OAKLAND — She’d just watched him kill her boyfriend and shoot two sisters — one fatally — but then he turned the gun on her.
“I’m coming after you, b—-,” the gunman allegedly said. A few seconds later she was shot too, suffering a graze wound to the face. Despite suffering a gunshot to the head, she was more fortunate than the others.
Waltrice Dilliehunt, 35, and Tyrell Bland, 27, were dead. Dilliehunt’s sister was shot four times and remains “permanently disabled,” she testified at a June hearing.
The gunman was identified as 35-year-old DeJuan Pickens; witnesses said he started firing during a fistfight between Dilliehunt and Pickens’ girlfriend, Rebecca Taylor.
Now, the two surviving victims have told their story from a witness stand, recounting the fight, the shooting, and how they came away alive from the carnage on Aug. 17, 2024. At the June preliminary hearing, Judge Scott Patton dismissed an accessory charge against Taylor, finding that her sole alleged crime — turning off her phone, which prevented police from tracking her — didn’t really amount to anything.
“If she said, ‘I grabbed his phone and I turned it off so they couldn’t track him,’ that would be a different story,” Patton said. “We don’t have that here.”
Pickens, a Concord resident, wasn’t so lucky. He was held to answer on charges of killing Dilliehunt and Bland and the attempted murder of the two surviving victims. He has a trial date set for late August, but that may be postponed at a status conference set for Friday, court records show.
According to the survivors, it all started with an argument over a blocked driveway. Dilliehunt, Bland, and Taylor all lived in the same apartment building on the 1600 block of 83rd Avenue in East Oakland.
For the victims, it was supposed to be a day of fun at a birthday party. When her sister came to pick her up, Dilliehunt became frustrated that their shared driveway had been blocked for more than an hour, apparently by Taylor or someone at her spot.
It started with a face-to-face confrontation. Dilliehunt allegedly threatened to call their landlord, then they started calling each other names. Then the fists started swinging, according to witness testimony.
Dilliehunt’s sister testified that Dilliehunt was winning the fight, but that Bland wanted to break it up. The sister thought it would be better if a man didn’t jump into a fight between two women, she said.
“I told him no, because I didn’t want any mess or somebody saying that they touched his girl or whatever,” she testified. “So I told him, ‘No back up, I will break the fight up.’ ”
Around then, Pickens allegedly pulled a pistol from a leather satchel and started waving it around. The others believed at first he was trying to stop the fighting. But then the shots rang out.
“My sister swung and I told her to stop. And she cocked back again to swing again and that’s when I heard the gunshot … I thought he shot in the air,” she said. “I’m like, ‘We’re so close, why would you shoot in the air?’ And I looked down and my arm was dangling.”
Nearly a year later, she still hasn’t regained full use of her arm, she said. She was hospitalized and required surgery to install a metal plate and four screws.
But in that moment, with the gunfire continuing, she hit the ground, beside her sister. The horror continued to play out.
“(Dilliehunt) was lifeless. She had no life in her eyes. No life in her body,” her sister said. “It was blood everywhere. There was blood coming out her mouth.”
Pickens allegedly shot Bland next, then chased down his girlfriend and shot her in the face, according to the witness testimony.
Both Bland and Dilliehunt left behind two children, and their families are continuing to closely fallow the case.
Pickens and Taylor were identified as suspects and charged a week later.
“I don’t know what bullet actually touched my body when he was firing at me, but I just know at the end of the day, I had a bullet in my face,” Bland’s girlfriend testified.