Town of White Pine struggles to cope with incident in which Makayla Dyer was allegedly shot dead by an 11-year-old boy over dispute about her puppies

A Tennessee mother has paid tribute to her eight-year-old daughter after she was shot dead, allegedly by her 11-year-old neighbor.



“She was a precious little girl, she was a mommy’s girl, no matter how bad of a mood you were in she could always make you smile,” Makayla Dyer’s mother, Latasha Dyer, told local TV station WATE, speaking with difficulty through tears.

“I want her back in my arms. This is not fair. Hold and kiss your babies every night – you’re never promised the next day with them,” Dyer said. “I hope the little boy learned his lesson because he took my baby’s life and I can’t get her back.”

According to police in White Pine, a rural town in the American south, the two children were playing in the mobile home park where they lived when the boy asked to see puppies that belonged to the girl’s family. When the girl said no, the boy shot her in the chest with a 12-gauge shotgun from his mobile home window.

“When we first moved to White Pine, the little boy was bullying Makayla,” Dyer told WATE. “He was making fun of her, calling her names, just being mean to her. I had to go the principal about him and he quit for a while and then all of a sudden yesterday he shot her.”

The boy – who has not been named because of his age – has been charged with first-degree murder as a juvenile, and court proceedings are likely to be confidential because of his age. The boy’s family have not spoken to the media since the incident. Child welfare officials are now investigating the boy’s family. He lived with five other children, according to Sheriff GW “Bud” McCoig of Jefferson County.

The shooting took place just after 7pm on Saturday, when the boy used his father’s shotgun to shoot the girl in the chest from his mobile home park window, officials said.

“We was in the house watching the Tennessee [football] game and heard the bang,” Chasity Arwood, manager for the mobile home park, told Knoxville News Sentinel. “[We] came out, the family was running to our porch yelling ‘He shot my baby, he shot my baby’.”

Arwood apparently had to hold Dyer back as she attempted to reach for her daughter after she was shot.

White Pine, Tennessee

“My husband had to guard the little girl until the rescue people got here,” Arwood told the Sentinel. “I was holding the family back trying to tell them ‘You can’t touch her, you can’t touch her’.

“Having to keep a momma away from her baby, being a momma, is really hard. That is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.”

When the boy’s mother heard what happened, Arwood said, “she slammed the door, locked it, and we never seen her after that”.

When the boy’s mother refused to come out, a distraught Latasha Dyer broke her neighbor’s window. Arwood said she gave Dyer a towel to soak up the blood on her hands, and a blanket to keep warm.

The shooting shook the eastern Tennessee county of 52,000, nestled along the Cherokee national forest on the western edge of North Carolina. Sheriff McCoig, whose office is investigating the incident, could barely contain his grief at a press conference where he informed reporters of the shooting.

“Well, by the grace of God,” McCoig said before he stopped, shook his head, looked up and started again. “There’s a loss [of] an eight-year-old child, and our department is hurting, and emergency personnel that responded is hurting, but we all have to pick up and be there for each other.”

He said local chaplains and pastors had come to the mobile home park that evening, “and they help us bear the hardship of the loss of a little child”.

White Pine elementary, the school of 850 that both children attended (the girl in third grade, the boy in fifth) pulled grief counselors in from neighboring schools to speak with mourning parents, students and staff.

“We got together as a staff yesterday and had our emotional time with each other to try to prepare for today,” the school’s principal, Bill Walker, told reporters. “I don’t think you can prepare for when you walk in and see students that are hurting, and [the staff has] done a very good job with keeping those in check and watching over students.”

At the mobile home park, an impromptu memorial for Makayla has grown up on the girl’s porch, with balloons, a candle wrapped with a picture of Jesus and a wreath of silk flowers, WATE reported. Neighbors have covered with hay a white, spray-painted patch of grass marking where Dyer died. Arwood is looking after the girl’s two puppies.

“They’ve been running to the porch they know is their home,” she told WATE.

Gun rights are a polarizing and seemingly intractable issue in the United States, where the right to bear arms is enshrined in the country’s constitution. Just two days before the eight-year-old was shot in Tennessee, 10 people were killed and seven injured in at a mass shooting 2,600 miles away in Umpqua community college in Roseburg, Oregon.

The girl’s funeral is scheduled for Wednesday, local television station WBIR reported.