After surviving COVID-19, grandmother, 71, killed while protecting granddaughter from attack

A 71-year-old grandmother, Sheila Lucas, was fatally shot and killed Saturday night in Southeast Washington while trying to protect her granddaughter during an attack.

After surviving the deadly coronavirus, which has infected at least 1,681,418 American citizens and killed 98,929 others, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University, Lucas would succumb to another of America’s evils – gun violence.

The United States is said to have the 28th highest rate of deaths from gun violence globally – 4.43 deaths per 100,000 people in 2017, according to findings by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

Another study notes that the gun homicide rate in the United States is 25 times higher than other high-income countries and that the phenomenon is most prevalent in racially segregated neighborhoods with high rates of poverty with Black Americans representing the majority of gun homicide victims. Black Americans are said to be 10 times more likely than white Americans to die by gun homicide.

“Who shoots a 71-year-old woman in the head who has nothing to do with all this? We didn’t get a chance to say, ‘Mom, we love you.’ We didn’t get a chance to say, ‘Mom, we’ll see you later.’ We didn’t get that opportunity. Her life was taken from us,” Lucas’ son, Robert H. Alston Jr. said. 

The 51-year-old pastor at Thankful Baptist Church near Lincoln Park in the Capitol Hill further told The Post: “Somebody just took her from us at the spur of the moment. She didn’t do anything. She didn’t bother anybody.”

The Police in Washington D.C. are offering a $25,000 reward in their search for the suspects who killed Lucas, 7KPLC reports. Citing The Metropolitan Police Department, the outlet reports that Lucas died at the hospital after she was rushed in.

He said his mother will be remembered as a fighter who was always outspoken saying, “If she didn’t like you, she told you she didn’t like you.” “She told you that because she loved you. My mom was a fighter, a trooper, a mother, a lover. We could always count on our mom to be at our side.”

He was two when his father was shot and killed and now he would have to live with the grim fact that both his parents were killed by gun violence. “I think God was preparing me for what was coming today,” he said. “I forgive the person who did the shooting.”