Staffney-Ashe, told Keys Weekly that Carr was originally from Key West but left years ago. “She never bothered anybody,” Staffney-Ashe said. “She didn’t deserve this, just because of the color of her skin.”
Carr’s daughter, Ashley Carr, who helped set up a GoFundMe page for her mother, told ABC News how much she meant to her family: “She was the mother, the father, the provider, the counselor, the pastor. She was everything.”
AJ Laguerre Jr.
Wearing a graduation cap and gown in the proud cardinal red and silver gray of Raines High School, Laguerre is smiling in a photograph shared on the GoFundMepage started by his brother Quantavious.
It was 2022, and the future seemed to stretch out before him.
The 19-year-old was the youngest of five siblings, all raised by their grandmother after their mother died in 2009. They were raised with two of their grandmother’s children in one big family. “We all consider each other as siblings,” his brother wrote on the Gofundme page.
The family celebrated when AJ, like his older siblings before him, graduated from high school. As he looked into going to college to study cybersecurity, he got a job at the Dollar General store several months ago to help their grandmother pay the bills.
Jerrald Gallion
Gallion, 29, was a dedicated father who talked nightly with his young daughter, Je Asia, said Sabrina Rozier, her maternal grandmother.
He sometimes worked two or three jobs to help support his daughter and “never missed a beat” throughout her life, Rozier said at a news conference Monday. He planned to take her to a father-daughter dance in the coming weeks and was in the process of coordinating what colors they would wear, she said.
“A daddy is supposed to be the first person to break a young girl’s heart, but this white, racist supremacist took that from her, robbed her of being walked down the aisle when she gets married, graduations, everything this young girl got going on,” Rozier said.
Rozier said her daughter and Gallion were best friends who co-parented well together even after they separated. She feared what could have happened if his daughter had been with him when he stopped at the store that day.
Article by: Matt Soergel
