Chiquita Burnett-Thomas was at her home in Memphis last Thursday night when she received a call from her youngest son, who lives in Drew.
“He called me and told me that I needed to get home,” she told The Enterprise-Tocsin.
Burnett-Thomas’ nephew, Ibn Burnett, along with his friend, Kendrick Austin, were shot and killed just before 6 p.m. that evening.
Drew Police Chief Terry Tyler told The E-T that 21-year-old Tacquiera Turner and 20-year-old Miracle Miller have been charged with murder in what Tyler described last week as a possible crime of passion.
Burnett-Thomas is a native of Drew, and she knows all too well about the horrors of gun violence.
On Valentine’s Day in 2013, she discovered the body of her brother, Christopher “Zeke” Burnett, Ibn Burnett’s father, at his home in Drew. He had apparently been robbed and shot twice, once in the head and once in the neck, according to the Sunflower County District Attorney’s office.
Zeke Burnett was a barber, well-known around the small town of Drew as a soft-spoken man.
Other than his work, he kept to himself.
The Burnett family spent the better part of a decade without a trial or a conviction in Zeke Burnett’s case.
That was until this past summer when three brothers -- who had been longtime friends of the Burnett family -- Lamarcus Wallace, Kerry Wallace and Patrick Wallace, were all convicted of capital murder in the February 2013 homicide.
The family of the Wallace brothers maintains they are innocent.
The Burnett family said after the trial they feel the same and that justice had not been served in the case, leaving an open wound for both families.
Last Wednesday was the first Valentine’s Day since that June conviction, and as with every anniversary, Zeke Burnett was heavy on the mind and heart of his sister.
“Every year to the day I think about it,” she said. “I make a post about it.”
The day after that anniversary, Burnett-Thomas and her family were faced again with another family member lost to gun violence.
Ibn Burnett was Zeke Burnett’s fourth child of seven, and he was his father’s third son.
“He was as soft-spoken as his dad,” Burnett-Thomas said of her nephew. “He didn’t bother anybody.”
Ibn Burnett worked at Walmart in Cleveland, his aunt said, and he had been training at the local barber school in Ruleville, and apparently planned to follow in his late father’s footsteps as a barber.
“He worked, and he went to school,” she said. “He didn’t have many friends… (Kendrick) was his only friend, the only person pretty much that you’d see him hanging around with, other than his momma, his grand momma and his siblings.”
Both men were 2020 graduates of Thomas Edwards Senior High School in Ruleville.
Shawandra Burnett-Walker taught Kendrick Austin in school. She is also Ibn Burnett’s cousin.
“My heart hurts for both families and so many people who loved them,” Burnett-Walker said. “They were very respectful, humble young men who always kept a smile on their faces. Ibn did not have many words to say, like his dad, and was very soft spoken. It breaks my heart that Ibn was taken from us 11 years later, the day after we found his dad Zeke.”
Kendrick Austin, she said, took her psychology and sociology class.
“Music has always been a part of my classes,” Burnett-Walker said. “(Kendrick) asked, ‘Mrs. Walker do you know Tucka?’ I replied, ‘No, because I do not like blues.’ He said, ‘You will like him.’ He was right, and when I would see him, I would refer to him as ‘My Tucka student.’"
Like the three men convicted in Zeke’s murder, the woman accused of killing Ibn Burnett and Kendrick Austin is no stranger to the Burnett family, although Burnett-Thomas said that to her knowledge, there had never been any cross words between any of them.
“None at all, actually,” she said.
For the tight-knit community in northern Sunflower County, three families are facing the tragedy of loss. There are two dead, and one person who is accused of both murders who may be going to prison for a long time.
Burnett-Thomas has prayed for and with the family of the men authorities insist shot and killed her brother.
Now, she said she is praying for the Turner family.
“I know they think we hate them,” Burnett-Thomas said. “My heart actually goes out to that family as well.”
With just a few days left in February, Sunflower County has recorded five homicides so far in 2024, including four within a nine-day period this month.
