ORLANDO, Fla. – Sharice Nesmith is grieving the death of her 4-year-old daughter Janice Serrano. The little girl was shot along with her grandmother and two aunts on Nov. 4.
“They ask for their sister all the time, and they say, ‘Where’s Nini?’ and I try to change the subject because I don’t know how to tell them,” the 26-year-old mother of three said in tears about how she hasn’t told her two surviving children their sister passed away.
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Nesmith, who suffered a gunshot wound to her face, told News 6 that her mother, 49-year-old Gail Baker, and sisters, 28-year-old Shantay Nesmith and 29-year-old Asha Baker, had gone out with Asha’s boyfriend, Shavell Jones, on Nov. 3 but when they got back to the house in Orlando, she overheard an argument and he was told to leave the house.
“She was arguing with her boyfriend Shavell, I guess they argued before at the club,” she recalled. Nesmith was in another room, but her daughter, Janice, who is a twin, had gone outside toward the living room.
“My sister was saying to my mom – cause he was taking out his stuff out, right? And my sister was telling to my mom, ‘Mom you better get him cause he’s throwing stuff on my niece,’” she said.
Nesmith said Jones went back inside the house and shot her mother, two sisters and her daughter.
“He … he took something so precious, and I keep asking myself like, what did this child do to you? That’s all he had to do was just took your clothes out of the house. Why go back in there and just shoot them?” said Carita Seals, a cousin of the family.
Nesmith said she didn’t realize it was gunshots what she heard but when she went into the living room, the scene was devastating.
“I didn’t know what was going on. I looked down and realized that he was doing that. He shot her in the head. I saw him shot my sister in the head, and then I looked up and he shot me in my nose,” Nesmith said.
Nesmith remembered running out of the house for help and having to leave her other 4-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son in a room.
“He said, ‘Are you OK, mommy?’ I said, ‘Hold on. I’m gonna go get some help.’ And so, then I was trying to find my boyfriend to come get help, he was already going to get help, he was knocking on doors,” Nesmith said.
The family is still trying to come to terms with their loss and are trying to figure out how to raise funds to bury their family in Homestead.
“I’m still having a hard time accepting it. We’ve always done things together as a family, and to know that they’re not gonna be here, it’s hard. It’s gonna be difficult living here in Orlando without them,” Seals said.
The family has set up a GoFundMe to help with costs.
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