OKLAHOMA CITY – What started as a welfare check to a home on the city’s east side early Monday morning quickly turned to something much more, as the bodies of three people were found inside: a teen girl, her mother, and the woman’s fiance, found dead.
“Why would you kill them? A 15-year-old? 36-year-old?” said Jackie Brown, the mother and grandmother of Carnesha Powell and her daughter Roshawna Stevens. “They belong to somebody else. They belong to me. And you took from me.”
Oklahoma City Police responded on a call for a welfare check at 1129 N. Standish Avenue at around 12:30 a.m. Monday. When officers arrived, officials said, they discovered the bodies of Stevens, Powell and Elijah Malachi Mothershed, 44, inside the home with trauma “consistent with homicide.”
More than a dozen family members filled the inside of Brown’s west side apartment Tuesday evening to remember the lives of Powell, 35, and her 15-year-old daughter, known to family as Sarah, taken too soon.
“She was sweet. She was kind. She was loving,” Brown said of her granddaughter. “That was my baby. And somebody took my baby from me. And they ripped my heart out and took my baby.”
Brown also said her daughter and Mothershed were engaged to be married.
“I knew Elijah a little bit. I met him and I know he was a big help in the community, and I know he loved people, and he loved to work with people, and help people,” said Brown. “That was the type of person he was. He was kind. He was very kind.”
Mothershed, a NE 23rd Street business owner and state-licensed medical marijuana dispenser, who was part of a News 4 story in August 2016 about his efforts to spread peace on the city’s east side, as well as revitalizing the community through murals.
“What we’re doing, we’re harmonizing the mind, the body and the spirit for unity and peace in our community instead of violence and chaos,” Mothershed told News 4’s Jessica Bruno.
Chaos and violence that now, ultimately, led to not one, but three deaths that has left a family reeling and searching for answers.
“I just want, if they had seen anything, heard anything, if they even know the person, turn them in,” said Brown. “I just want justice. My daughter ain’t here no more. My granddaughter ain’t here no more. They gone.”
The Powell family has set up a GoFundMe fundraising page, requesting financial help to cover Powell and Stevens’ funeral costs.
