Tiana Carruthers’ life has always involved a fair amount of struggle and pain.
A less-than-stable family life meant she and her two younger sisters relocated a lot. And she always tried to take care of them.
“I really, honestly never got the chance to be a child,” said Carruthers, 25. “I was always playing that motherly role for my sisters.”
Her motherly instincts kicked in when she sensed danger on the afternoon of Feb. 20 and told a group of young children — including her own 7-year-old daughter — to run from the playground area of the Richland Township apartment complex where she lives.
Seconds later she became the first of eight people shot, allegedly by a Uber taxi service driver, in one of the most bizarre series of crimes in Southwest Michigan history.
A man in a car was apparently looking for someone. He was driving kind of wrecklessly through the complex, Carruthers said, and asked if she knew someone named Maisie.
“A couple of minutes go by and I see him coming back around,” Carruthers said. “At this time, I see him coming and I tell the kids, ‘You guys run and you do not come back over here for anything. I don’t care what you hear. Not anything.'”
Police said Carruthers put herself between the fleeing youngsters and the man. He fired at least 10 times. She was struck by four bullets as she tried to flee the playground area but none of the youngsters was injured. Kalamazoo County Sheriff Richard Fuller said she acted courageously.
“I think her actions were very heroic and in the end she saved lives that day,” Fuller said. “I’m very thankful that she acted instinctively.”
“I really appreciate that, but honestly I don’t feel like a hero,” Carruthers said. “I was doing something any mom would do, something any parent would do.”
Carruthers said her family life has not been ideal. But she declined to provide specifics or talk about her mother and father.
“I was with my great-grandmother, my grandmother, then my grandfather, and it was just back and forth, back and forth, and finally I stayed with my mother,” said Carruthers on Wednesday, still recuperating from the gunshot wounds she suffered.
“I pretty much raised my sister,” Carruthers said of her youngest sibling, Antasia, now 18.
Carruthers was 18, herself, when she got her first apartment. It allowed her to move out of the Kalamazoo Gospel Mission. Antasia, then 13, joined her at that first apartment. They have another sister, Sophia, now 23, who Carruthers also helped care for.
Carruthers was born in South Haven but grew up in Pullman and attended Bloomingdale schools. She lived with her mother off and on, between living with relatives. She grew up primarily on her grandparents’ farm in Pullman. When she reached junior high school age, she relocated to Kalamazoo to, again, live with her mother.
After years with farm kids in rural Michigan and places with pigs and chickens, she said she was excited about going to school with city kids in a more diverse environment that including black kids like herself.
But she said it wasn’t an easy fit. “They thought I acted white,” she said.
“At 17, I was in a domestic (live-in) relationship and my mom really wasn’t supportive,” she said.
Tiana ended up pregnant and had a baby girl in November of 2008. She moved out of her mother’s place in early 2009 and that’s how she found her way to the Kalamazoo Gospel Mission.
But she said she also found a lot of help there. Counselors connected her with positive mentors and schooled her on how to get a job. She praises the help she got, and continues to get, from Youth for Christ.
“Youth for Christ took me under their wing,” she said with a smile.
With the help of Catholic Family Services, she got her first apartment and managed to graduate from Loy Norrix High School in 2010.
Through Youth Opportunities Unlimited, she got a job painting school buildings in Parchment, something she mentions with a bit of pride.
“We painted all the schools,” she said.
Carruthers was interested in business, perhaps to manage a community center like her grandmother once did in Pullman. But she was still breast-feeding her baby when she got her first job. And after some ups and downs, she was working this past winter as a field associate for Denso Manufacturing Michigan in Battle Creek. She worked on the car radiator line at the automotive supply company.
But, she said, “I was having issues with transportation (getting back and forth to Battle Creek) and getting a sitter.”
Just before the Feb. 20 incident, she was fired after about four months on the job.
Her outlook remained positive, however. She said she was looking forward to helping Antasia go to her senior prom, which was Saturday, and seeing her graduate from Loy Norrix this spring. Her sister is headed to Western Michigan University in the fall.
But the shooting was a tremendous ordeal, she said, and left her with two broken legs, a broken arm and a damaged liver. It has also left her jumpy around strangers.
Staff members at Borgess Medical Center and others have praised her for her upbeat attitude, however. Even while laid up at Borgess, they say she showed a lot of concern for others, asking how they are doing rather than becoming sour or bitter about her situation, which has involved trying to walk again, and work with one arm.
After celebrating her 25th birthday in the hospital, she said she was simply happy to be alive.
The shooting in Richland Township, along with two others in greater Kalamazoo by the same gunman, occurred over a five-hour period and left six people dead and Carruthers and Abigail Kopf, 14, of Battle Creek, struggling to recuperate.
Jason Brian Dalton, 45, of Cooper Township, was arrested on Feb. 21, and faces murder, attempted murder and felony firearms charges in connection with the shootings. The victims were apparently all strangers to him.
On the day of the shooting, Carruthers said she was trying to meet the mother of one of the little girls she ultimately told to run. The girl, whose family lived nearby, had come to her house asking to stay and play.
“I was on my way, taking her to her mother, getting to meet her mother,” Carruthers said. “I’m the type where you can’t be over at my house and your mom doesn’t know where you are and I don’t know who you are.”
She said the playground was close to the little girl’s home. Carruthers’ daughter came along as well as two other children she knows.
As she undergoes physical therapy and receives counseling to help her work through her fears, Carruthers said she is more focused than ever on her family, her child, God and making sure she’s doing the right things with the right people.
“Honestly I’m giving my life to God. I’m working on that,” she said. “… I’ve always been real cheerful, a happy person, always a do-right person. But now I think I want to take it to the next level and I really want to look into the Lord a lot more.”
She said she grew up in the Baptist church but had kind of drifted away from that. She said she has an interest in being a mentor to others, and perhaps working with Youth for Christ.
“I’m more focused on healing my family because we’re not the best family,” she said. “I’m more focused on them. I’m more focused on growing. I’m more focused on God; trying to be a better person. How can I help someone else?”
She doesn’t know where all that will lead, but she thinks she’s heading in the right direction. She continues to be grateful for many people who have helped her since the shooting.
She said she was the child of a young mother but would like other young women, particularly black girls, to break the cycle of becoming mothers too young, and of living a life that others expect them to lead.
“Being a mother at a young age doesn’t define you,” Carruthers said. “And it’s up to you to make that difference.”
She said, “You don’t have to be stuck in those situations. You don’t have to be just stuck. There are all these opportunities. You just have to go get them. Don’t ever be stuck. There’s options.”
As she recuperates she’ll be looking for options. A lot of attention has come her way since the shootings, but no work opportunities, she said. Denso conducted a fund-raiser to help her and fellow shooting survivor Abigail Kopf and she said she is grateful for that.
But with a laugh, she said, “If they didn’t let me go, I would have been there (at work) that day.”
Carruthers said her sister Antasia, now college-bound, has expressed an interest in being a pediatrician “but she keeps changing her mind.”
That career path may change a bit, she said, but she’s sure Antasia wants to work with children.
What does Carruthers want for her daughter?
“I want a lot of things for her,” she said. “I really don’t want this tragedy to affect her growth, you know what I mean, because I know it affects her every day just like it does me.”
Carruthers said her daughter has nightmares as a result of the shootings.
“She’s scared all the time,” she said. “She’s really jumpy, just like I am right now. I really want her to grow up and I want her to be encouraged. I want her to go to school. I don’t want her to go through half of the things I’ve been through in my life. I want her to be a child. I want her to grow. I want her to have a happy childhood, a happy upbringing.”
