Erin Ennis took to social media Wednesday thanking people for their prayers and well wishes.
“A bullet will reside in my leg for the rest of my life,”the Clark Atlanta University student posted on Instagram, “but at least I have a life period.”
Ennis was one of four students shot Tuesday night at a block party outside the Atlanta University Center’s library. They were with about 200 other students marking the beginning of the school year.
Ennis, 18, of Powder Springs, Maia Williams-McLaren, 18, of Boston; Elyse Spencer, 18, of Rochester, New York.; and Kia Thomas, 19 of Jonesboro had injuries ranging from graze wounds to gunshot wounds.
Thomas, a junior at Clark Atlanta, is a decorated volleyball standout, university officials confirmed, and was honored in 2017 as the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference Player of the Year, the 2018 preseason offensive player of the year and was recently selected for the 2019 preseason all-conference volleyball first team. She is a 2017 graduate of Coweta County’s Northgate High School.
Police say an argument between two parties appears to have occurred before the shooting. The injured students were not the intended targets.
“I’m just trying to process a lot of things,” Tiffany Williams, the mother of Spelman College student Maia Williams-McClaren, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Wednesday.
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on her Twitter account, Elyse Spencer says she will graduate from Spelman in 2023 with a major in photography.
“Thank you for y’all prayers,” she posted to her Twitter account but could not be reached for further comment. “Can’t really reply to people. But I’m here, I’m alive. God got me. Y’all got me.”
Spencer was one of Rochester’s “bright stars,” Mayor Lovely Ann Warren said on Facebook, and was a member of the Mayor’s Youth Advisory Council in Rochester, along with a number of other community groups.
A GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign has been set up to raise $5,000 for her continued care. The campaign, organized by her sister, says Elyse "was shot in the chest right by her heart."
Several people helped victims during in the aftermath of the shooting.
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One, Derrick Daniels, a Clark Atlanta sophomore education major from Chicago, used his shirt to apply pressure on one student’s leg wound.
Daniels said he didn’t know the young woman, but “I knew I needed to do something to help her.” He said he knew to apply pressure from his dad, who was in the military and as someone who learned what to do just by growing up in Chicago, a city that has been hit hard by gun violence.
Daniels said he has lost several friends to gun violence in Chicago. Earlier this month, the city experienced a weekend of gun violence that included seven deaths and 52 people wounded.“I don’t want to say I’ve become desensitized to these kinds of things, but being the type of person I am, I always want to be able to help people in these situations. I want to keep a level head at all times,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Wednesday.
