24yr old, Mariam Shade Adebayo who had just started a new job after graduation from the University had her life abruptly cut short in the parking lot when her ex boyfriend, who couldn't handle their breakup after 6 months of dating, arranged a meeting for closure, a meeting that would be her last.
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| Shade and Mum |
Mariam “Shadé” Adebayo, 24, had broken up with a man who had
responded with a barrage of phone calls and text messages. He said he needed
the “closure” of a face-to-face meeting. Adebayo relented, but she insisted on
a public place. She had promised to text Kiankhooy when the meeting was over. Kiankhooy turned into the shopping center. She saw police cars, an
ambulance, a wheeled stretcher being pushed She could see only the side of the
victim’s body, but she saw enough.
In the two weeks since, the full, unconscionable weight of
what happened has fallen on those close to Adebayo, an ever-smiling, ambitious
young woman given to trying to see the best in people. “It gets more real every day,” Kiankhooy said Friday. “She
really is gone.”
According to Montgomery County authorities, the
ex-boyfriend, Donald W. Bricker, 27, mapped out the June 1 attack in chilling
detail. That day, Bricker received an antique-style replica handgun in the
mail. He practiced firing it at his home in Hagerstown, Md., and headed out to
meet Adebayo. He got into her car, police said, and started arguing. Adebayo
tried to run. He got out, shot her, she fell, and he walked up to her and shot
her again, police said. Adebayo died a short time later. Bricker, who police
said drove off in a pickup truck, was apprehended after a police chase.
“He was doing anything he could to control her, to the point
of manipulating her into a final encounter,” said Capt. Darren Francke, head of
Montgomery’s major crimes unit. “She still wanted to try to help him, and he
preyed on that.”. The relationship with Bricker — a man her friends and family
didn’t really know, who had a mysterious, criminal past — seemed behind her.
Several weeks ago, over lunch with her mother, Cassandra
Atkens, Adebayo spoke about time she would have with others. “Now that I’m not
seeing him anymore,” she told her mom, “we should do more things together.”
The daughter of immigrants from Ghana, Mariam Folashadé
Adebayo grew up in Germantown. Kiankhooy met her in 2003, during Kiankhooy’s
first week as a scared seventh-grader at a new school. Walking into a science
class, she scanned the room for the friendliest face, spotted Adebayo and took
a seat next to her. Three days later, Adebayo passed her a note, laying out
plans for their friendship — how they would have a sleepover and go to the
mall. Within three weeks, Kiankhooy remembers, she had a best friend.
At Seneca Valley High School, Adebayo seemed to greet
everyone and was voted most talkative her senior year. “She was that girl who
could float from group to group,” classmate Stephanie Evans recalled. And she
seemed to have mapped out her future. At one point, she gave her mother a CD of
the singer Sade — whose name is pronounced the same as Adebayo’s shortened name
— that included the song “By Your Side.” She said she would play the song at
her wedding for a dance with her new husband and a dance with her mother. Her
mom joked that the romantic song might not be appropriate for a mother-daughter
dance. “Of course it is,” her daughter replied, “because I love you.”
But she hardly seemed naive. In a Facebook post from last
year, Adebayo recalled meeting a woman who told her that her joy was rooted in
her youth. Adebayo wrote that she knew the world was full of hate, but she
maintained that “there is still good, purity and happiness out there even on
our darkest days.” “Spread love guys,” Adebayo wrote. “It’s seriously the only
thing that’ll keep you going.”
Bricker graduated from North Hagerstown High School. By his
21st birthday, court records state, he had been charged with assault,
trespassing and failing to obey a restraining order, cases that were dropped.
But one accusation stuck — a statutory rape case from May 17, 2008, when
Bricker was 20. He had sex with a 13-year-old girl, initially denied it when
confronted by detectives, and eventually pleaded guilty to third-degree sex
offense, according to records filed at the Washington County Circuit Court.
Bricker was sentenced to two months in jail, and he was ordered
to register as a sex offender in a Maryland database. Family members and
lawyers who have represented Bricker declined to comment for this article.
Activity on his Facebook profile suggested that after the 2009 conviction, he
was exploring born-again Christianity. At some point, he met Adebayo, and by
the fall of 2014, they were dating.
“Everybody loved her,” one of Bricker’s friends, Ian
Bazzano, said via text message. “Donnie’s family absolutely loved her.” Montgomery
County Police said on Tuesday that Donald W. Bricker Jr. of Hagerstown, Md.,
would be charged with first-degree murder in the fatal shooting of his former
girlfriend Mariam “Shadé” Adebayo near a Germantown Target. (WUSA9). Adebayo told friends Bricker was trying to move past the
case, and she seemed to want to help him. He also had a certain quality, one
she told friend Evans about: “Steph, you don’t understand. He listens.” Evans
concluded something else, as well: “If you are in Shadé’s life, you’re worthy
of something.”
Early this year, though, Adebayo told her mother that she
and Bricker were having problems, saying he did not have a steady job and
called her too much while she was at work. “He’s not grown-up,” Adebayo said,
according to Atkens. By this spring, Adebayo broke things off, according to her
friends and family. Bricker didn’t want to accept it, calling and texting her
so much that she blocked his numbers, according to friends. So he switched to
e-mail.
Just before 7:35 p.m. June 1, Ricky Ashley Jr., 29, and Matt
Kamachaitis, 28, were loading a door into a truck in a Home Depot parking lot —
adjacent to the Target lot in Germantown. They heard a boom, thought it was an
air bag deploying from a car accident and ran toward the sound. They heard a
second boom: This one, they were sure, was a gunshot. They saw a white pickup
drive away.
Ashley and Kamachaitis kept going. They saw a woman on her
back, her head raised slightly, looking toward them. Now they were standing
above her and saw her bleeding. Her eyes darted back and forth. Her hand moved
slightly, as if trying to reach for them. They bent down and held her hands.
“Hold on,” Ashley said.
“Breathe,” Kamachaitis said. “The paramedics will be here
soon.”
The two later learned the woman’s name, heard that her
friends were organizing a vigil and decided to go. More than 500 others went,
as well. Adebayo’s friends spoke about how she wanted to help people, how loyal
she was. They spoke about her cheerful habits — dancing, impromptu singing of
Michael Jackson songs, always eating Nacho Cheese Doritos.
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| Adebayo (left) with friend Nilly Kiankhooy in March 2013.
(Courtesy of Nilly Kiankhooy) |
After the vigil ended, the two men walked back to their
vehicles. Kamachaitis let out an expletive — furious over what happened,
heartbroken over someone he never knew.
Adebayo’s memorial service will be at 10 a.m. Saturday at
the Episcopal Church of the Ascension, 205 S. Summit Ave., Gaithersburg, Md.
More information is available here.
CREDIT: Washington Post
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