On a shady street in east Gainesville, a teal house stands between tall trees. Paul Anthony Sr. planted those trees himself.
It’s an unremarkable house on an unremarkable block. Anthony’s second cousin lives across the street. Brittish Walker is 20, and she likes to sit on the porch and play dominoes. From her porch, she can see the teal house, the trees, the driveway. She was watching from her porch Monday, a cool, crisp, so-far unremarkable day. Her dogs, usually frantic and jumpy, were quiet.
She watched Anthony pull his car into a spot next to his house. He began to rinse off his car, a black Chevy Impala with tinted windows. He was proud of that car. Walker wanted to catch up, and crossed the street to greet him. They talked about the Gators loss to Alabama. He told her what he thought the team should have done. She walked back to her house and noticed a red truck coming down the street.
“I didn’t think nothing of it,” she said.
Anthony, who became one of six victims in the shooting spree Monday, is not the type to get into arguments. Family members describe him as a kind, quiet man who keeps to himself and his family. He attends the Church of the Kingdom of God every Sunday unless he has to work. He’s 43 and a manager at Captain D’s seafood restaurant. He has five kids. According to Walker, he knew Clifford L. Miller Jr.
“He was just like somebody from the neighborhood,” she said. “He knew us very well.”
Miller grew up in the neighborhood. He would get into arguments with his mother, Walker said. Loud, heated arguments. He would storm out of the house and walk around mumbling to himself and starting fights. He got into it once with Anthony’s son, Paul Jr. Walker thinks this is one of the reasons Miller came by Anthony’s house.
Miller, 24, was a drug user with a cocaine conviction.
“He was kinda like, on the insane side,” she said.
It was about 3:45 in the afternoon. Anthony was rinsing off his Impala ten steps from the street. The red truck pulled up. Walker heard three shots. She made it five steps into the house.
She panicked. She heard the tires squeal, and when she ran outside she saw Anthony limping in the street, on the phone with 911. He tried to get a tag number, but the red truck didn’t have one. She ran to help him. He couldn’t walk. He stumbled. She grabbed him. He was shot through the left torso and left buttocks. He started muttering, repeating: “It was a red truck.”
She dragged him the three steps onto the wide porch in front of his house. The amount of blood surprised her.
She ran across the street to her house to get some towels. When she got back he was moaning, fading. She put pressure on the wounds, and the towels grew heavy and wet.
“What’s your name?”
He struggled to answer: “Stay with me.”
She told him he was going to be all right. She was scared. It could have been her. She could be the one bleeding.
“Stay with me,” she told him.
The police came, and she helped remove his clothes. He was breathing heavy and slow. They took him away. She couldn’t go. The ambulance drove off and left her there, shaken and sticky with his blood.
A couple of hours later, before she’d learned that her cousin would survive the night, detectives returned to the house with the name of the shooter: Clifford Miller Jr., the young man from the neighborhood. The one she always suspected was a little unstable. He had driven away and shot himself in the head.
Walker went back inside, changed her clothes and tried to scrub away the blood, but it wouldn’t come off. She’d waited too long.
She gave up. She threw her clothes away.
