Essie Mae Horne locked eyes with a killer. Standing just inside the frame of her front door in the middle of the night, he opened fire. She dove into her bedroom for cover.
When Horne soon emerged, the young gunman was gone, and her husband — who she had just kissed moments earlier — was dying on the kitchen floor of their Lincoln Park apartment.
Tuesday marked 19 years since Andre Mahan, 31, was gunned down in 2006. It’s been 19 years of questions for her and their two children, the youngest of whom was about 18 months old when his father died. “Why would someone come to my home and do what they did?” Horne said.
Authorities are hoping to solve the mystery. San Diego County Crime Stoppers, which teams with local law enforcement, issued a plea for tips and is offering a reward of up to $1,000 to anyone who provides information that leads to an arrest.
A decade after her husband was fatally shot, Horne lost her twin brother, Johnnie Ray Horne, to gun violence — four youths drove up, and one confronted and shot him as he chatted with a friend in front of a San Diego home. His murder case ended in arrests and prison terms.
The losses propelled Horne to create Tween Swag (pronounced twin swag), an organization geared toward addressing gun violence and mental health issues. Horne, 48, said Tuesday she has come to understand that hurt people hurt people, and that healed people can help heal people.
“When survivors speak, change happens,” Horne said. She wants to be a light for her community.
The attack on Mahan happened just after 2:30 a.m. on Aug. 19, 2006. Horne says she, Mahan and her cousin had just arrived home from an evening out, with their kids at grandma’s house for the night. She stepped away to change clothes, heard a very loud boom and thought it was a car backfire. She headed into the living room to ask Mahan about it.
A stranger was in the doorway, gun raised toward her. “We locked eyes and he fired,” she said. From there, “Everything happened so fast, but so slow,” she said. She soon found Mahan down in the kitchen.
Horne recalls the shooter wearing a red shirt over a white shirt and a close-fitting black nylon cap on his head, commonly called a durag.
Police say the suspect was a light-skinned Black youth, about 5 feet, 7 inches tall and about 17 or 18 years old — although Horne says he appeared to be closer to 13 or 14.
Widowed at 29, she still doesn’t know why a gunman showed up on her doorstep, killed her husband and shot at her. “My kids don’t have a father because someone chose to take his life for whatever reason.” And she doesn’t know if the killer is alive and free, in jail or dead.
Authorities asked that anyone with information about Mahan’s killing call the San Diego police Homicide Unit at 619-531-2293 or the Crime Stoppers anonymous tip line at 888-580-8477. To leave an anonymous tip online, go to sdcrimestoppers.org.