Archdeacon: ‘I want to keep my daughter’s name alive’

The remembrance table for her late daughter, Lois Oglesby, was just inside the front door of her Kettering home.

It displayed photos of Lois as a little girl and later as a mom and it held a glass memory box with Lois’ driver’s license and a pair of her silver hoop earrings inside.

A pair of Congressional declarations honoring her were there, as was a small pink envelope addressed in little girl lettering to “Mommy.”

Framed and hanging on the wall above the table was an Ohio state flag that had flown at half-staff above the state capitol; a proclamation signed by Governor Mike DeWine; and a bracelet that included a charm, provided by the coroner, bearing Lois’ thumb print.

On an end table, easily within reach of her seat, LaSandra had added a box of tissues — “just in case” she said — before talking publicly about her daughter for one of the first times since that fateful night exactly five years ago today.

As LaSandra began to reflect, 5-year-old Reign scooted in wearing oversized, fluffy pink, animal face slippers. She was juggling a blob of blue, squishy, oozy Slime from one hand to the other while wearing an impish smile.

Reign was just two months old when her mom and eight others were murdered — and more than two dozen others were injured — by a 24-year-old gunman from Bellbrook who began firing an AR-15 style weapon affixed with a 100-round magazine just past midnight in the Oregon District on August 4, 2019.

The deadly assault lasted only 32 seconds before police killed the assailant as he was about to enter Ned Peppers bar, which was crowded with hundreds of panicked people.

Now, LaSandra and her husband Anthony are raising Reign and her 12-year-old sister, Hannah.

And on this afternoon — with LaSandra, who the girls call Nana, immersed in emotional conversation ― Reign attempted a Nana no-no.

As the gooey Slime slowly dripped through the little girl’s fingers toward the living room carpet, LaSandra finally had enough:

“OK Reign, get back to the table in the other room. You’re freakin’ Nana out!

“Why?” Reign asked with a grin.

“Because you’re not in a safe zone!” LaSandra said, though her directive soon was disarmed by little girl giggles.

And right then, Reign may have been just where she belonged.

If LaSandra was talking about Lois, it seemed only fitting that one of the two people in the world who most reminds her of the beloved, 27-year-old daughter she lost was right in front of her, testing the limits.

As LaSandra would later admit, Lois — during three years of “teenage trainwreck” — had done the same.

That LaSandra was publicly sharing such insights was something she’d been unable to do the past five years.

“This is the first year I’ve been able to have a public conversation,” she said. “I’d hear (victim Logan Turner’s) dad talk, but it wasn’t my time yet. I didn’t have my voice yet.”

That’s changed thanks to time and therapy and the realization that Lois’ story needs to be told to help fortify her daughter’s memory and her granddaughters’ future.

“Lois’ story didn’t end well, but that’s not what should define her,” LaSandra said. “Being given the opportunity to talk about her and say her name is a blessing.

“People need to know she was always the light in the room for us.

“And from the time she was little, she had a gift. She connected with kids. She loved kids, especially her two kids.”

That was never more evident than the night she was shot in the head on Fifth Street and was carried into the Tumbleweed Connection where she lay dying on the floor.

With help, she made a Facetime call to her then boyfriend, Daryl Lee, who later recounted:

“She said, ‘I need my kids! I’m shot! I’m in the Oregon District and I just got shot in the head.’”

Lois died soon after and that remains one of the most heartbreaking exchanges in the night of carnage.

Finally able to publicly reclaim her daughter’s memory, LaSandra will be one of the featured speakers today when the Seeds of Life Memorial will be dedicated at a 3 p.m. communal celebration in the small plaza next to the Trolley Stop on E. Fifth Street in the Oregon District.

A tribute to the nine victims — Lois; Megan Betts; Monica Brickhouse; Nicholas Cumer; Derrick Fudge; Thomas McNichols; Saeed Saleh; Logan Turner; and Beatrice Warren-Curtis — the memorial was a collaboration of architect, sculptor and urban designer Terry Welker; artist Jes McMillan; poet and educator Sierra Leone; and artist James Pate.

LaSandra, who’s worked 28 years with the Miami Valley Community Action Partnership and is now its director of Micro Enterprise, was on the memorial’s steering committee.

She also joined the public in piecing together the tiles that make up the memorial’s primary mosaic design that’s in front of the stainless steel sculpture that represents the nine victims.

“I love everything about the memorial,” she said. “I love the group that was chosen to create it and how they made sure the community was involved.

“It was a hurt for everybody, not just my family or the eight others who lost someone. It was a heartbreaking day for the community. Hopefully this will fill some of the emptiness.”

But it won’t be the only celebration for LaSandra and her family today.

Back in Kettering — as is now the case each August 4th — they’ll be celebrating what they call “Nae Day.”

Lois Lenae Oglesby was known to her family as Nae.

“Each year when 8/4 comes we have Nae Day to remember her,” LaSandra said. “We’ll have some music and food and this year we’ll have some yard love. We’ll put out the bouncy house and have a good time.”

The fun and games are a bit misleading though. They come after troubling nightmares, a deep sense of loss and some ongoing dismay.

Three years ago, LaSandra was part of a lawsuit four victims’ families filed against the South Korean company that manufactured the high-capacity magazine used by the shooter.

“They told us at the beginning it could be upwards to 10 years before anything is decided,” she said. “In the meantime, nothing changes.

“I don’t understand how we have rules and regulations for everything, but when it comes to gun violence everything is relaxed and the problem keeps getting worse.”

In 2019, the Oregon District attack was one of 414 mass shootings around the nation according to the Gun Violence Archive.

In each of the years since, there have been over 600, including a high of 689 in 2021 and 655 last year.

