WASHINGTON — It has been two years since a 10-year-old girl was shot and killed in Northeast D.C.
Makiyah Wilson had just gotten a treat from an ice cream truck when a group of men sprayed more than 70 gunshots into a crowd of people.
“That’s my butterfly,” Donnetta Wilson, Makiyah’s mother, said. “Makiyah was my everything.”
“She means light and love,” Michael Wilson, Makiyah’s dad, told WUSA9. “While this sun is shining on us, I can still feel her spirit man. I miss her right now.”
Makiyah was sitting on a stoop in front of her home with her sister in Clay Terrace.
A group of masked men were caught on video pulling up in a black car, jumping out, and firing barrage bullets into a crowded courtyard.
“Seventy rounds with kids outside in broad daylight?" Michael Wilson said. "You didn’t care."
Several people, including Makiyah and her sister, were shot.
An autopsy report revealed the 10-year-old was shot through her back and into the heart.
“Seeing her from that first moment of when it happened and knowing me, as a mom, could not do anything for my child – I remembered it like it was nothing. I just – that’s the biggest thing of that day,” Donnetta Wilson recalled.
“Me feeling my daughter cold in the stretcher – that sticks with me to this day,” Michael Wilson said. “I can’t – because my daughter is just so warm and loving. Me seeing her cold, lifeless – I’d rather that’d been me, man. It’s a curse. It sticks with your mind every day.”
Eleven people are charged in connection to Makiyah’s murder.
The first big trial was scheduled for Aug. 2020 but is delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“You don’t know what you took from us. You don’t know. Makiyah was an angel. She’s still an angel. She was an angel on earth before she was in heaven,” Donnetta Wilson said when asked what she would say to her daughter’s alleged killers.
The Wilson family has been busy in the last two years building a group called, Makiyah Scouts, to inspire young girls running a foundation in their daughter’s name and working to help stop violence in their communities.
Their efforts to prevent violence against children made the recent killing of Davon McNeal harder to process.
“Just within a year of her anniversary last year, Karon Brown. You get what I’m saying?" Donnetta Wilson told WUSA9. "Now, this year with Davon it is like wow. It seems like everything it is time for us to get ready for an anniversary it’s the death of another child."
“It’s just triggering like it is happening all over again,” Michael Wilson said.
The parents said their sadness has turned to anger and frustration as they call on their own community to step up, support one another and do something to prevent what happened to their child from happening again.
Michael and Donnetta Wilson said the overwhelming level of support they got when Makiyah was killed in 2018 had fizzled, and they would like to see more continued support for their community as they continue to heal and fight for justice.
“I try my best daily, but I want to do this movement together because if we all do this together, it will make a statement,” Donnetta said.