CHESAPEAKE, Va. — Ajia Tynes does her best to stay positive. She says from the pink bows on her shirt to the pink frame on her wheelchair, any pop of color helps boost her spirits.
The reason she's needed the wheelchair for the last two years is both painful and puzzling.
In 2023, Ajia and her five children were moving out of a domestic violence shelter into a place of their own in Chesapeake.
“We ended up moving. It was in the back of [the neighborhood] on Geneva Square in [a complex] called Owens Village,” she said. “I wanted to do whatever I felt was best for me and the kids.”
Things were looking up for them. Ajia said she was working and her kids were adjusting. So on Mother's Day in 2023, they took a moment to celebrate the holiday and two of her daughters' birthdays. Then, the unthinkable happened.
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“The first bullet that I heard came into the bathroom,” Ajia recalls. “I didn't realize that was a bullet. And then the second [came through the wall]. Then that third bullet came right through my kid's room and right through the bathroom wall and hit me in the spine. I fell immediately to the floor, and I was pregnant.”
At 28 weeks pregnant, Ajia said she was expecting a daughter she named Delilah.
“I could feel my baby girl inside me. She was, like, fighting for her life,” Ajia remembers.
Ajia was rushed to the hospital, where she lost Delilah.
“I couldn't believe it. It was really hard for me to accept. That was my first time losing a baby. That was my first time losing a pregnancy,” she says.
Ajia was minding her own business inside of her home at the time of the shooting. It was a senseless act of gun violence.
After learning she lost her baby girl, Ajia also learned she lost the ability to walk. At just 30, she was paralyzed from the waist down.
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“I just miss the feeling [of] my feet touching the floor. I miss it so much. The simple things,” Ajia shares. “I can't just get in bed with my daughter and tickle her feet to make her get up in the morning, because she’s a hard sleeper. And I can't climb on the bunk bed to wake up my baby boy.”
Nearly two years later, Chesapeake police say they still don't have any concrete leads on who is responsible.
“They told me it had to be a case of mistaken identity,” Ajia explains.
When asked if she thinks someone knows who did this, she says, “I think somebody knows who it did, but with the whole 'snitching' thing and people not wanting to get involved, they're just keeping quiet about it.”
After the shooting, Ajia and her kids moved to a new apartment in Chesapeake. However, her health challenges grew.
“I was going to the hospital nonstop,” she recalls, emphasizing the back-and-forth nature of her visits. “When Christmas [2024] came, I was so sick, and I didn't want to leave my babies. Right after that, I decided I had to go to the hospital.”
She was admitted into the hospital for a few days and when she was released, she needed to find around-the-clock care.
Since December, she has been in a nursing home in Suffolk while her mother has moved in with her kids in Chesapeake.
“I can't [take care of my kids on my own] right now,” Ajia admits. “I tried, but it's too hard. It’s really, really hard to try to do it by myself while I'm in a wheelchair.”
Ajia sees her children as much as she can, but one will always be missing: Delilah, whose ashes she keeps in a necklace close to her heart.
“I have her with me all the time,” she says.
As Ajia makes sense of everything the shooting took from her, she hopes sharing her story will compel someone to come forward.
“I just feel like, once [police] find out who did it, that justice for Delilah [will be] found,” she says.
Police still don’t have any leads.
If you know anything that can help solve the case, call the Chesapeake Police Department at 757-382-6161. You can also leave an anonymous tip with the Crime Line at 1-888-LOCK-U-UP or on the P3 Tips app.
If you'd like to donate to Tynes' family, click here.
