INDIANAPOLIS (WTHR) - Erika Bolanos was sitting right beside her boyfriend when someone gunned him down in an Indianapolis park.
That someone, police believe, was the 18-year-old's own classmate, now accused of murder.
Erika got her car back yesterday. It's the same car where she sat Sunday night and watched another teen shoot and kill her boyfriend, Deante Williams. Erika says when she got the car back, some of Deante's blood was still inside. Hours later, she got a call from police, saying they had a suspect in Deante's murder in custody, 18-year-old Eugene Jones.
The day of Deante's murder, Jones' Twitter page shows a tweet that reads, "Funerals and court dates."
"That's a face I'll never forget. Never forget just looking at him," said Erika, speaking of Jones, who turned himself in to police Tuesday night.
"It'll never bring Deante back. Like it's a sense of relief that he's caught that he turned himself in, but it will never fill that hole in my heart, that emptiness that I have," Erika cried.
Erika says she'd never met Jones before Sunday, but had heard his name from Deante who attended North Central High School with Jones.
"He just told me they had problems before, but he thought they were cool," Erika explained.
Cool enough that Erika says the teens agreed to meet Sunday at Wes Montgomery Park so Deante could sell Jones a gun.
"I had told him, 'It's just not right. It's not the right way,'" Erika recalled. "I had mentioned to Deante that I didn't want to be there, that I wanted to leave, but he was like, 'It's okay. We'll be okay.'
"And I had told him, 'Don't ever put me in a situation to where I have to live without you,'" Erika said she told her boyfriend of nine months.
Instead, that's exactly the situation Erika is facing now, the memory of holding Deante in her arms after, she says, Jones shot him.
"It's just something that plays over and over and over constantly in my head and I always ask, like, 'Why?'" Erika said.
She has a few questions for Jones, too.
"How did it make you feel? Did you feel cool? Did you feel like the man? Were you bragging about it?" Erika said.
Erika knows she'll probably never get the answers and if even if she did, those answers wouldn't be enough.
Jones is now charged with murder and robbery.