Police: Boy, 13, shot and killed 12-year-old girl in Chesapeake

CHESAPEAKE

Gabrielle Buksha was standing on her porch Tuesday evening when she heard what sounded like a firecracker and went to check on her kids. They were playing with friends in their Deep Creek neighborhood.

As she approached the group on Geneva Avenue, she heard her daughter screaming.

"Mommy, she's not moving," she told Buksha. "She won't get up."

Carolyn "Cee-Cee" Walker was lying on the ground, a bullet wound in her forehead. The 12-year-old's pulse was faint, and her chest no longer rose and fell, Buksha said.

Beside her, a 13-year-old boy - whom police would take into custody later Tuesday and charge with manslaughter - was kneeling, refusing to leave as Buksha told the kids to get to the other side of the street.

Buksha called 911, and the boy gave her a shirt to use to apply pressure to the wound. By the time police arrived, Walker was dead, she said. The boy had disappeared.

By Wednesday morning, police had released few details about the investigation into Walker's death. Instead, witnesses to the shooting helped family members patch together an account of the minutes leading up to her death.

Walker's relatives said the arrest is only the first step in a process of seeking answers and holding people accountable. Friends, family and even police are still wondering how a young teen even got hold of the loaded gun that killed the Deep Creek Middle School sixth-grader.

Residents of the Owens Village housing complex, where the shooting took place, are calling the night a tragic accident, another example of how kids and weapons too often can combine for deadly results.

Police would not comment on their decision to charge the teenager with manslaughter, but Lisa Renee Walker - Carolyn's mother - said the medical examiner's office told her the death would be ruled accidental.

After the shooting, friends told Marlisa Walker, Carolyn's sister, that the boy had been carrying the gun for several days and had even taken it to school in his backpack. He, too, attends Deep Creek Middle, Marlisa Walker said.

School division spokesman Tom Cupitt said officials had received no reports of a student bringing a gun to the middle school.

Marlisa Walker said she was at work Tuesday evening when the shooting took place. She later heard from witnesses that Carolyn had been outside with a group of friends. A teenage boy was playing with a gun, she said, pointing it at his own head and then at her sister's. That's when the weapon fired, she said.

Anderia Knight, who lives in an apartment near where the shooting took place, said kids from the neighborhood gave her a similar account. Knight said she has seen the 13-year-old boy in the neighborhood before and that he was showing off his new gun to friends on Tuesday.

"He turned it on himself and then on her," Knight said. "And before he knew it, the gun went off."

Walker's mother, who lives down the street from where the shooting occurred, remembers the phone calls she began to receive soon after.

"Cee-Cee's just been shot," kids told her.

She prayed it was a mistake, that it wasn't her daughter, she recalled Wednesday as friends and family wandered in and out of her apartment lending support.

"When I got out there to where she was, it was my Cee-Cee," she said.

As police examined the scene that night, Lisa Walker stood a short distance away - restrained by friends and family - and sobbed.

"Lord have mercy," she wailed. "That's my baby."

Friends stood in groups nearby, comforting one another and sharing stories about the bubbly girl who was a fixture of the neighborhood.

"She was like a sister to everybody," the victim's 9-year-old brother, Clayton Walker, said Wednesday.

Carolyn wanted to be a middle school cheerleader, her sister Marlisa said. She loved going to the mall, primping in front of the mirror, and going ice-skating every week with her friends.

Deep Creek students quickly began texting one another the names of those involved Tuesday night, parent Gordon Weston said Wednesday. His 11-year-old daughter, Natalie, started crying when she saw Carolyn's name, he said.

Lisa Walker said her daughter wasn't fascinated by guns and wouldn't hang out with people who carried them.

She hopes whoever is responsible for firing the shot that killed her daughter is held responsible. Even a 13-year-old is old enough to know right from wrong, she said.

"I'm not questioning God, but this didn't have to happen," Lisa Walker said. "It all boils down to this child knows better."

Pilot writer Elisabeth Hulette contributed to this report.

Sarah Hutchins, (757) 222-5210, sarah.hutchins@pilotonline.com