A family member and a longtime friend have identified Amanda Everitt as the 40-year-old mother who was killed along with four others in a mass shooting in Lake City Friday morning.
The suspected shooter, identified by police as Chad Hickman, 39, is also dead.
Police on Saturday released the ages and genders of all five victims, but have not confirmed their names. However, a Facebook post by David Everitt, who said he is Amanda’s father, identified her as one of the victims and said the world “just lost two beautiful people and one is clinging to life.”
“My daughter Amanda and her two beautiful children were shot in their home yesterday,” he said.
Amanda and her son, Eric, 16, “went home to be with god,” he wrote, “and our granddaughter Bella is clinging to life in a Grand Rapids hospital.”
Everitt said Bella was shot four times and “still managed to call 911 and identify the shooter,” he said. “She is a hero.”
Everitt also issued a plea, “to everyone on this planet to teach their children compassion and kindness not hate and violence so parents and family members do not have to bury their children and brothers and sisters.”
He also called the killings a “cowardly act by a evil person.”
Everitt could not immediately be reached on Saturday.
A friend of Amanda’s, Kimberly West Moffit, said she will remember Amanda based on her life, not her death.
“Amanda was bright, brilliant, caring and an incredibly loving mother,” Moffit said in a message. “She gave everything she had to her children while also fighting and overcoming battles of her own as a 40-year-old woman. She had a heart of gold. She was genuinely kind, didn’t carry anger toward people and was the type of person who cared deeply.”
Moffit said she has known Amanda since first grade, and they graduated together from Lake City High School in the class of 2004. She said Amanda was a “straight-A student, beautiful inside and out.”
“When I think about her, I don’t think about what happened to her,” Moffit said. “I think about the girl I grew up with and all those years and memories that came before this. She was kind. She was funny. She had a good heart, and she was one of those people who was simply part of growing up for me. When you’ve known someone since you were little, it’s hard to even explain what that means. They’re just woven into so many pieces of your life.”
Moffit said she wants people to remember Amanda as a daughter, mother, friend, “and someone so many of us grew up alongside and cared about.”
Michigan State Police were dispatched about 11:40 a.m. Friday to a home on South LaChance Road in Lake Township after receiving a report of a shooting.
When troopers arrived, they found three people dead. On Saturday, MSP identified the deceased victims found there as a 45-year-old male, a 40-year-old female and a 16-year-old male.
A 13-year-old female was also at the home, suffering from a gunshot wound, police said. She was transported to a hospital and remained in stable condition as of Saturday afternoon.
Police were also seen Friday at a home in the unincorporated town of Jennings, about 2.5 miles north of the LaChance Road crime scene. A neighbor identified this location as the home of Hickman, the suspected gunman.
MSP said troopers found a fourth body, that of a 53-year-old male, at a separate home in Missaukee County. They have not disclosed the exact location or community.
The bodies of Hickman and a 29-year-old woman were later found in a wooded area near Whitlock Lake, which is around three miles north of Jennings, authorities said.
Police have not identified a motive or said how the victims may be connected to each other.
jpignolet@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: 3 Missaukee County shooting victims ID’d by family member
Reporting by Jennifer Pignolet, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Jennifer Pignolet, The Detroit News | USA TODAY Network
