WASHINGTON — At a vigil for Pamela Thomas in the February dusk, her son and sisters invoked a reading from the Book of Isaiah. They said in unison, “no weapon formed against you shall prosper.”
The weapon was a handgun, fired in a Northeast shootout last week. Its bullets hit Thomas, 54, as she held a cake next to the love of her life, her eight-year-old son.
“The bullet flew right past my head, right through my hair,” said Rufus Thomas Hayes in an interview. “And it shot my mom.”
They were driving to a birthday party, with family members waiting. They still waited Friday night, on the same corner of Division Avenue where Pamela died.
The officers investigating the unsolved case handed Rufus a Star Wars balloon, embraced him, and feared his separate griefs could break him apart.
The third grader’s father and stepfather both died in the past few months. Pamela wrote her own eulogy, fearful she would be next. She kept it scrawled on notebook paper in her home on 54th Street, Northeast.
“My little sister did not deserve to die that way,” exclaimed Marilyn Walker, also in the car headed to the birthday party – relatives now collateral of a stranger’s gunfight.
“You took my sister, but you also took a family with you.”
They said their lives' new meaning is to find whoever opened fire – but confessed their lives are something they can hardly make sense of at all.
The shooting happened in the 600 block of Division Avenue just after 3 p.m. February 9. Metropolitan Police said Friday a reward for information leading to an arrest has now doubled to $50,000.
A GoFundMe organized by Marilyn to help Rufus has raised north of $32,000.
“Whoever did this, I just ask, please, turn yourself in,” she said. "I'm praying for you. I'm praying God have mercy on you, but you got to turn yourself in."