Khia Shields, inset on the left, and a bullet hole, inset on the right, against an image of her mother’s home in Wrens, Ga. (Selfie; Screengrab via WFXG; Screengrab via WJBF.)
“Y’all really took my baby away,” a heartbroken mother wrote in a social media post after her teenage daughter, a college sophomore in the prime of her life, was shot and killed at home while sleeping.
Shareka Pitts bookended her terse sentence of grief with two emojis expressing heartbreak – having little else to post on the day she learned about the sudden death of her daughter, 19-year-old Khia Shields.
The slain girl studied at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro – a small college town roughly an hour west of Savannah – where less than two weeks ago, she started her second fall semester.
The fatal shooting occurred in the early morning hours of Aug. 26, the Wrens Police Department wrote in a press release.
Shields had been shot in the chest at least once.
Pitts recalled what unfolded in the family’s home immediately after the violence, in comments to Augusta-based ABC affiliate WJBF.
“She walks in my room,” the distraught mom told the TV station. “I’m up, looking…she’s looking at me, I’m looking at her. She had her hands held out like, ‘Mommy, mommy, I’m shot.’”
Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office deputies and WPD officers arrived around 1:10 a.m. and attempted life-saving measures with the help of local firefighters, police said. The girl was rushed to a medical center at nearby Augusta University where she was pronounced dead.
“She was just a normal teenager,” Pitts told WJBF.
Shields was working her way through college at a Walmart in Grovetown. Friends created a memorial to honor their former co-worker.
“Everybody loved their Khia,” her mother told Augusta-based CBS and MyNetworkTV affiliate WRDW. “She was just this warm person, and they just took her away from me. Never in a million years that I thought that I would be woken up with her saying she was shot, never.”
Pitts grew up on the street where the shooting occurred in the tiny city of Wrens – some 30 miles south of Augusta.
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“It’s very quiet neighborhood,” she said. “You know, I’ve been here for 41 years so never had this issue.”
Her daughter had just turned 19 days before she was shot and killed. She had dreams and a plan for the future.
“She wanted to be a teacher,” Pitts told WRDW. “Little kids always latched on to her. For some reason, all the kids that she was around, and like her godson, even her cousins, she was just that person that they would latch to – that they would connect with.”
A GoFundMe remembers Shields as “a nice loving young Queen with a very bright future in the educational profession.”
Funds will go toward the unexpected funeral costs and to support a reward for information about her killer, the fundraiser says.
Pitts railed against the scourge of gun violence in various comments to local media outlets in the southeast area of the Peach State.
“I’m going to keep her name alive,” Pitts told WJBF. “I’m gonna keep speaking on her until we can come up with a solution to stop gun violence.”
“Just put the guns down, just put the guns down,” she told WRDW. “We have to come together as one and as a community and stop this gun violence because it’s getting out of hand, especially for Jefferson County.”
Law enforcement is largely empty-handed at the moment.
The local police department and sheriff’s office passed the investigation onto the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
“It appears to us that this is some type of gang associated violence that’s going on,” GBI Special Agent in charge Patrick Morgan told WJBF. “We’re trying to get a handle on that and conduct several investigations that date back a couple of months that we think are all tied to the incidents that have taken place recently.”
Law&Crime reached out to the GBI and the JCSO for additional details on this story. No updates were available at the time of publication.
“Just a great spirited, beautiful young lady that was just taken from me just too soon,” Shields’ mother recalled in plaintive tones to WRDW. “She will be missed. She was my only child. My only child.”
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