‘A wake-up call’

Earlier in the evening on that fateful August night five years ago, Lois, who had an apartment in Vandalia, visited her mom, who then lived in Dayton.

In recent years their relationship had gotten better after that strained period during Lois’ mid-teen years

LaSandra had three daughters, with Lois the middle child between Amber and Diamond, who is the youngest.

“Lois was smart as a whip, but at about 13 she started getting into trouble,” LaSandra said. “I was a single mom then, working 9 to 5 and she was a latchkey kid, and she wouldn’t stay in school.

“She’d run away and one time it took us three weeks to get her back. I didn’t sleep those three weeks and I remember finally picking her up at someone’s house.

“I looked her in the eyes, and she said, ‘Why don’t you just let me do what I want to do? Why don’t you just let me go? … Just let me go!’”

LaSandra’s voice broke, and her eyes began to glisten: “I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t let her go. I loved her too much.”

LaSandra said a turning point came when Lois and another girl were caught “stealing something at the mall. They took Lois downtown and when she called me, she said, ‘Come get me.’

“But I said, ‘No! I’m gonna sleep tonight.’

“After that she came home and was on house arrest and got tutored.

“For a while, that trip to juvie put a real whammy on our relationship, but it ended up being a wake-up call for her.”

Lois eventually graduated from Mound Street Academy.

When she was 20, she got pregnant with twin daughters and gave birth after just 27 weeks.

Daughter Hailey was stillborn, and Hannah was tiny. LaSandra was with Lois through it all and that strengthened their bond.

Lois, who was working toward being a pediatric nurse, had a heartfelt talk with her mom that August night five years ago and then went to Elsa’s in Kettering to meet a girlfriend. It was her first night out since giving birth to Reign two months earlier.

While there, she got a call from another friend to come to the Oregon District, so she and her friend at Elsa’s went.

“They weren’t in the Oregon District two minutes when the shooting started,” LaSandra said.

After Lois was shot and called Lee, he called LaSandra.

“I didn’t realize what all had happened,” she said. “I figured since she’d called, she was okay and we’d just go to the hospital and see her.

“But when we got there, they wouldn’t let anybody in. That’s when her boyfriend called again. He said he’d seen her. She was gone.”

The Convention Center had been turned into a makeshift morgue and triage center so LaSanda and Anthony headed downtown.

“We stayed in the Arby’s parking lot for hours until they allowed us in the Convention Center,” she said.

She remembers once they were back home, she saw a video on Channel 7 that showed the panic on Fifth Street when the gunfire started:

“I recognized Lois running. She had on white shorts and a brown tank top and flip flops.

“Unfortunately, Hannah saw it, too. It was on their website.”

That night, she and Anthony were in bed and Hannah, then seven, was sleeping between them.

“I cringe when I remember this,” LaSandra said quietly. “She woke up boxing the air and screaming ‘Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!’

Two days after the shooting, Reign was scheduled for her two-month check-up with her pediatrician.

“We took her,” LaSandra said. “No matter what was going on, I knew I now had to be Nana-Mom.

“But we were most worried about Hannah because she was old enough to know what was going on.

“Our doctor introduced me to a grief counseling center in Oakwood that’s strictly for kids and they helped us all so much. They explained how I should explain it to her.

“Hannah already had been introduced to death with the loss of Haleigh. She’s a twin-less twin, but we celebrated Haleigh every year with a cake, and we’d release balloons.

“But this was different for all of us. And even though I didn’t want to go back into the Oregon District, Hannah wanted to go there to see where her mom had been and where she’d died.

“For me, it even took a long time to watch TV again.

“The thing is, when you lose someone like this, your whole world just stops, but everyone else around you just keeps moving on.”

She said as ironic as it sounds, one of the best things that happened for her was the arrival of COVID:

“When it hit, the whole world stopped, too. That gave me time to make my way back.”

She eventually started getting grief counseling at the Pathways of Hope program at Hospice of Dayton on Wilmington Avenue.

“I’ve had a great village to get me through this,” she said. “I’ve had such an outpouring of support. There’ve been letters and messages from across the country and even school children in Paris.”

What’s most helped her though is the remembrances of Lois she gets every day from Hannah and Reign.

Hannah has grown quite tall and though she knows she looks like her dad, she says, “Nana, I act like my mom.”

“And her laugh sounds exactly like my daughter,” LaSandra said. “The first time our family heard it, it stopped us all in our tracks. “And Reign?

“She’s just Lois through and through.”

‘They’re buried together’

Lois is buried in the new section of Woodland Cemetery. Her polished black gravestone includes four engraved pictures of her, including one when she was pregnant with Reign and another where Hannah is kissing her on the cheek.

The grave has been decorated with plastic flowers, pinwheels and toys left by her daughters.

“I don’t know if you caught it, but the bottom of the stone remembers Hailey, too,” LaSandra said. “When Lois passed, Woodland Cemetery offered to exhume Haleigh’s body and they put her in her mother’s arms before they closed the casket.

“They’re buried together.”

Now LaSandra, like Lois before her, knows what it’s like to lose a child.

As she talked about such loss, she admitted something you wouldn’t expect:

“I was really sad after the shootings and I found myself thinking about Connor’s mom.”

Connor Betts was the shooter and one of his nine victims had been his sister, Megan.

“I was engulfed in grief,” LaSandra said. “I can’t imagine losing both your children and one being the shooter and killing the other. I don’t know how you’d ever recover.

“That blurred the lines for me, and I talked to my therapist about it. I asked, ‘Am I right for worrying? Am I wrong?’”

“Seeing anyone hurting just saddens me. I think it’s just a genuine love I have for people.”

That love showed several years ago when she told her daughter:

“No, I won’t let you go.”

It’s why she’s still holding on so tightly now and why she said she’ll finally speak today:

‘I want to keep my daughter’s name alive.”