“Right off she goes, ‘Mama Dee, is Tasha home?’” recalled Dee, her voice now soft and already showing the pain. “I said, ‘No, but I just talked to her a few hours ago, and she said she’ll be home later.’
“That’s when Angela said, ‘No…She’s been in a bad wreck.’
“I said, ‘What? Not Tasha.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I think it is Tasha. They said the wreck happened around 3 to 3:20 in the afternoon.’
“I couldn’t understand. I said, ‘No, nobody called me. The police didn’t come to my home. It can’t be her,’ and she said, ‘Yeah, they say she’s gone.’
“’Gone? Gone where, the hospital?’
“And she said, ‘No, Mom… They say she’s dead!’”
As she relived that terrible moment a recent afternoon, Dee’s eyes filled with tears and her voice broke and that prompted her four-year-old grandson JairAnthony — the little charmer they call Scooter — to put down the empty Kleenex box he was playing with and press close to her side, though he wasn’t quite sure what to do next.
Realizing the conversation about his mom could be tough for the little boy, Dee’s sister, Mary “Minnie” Mann, called him over, took out her smart phone and pulled up a video of him playing basketball with his Saturday morning peewee team at the Victory Temple Church gym.
“When I heard that, I screamed for my oldest son (LaShawn),” Dee continued. “I said, ‘Call the coroner’s office right now and see if your sister is there.’ He did and after a while I heard him say, ‘Dammit, she’s got a tattoo on her leg. Most people wouldn’t have it. It’s a cartoon.’
“It was Tow Mater from the Cars movie. He’s the little guy who drives backwards in the tow truck. And sure enough it was there. It was our Tasha.”
The night before, Dee’s 26-year-old daughter had left home to go to a New Year’s Eve party with the Street Riders Motorcycle Club she was in.
It had taken her two years to earn the club’s big, circular center patch of a motorcycle rider, and she had had her Aunt Minnie sew it onto the back of her black leather vest. Stitched across the front in big letters was her nickname: Light Bright.
She planned to stay with friends that night and return to her mom and three kids on New Year’s Day. And from what the family can piece together that’s what she was doing when she got a ride from 30-year-old Fredrick Bailey.
“From what people say, she didn’t know him before, she was just getting a ride to her car,” said Dee.
Bailey’s gray Pontiac sedan was said to have been going 90 to 100 mph down North Broadway Street in Dayton when it veered out of control near Edgewood Avenue, hit an RTA pole and flipped several times before landing on its top. Both Tasha and Bailey were thrown from the car.
According to the Montgomery County Coroner’s office, Tasha died at the scene of multiple trauma injuries. Bailey died at Miami Valley Hospital.
For Tasha, it was a sudden, violent and, some think, quite suspicious end to a tale that already had taken a much-trumpeted tragic turn five months earlier at the Walmart store in Beavercreek.
On Aug. 5, she had gone there with John Crawford III, her friend from Fairfield, to buy marshmallows, chocolate and graham crackers for her kids to make S’mores at a party for her cousin, Aunt Minnie’s son Damien, whose U.S Army reassignment was taking him from Fort Campbell to Hawaii.
In the store, Crawford was engrossed in an intense phone call with the mother of his two children and during the conversation he had picked up an unpackaged BB/pellet gun that was sold there and was absently carrying it with him as he spoke. Walking down the aisles, he appeared to pay little attention to what he was doing
Fellow shopper Ronald Ritchie called 9-1-1, telling the emergency dispatcher that Crawford was pointing the gun at people and even had reloaded it. Police responded immediately. Beavercreek police Sgt. David Darko yelled for Crawford — who was still on his cell phone — to drop what turned out to be an unloaded pellet rifle. At about the same instance, police officer Sean Williams shot Crawford.
Crawford was killed. Tasha, who was in a different aisle looking at clothes, had no idea what had happened.
Police detained Tasha and took her to the Beavercreek police station where Detective Rodney Curd — who later admitted to state investigators he initially had incomplete information about the shooting — worked her over verbally with several off-base assumptions, threatened her with jail and didn’t tell her Crawford was dead until the session ended 94 minutes later.
And now, less than five months later, Tasha was dead, too.
For a few days after the accident, the family didn’t tell the three boys – besides JairAnthony, La’Corteon is 8 and Roger is 6 – that their mother had died. They just knew she had been in a wreck.
“How do you tell these kids they’re not gonna have a mother no more?” Minnie asked.
