Home from his freshman year in college, Wali Clanton Jr. was watching a Saturday night movie with his mother who wasn’t feeling well June 13 when he got the call from a friend about the pool party.
He kissed his mom on the lips — a departure from his normal peck on the cheek — and said he’d be back.
The next time LaToscha Brown saw her son was three days later, through an observation window. He was lying on a slab in a funeral home being prepared to be flown to Tampa for his funeral.
As the Fayette sheriff’s investigators tries to unravel what led to the Stockbridge teen’s fatal shooting along a well-appointed stretch of estates in the northern part of the county, Clanton’s family and friends are trying to make sense of a life of promise snuffed out.
He would have been the first young man in the family to finish college. His mother said he was intent on becoming a nurse practitioner.
But on this Saturday night - June 13 - Clanton just wanted to be with friends. Clanton was among hundreds drawn to the pool party, less than a mile from the mansion once owned by boxer Evander Holyfield. Winifred Smith had agreed to allow her 20-year-old grandson to have a party at her house.
By 11:30 p.m., Smith’s four-acre property was swarming with young people — many like Clanton had learned about it on social media and did not know Smith’s grandson.
Smith watched as the crowd more than doubled as midnight approached.
“She counted roughly 400 people at the party. She then started telling everyone that the party was too big and everyone needed to leave,” according to the Fayette Sheriff department’s incident report obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Details remain sketchy, but interviews with Smith and her daughter indicate an argument erupted at the end of Smith’s winding driveway near Hwy 279 as teens were leaving.
Smith’s daughter was busy directing traffic. Nearby, she heard an agitated conversation. Then gunfire.
Witnesses told the AJC it sounded like several guns were involved.
Five people were hit. While the others did not have life-threatening injuries, Clanton suffered a gunshot wound to the chest.
Smith and her daughter watched as Clinton Nash and a sheriff’s deputy worked frantically to save the 19-year-old. Nash, who lives in the Smith home, performed mouth-to-mouth on Clanton as his friends and onlookers hovered, praying and urging him to hang on as he slipped in and out of consciousness.
One young man held his hand so tightly throughout the ordeal that “police had to pry his hands loose” when they were putting Clanton into the ambulance, Smith recalled. He was taken to Fayette Piedmont hospital where he was pronounced dead.
Fayette County Sheriff’s Office arrested an 18-year-old man late Friday in connection with the shooting. Terrence Kyreef Montgomery Jr. remained in the Fayette county jail on Monday, charged with felony murder and malice murder, four counts of aggravated assault and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
The Smith family spoke to The AJC hoping to clear up inaccuracies that they say have surrounded the shooting. Media reports about a partygoer’s drugged drink are false, the family said.
Smith and her family didn’t know Wali Clanton but she said they are devastated by his death.
“We want the parents to know that everybody tried so hard to resuscitate him,” Smith told The AJC in an exclusive interview. “We prayed over him. We just wanted him to be alive.”
LaTosha Brown moved to Georgia from Tampa to give her then middle school son a better life. Now he has returned for his Saturday funeral and burial. Teammates from his high school and college football teams are scheduled to attend.
An estimated 500 people attended a Thursday memorial punctuated with testaments and tears at Dutchtown High School where Clanton graduated in 2014.
“He was a very passionate and respectful young man. He always emitted a positive spirit,” said Derrick Westry, Clanton’s guidance counselor.”If your day was gloomy, he would find a way to make you feel better with a smile. He was a person you could count on.”
One particularly touching moment during the memorial service came when Clanton’s mother, LaToscha Brown, bent down to hug and talk to 16-year-old Maiya Dowdell, one of the teens injured during Saturday’s shooting.
The young man who wore his hair in locks more as a spiritual commitment than a fashion trend was more likely to defuse a fight than get involved in one, his family said. He was the one who’d surprise his friends’ mothers by calling them on Mother’s Day. He’d get up early on holiday mornings to fry turkey for the big family get-togethers.
He posted a Facebook video a few years ago saying how much he loved and admired his relatives. He doted on his mom, taking care of her after she had surgery. He had a good first year in college. His father, Wali Clanton Sr., proudly posted his grades on his Facebook page, his aunt Anita Robinson of Lawrenceville said. The younger Clanton was looking forward to being a walk-on for the Kentucky State University football team this fall, his dad said.
Father and son were looking forward to spending time together in Tampa this summer. The two had plans to work out to get Wali in shape for the coming football season. Now the plans involve burying him.
“I’m devastated,” Wali Clanton Sr. said sitting on the porch of Brown’s home after arriving from Tampa.
Wali, whose name means “protector” in Arabic, was what he had been to 19-year-old Velizia Rumph ever since they met in a mall as middle school students. He escorted her to her senior prom last year.
Whenever she felt lonely, she said, “he would tell me he’d always be there for me and I wouldn’t have to worry about anything.”
The teen’s death is an added heartache for his father’s family.
“He’s just going to be truly, truly missed,” Clanton’s aunt Resa Chapman said. “We just recently lost my father who was nearly 80 years old. This baby was just starting to bud and blossom. And to see him being snatched out of this world. Sometimes I can hardly breathe.”
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