DUBLIN, Ohio (WCMH)– The sister of Dayton shooting victim Derrick Fudge says their family had reunited in Springfield where they’re all from earlier in the day Saturday.
After the picnic, Twyla Southall returned home to Dublin, but just hours later, her phone started going off in the middle of the night.
That’s when she heard the horrifying news from her niece and nephew.
“My niece, she said when they had started hearing the pop! pop! pops! she said, ‘everybody get down’ and kept screaming get down,” Southall recalled.
In the deadly chaos of that minute of gunfire, Derrick Fudge was hit. He had been out in the Oregon District of Dayton when he went outside a club with his son, Dion Green, and his son’s fiancé, Donita Cosey, to grab some food on the sidewalk. That’s when the gunfire started.
“My nephew saw everyone running, so he said let’s just get out of here,” Southall explained. So everyone started getting up and my brother did not get up.”
Dion Green was holding on to his father as he took his last breath.
“He fell on him, and by that point, I believe the police… they were right there just like is being reported on TV,” Southall recalled. “They were right there in a matter of seconds and trying to help pull him off of him, but he was very distraught.”
Southall says she finds some peace in the fact that she had seen her brother just hours before at a family cookout in Springfield.
“It’s like a mixed bag. I’m very, very grateful to know that he was with his son. That’s his only son. He loves his son, but it’s so sad that was with him. There’s survivor’s guilt. There is ‘that he was in my arms and took his last breath’ devastation. “You just can’t un-see that, un-live that,” she concluded.