A few days after the crash, Dee viewed the body at the coroner’s office and decided there would be no open casket. For her, the loss was compounded by the fact that just 28 months earlier her 21-year-old son Korey – they called him O or O Man – had unexpectedly died.
Yet, for all this hurt, she knew she had a tougher situation ahead once she got to Minnie’s house where the boys were waiting.
“I sat in the middle of the (living room) floor and had my three grandbabies come to me,” she said. “I got them real close and I said, ‘Your mommy went to heaven like Uncle O did. She’s an angel now. She got her wings immediately, so you won’t get to see her like you did Uncle O. But she’s watching over you, and we’re all here, and we’ll get through this.’”
Afterward La’Corteon, who had seemed to understand better than his younger brothers, sat down on the love seat with her and said quietly:
“But do you think we can get a cell phone to talk to Mom?”
Light Bright
“She was an amazing kid growing up,” Dee said of her daughter. “She was in every activity after school. She was a cheerleader at Wilbur Wright. She was in ROTC and the choir at church.”
Tasha started high school at Colonel White, then went to Mound Street Academy and ended up at the Life Skills Center after she got pregnant at 16.
Dee said the two fathers of Tasha’s three children “have never been in the picture,” but her daughter was determined to make something of herself. She said she went to Kaplan College, became a home health care aide, was working toward becoming a nurse and “always provided for her kids.”
She said her daughter was good with people for whom she cared: “She has one special client, Miss Campbell – she’s originally from London – and they formed a great bond. Tasha would work for her off the clock just to make sure she always was attended to.”
The flip side of her interests was the Street Riders to whom she was first introduced by her late brother and her dad, Anthony Cook.
“She and O used to go some weekends and watch the street races off Germantown (Pike),” Dee said. “Their dad had a bike, but he didn’t race. They all just watched. And when her brother passed, it became another way to stay connected to him.
“Everybody thinks the club gave her that nickname or that it means being a redbone.”
She was referring to a term that denotes a multi-racial person, which Tasha was. Dee is white, Anthony is black.
“That nickname was really about wanting her light to shine bright for her brother,” Dee explained.
In the spring of last year, Tasha met Crawford and after that they did several things together, including taking a trip to Georgia.
When her cousin stopped back in Fairborn before his Army reassignment, the family had a barbecue in his honor on Minnie’s patio.
“Tasha said, ‘You mind if I pick up my friend, John?’ and I said, ‘I don’t care,’” Minnie remembered. “She said it would take an hour or so to go get him and come back and my son pops up and said, ‘Hey Tasha, here’s $20. When you’re out, pick up some stuff for the kids. We’re gonna have a bonfire out back and make S’mores.’”
‘She became a hermit’
“This all started over S’mores,” Dee said quietly. “Who would have thought walking into Walmart for something so innocent would have ended with John dead and my daughter’s life wrecked after that?”
Minnie shook her head: “The sad thing is the picture they put together on them. All that bad stuff, it’s a false picture.”
Anthony VanNoy — the one-time Ball State football player and now the Dayton attorney who represented Tasha — said claims that Crawford was non-compliant to the police command to drop the BB/pellet gun are a bit skewered.
He referenced research done by Crawford’s attorney, Michael Wright: “To hear a command, recognize what it means and take action takes the brain two seconds. From the time the officer said ‘Drop it’ until he fired, it was just .33 of a second.”
Police said they issued at least two commands, and that Crawford did not comply.
Either way, once Crawford was killed and another shopper, Angela Williams, collapsed in the commotion and died, the still unsuspecting, but shaken Tasha was put into a police car, quickly questioned and eventually allowed to call her mom.
“She was crying,” Dee said. “She said, ‘Mommy, you’ve got to come to me now.’”
When Dee and Minnie got there, they said they were told their daughter had been involved in a “domestic violence situation.”
At the police station, Curd aggressively grilled Tasha. He told her he thought Crawford had brought a gun into the store and suggested he had planned to kill his ex-girlfriend. When the increasingly distraught Tasha disputed all this, he told her if she was lying she would go to jail. At one point after she had been crying, he said her eyes didn’t look right and suggested she was on drugs.
“I swear to God I have kids,” Tasha said in a tape that was released as part of a probe conducted by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation. “I have a job. I have a family. On everything I love…you can give me a lie detector test and everything… On my dead brother’s grave, I swear to God I’m cooperating and everything ‘cause I don’t know.”
She was telling the truth, but even so, said her mom, her truck was impounded, the GPS she needed for work was taken and her medicine for lupus was confiscated.
In the days that followed, the real narrative started to come to light, and once some of Tasha’s thoughts were picked up by media across the nation, the nightmare for her intensified, her mom said.
A special grand jury declined to indict anyone involved in the deaths of Crawford and Angela Williams. The U.S. Justice Department is investigating Crawford’s case for possible civil rights violations.
Dee said in the months that followed, her daughter got threatening phone calls, was attacked on social media, had her truck tampered with and was pulled over by police several times.
“At least four times,” said her cousin, 28-year-old Donovan Hirst.
Twice she was charged with OVI, charges she disputed, though her truck remains impounded.
She said Tasha lost her job and then she started losing her hair.
“It took a tremendous toll on her. She was scared, paranoid, afraid to be alone,” Minnie said. “She was so full of life before this happened, and then she went into a shell. She became a hermit.”
Minnie tried to find her an attorney, but several — once they knew who Tasha was — turned them down. Finally, VanNoy agreed to represent her and immediately he thought she should tell everyone what had happened.
She ended up on an MSNBC television show and in the national spotlight.
She hated it, but she also felt she had to speak up for Crawford, said Dee: “She said, ‘Mom, somebody has to tell the truth.’”
VanNoy agreed: “She understood why she needed to share her story, but she’s not a spotlight seeker. She was an everyday person – a mom who loved her kids and loved life – and then she walked into Walmart one day with a friend and her life got turned upside down.”
With all that as a backdrop — and a civil suit filed just 16 days earlier by the Crawford family against the Beavercreek police and Walmart, a suit in which she would be a key witness — the circumstances of Tasha’s death have become fodder for some who believe there is more to the high speed crash than just driver negligence.
Was Tasha being chased? Was the car tampered with? Was there a mechanical failure or something else?
Also disturbing are the final abuses she endured.
“Someone took a video of my daughter lying there at the crash and put it on Facebook,” Dee said as tears welled again.
And then there was the woman who lives near the crash site and took photos of Tasha and then shared them with Tasha’s friend Angela, who had stopped by the scene to grieve.
‘It just seems inexcusable’
One respite the family now has is Tasha’s three boys and their Saturday basketball games.
“That’s me,” JairAnthony said as he pointed to himself in his aunt’s video. “Our team is the Trail Blazers. I made three baskets.”
Dee said the boys’ Fairborn teachers have been “wonderful…We have the best teachers in the world out here. They came over and asked me what they could do to help the boys get through this.”
She said her grandsons have become “more clingy” since their mom’s passing. Sometimes they are angry at losing her and often they just have questions.
She said the other morning Roger claimed his mom came into the bathroom when he was in there, turned on the light and talked to him.
JairAnthony’s fourth birthday was Jan. 20, and he wanted to know why his mom wasn’t at his party.
Dee said Tasha had planned it before she died: “She ordered the cake and it’s because of her I knew to have it at Magic Castle.”
VanNoy said right now he has three areas of concern: “First, we want to make sure everything is stabilized for the children so they can achieve some normalcy.
“The second track we’re working on is investigating the cause of Tasha’s death in respect to the motor vehicle. We’re not quite sure exactly what happened or why. At least one expert is trying to review the black box information, but that may be difficult because of the rate of speed at impact.”
He said his final area of concern is “police treatment of individuals during the investigating process. We recognize the awesome task law enforcement has, but unfortunately we look at what happened with Tasha and the way she was talked to and treated at such a critical time. It just seems inexcusable that we permit this in our society.”
After all she had gone through since August, Tasha had hoped the new year would allow her to get back to her old self. Dee said her daughter was looking forward to her New Year’s Eve party.
“I want to show you something nobody else has seen, not Tasha’s friends, not even Anthony VanNoy,” Dee said as she took out her phone and thumbed through a series of family photos.
She brought up the last photo she had of Tasha. It was shot just before she walked out the door on New Year’s Eve. She wore a shiny pink fedora, her black vest with the new center patch, tight pants and pink shoes that matched her hat.
Some 18 hours later she was dead.
“She was just a caring, kind person who was full of life, until one day… one day it was just all sucked out of her,” Dee said with a voice suddenly overcome by emotion.
Minnie finished the thought, saying Tasha lost her job, her sense of well-being, even her smile: “She was stripped of everything until nothing was left. It’s like a big hole had been dugged and she was thrown down into it.”
Light Bright deserved so much more than all that darkness.
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