A Celebration of Life for Tysaiah

Tysaiah Donaldson had big plans for 2016.  The 19-year-old proposed to his girlfriend on Christmas. He was set to graduate from technical school next month. After losing everything in a house fire two years ago, Donaldson, his mother and sister were ready to move out of his grandmother's Wesley Chapel home and into a place of their own.

     Tysaiah was standing in front of his girlfriend's apartment in the Oak Bend Apartment Complex off N 19th Street about 7 p.m. Wednesday when someone shot him and fled, according to the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office

He died at a local hospital.

When he wasn't in school, he was with his girlfriend, Angelice Major. He didn't run with a bad crowd and he's never been arrested

"We were just glad to have each other," said his mother, Andrea Pinkett. "We were talking about rebuilding our life in 2016. Now I have to open up 2016 without my son."

Last week, mother and son were driving down E Fletcher Avenue when Donaldson saw a man wrapping a dirty shirt around his bloody feet. Donaldson asked his mother if his old shoes were still in the trunk.

She told him she'd already donated them. Donaldson told her to stop anyway, Pinkett said, and gave the man the shoes off his own feet.

"That's how he was," she said. "Everybody knew that he was the one who never get in trouble. He wasn't a boy that hung on the corner."

2014, he was living with his mother, sister and niece when their Tampa duplex caught fire, Pinkett said. They all crammed into a room in Pinkett's mother's house in Wesley Chapel.

The move disrupted his schooling. He earned his GED and enrolled at Erwin Technical, his mother said. He had plans to become an electrician specializing in solar energy, his mother said. Pinkett is also enrolled at Erwin so they rode together to the campus and were set to graduate together, too.

Donaldson was wary about violence, Pinkett said. He didn't wear a lot of jewelry or dress flashily. Several months ago, he watched as a close friend was shot, robbed and left to die on the street with his pockets turned inside out.

Donaldson had been dating Major, who lived with her parents, for two years and had asked her father for permission to marry her. On Christmas, he gave her a ring and promised to be with her forever. He was good with kids, his mother said, always playing with his young niece and excited that his sister had another child on the way.

On Wednesday morning, Donaldson put on the white button-down shirt his mother gave him for Christmas.

"I look good?" he asked. She told him he did.

He asked her to drop him off at his girlfriend's apartment.

"He said, 'I love you,' and I said, 'I love you, too' and I drove away," Pinkett said. "I didn't know that was going to be the last time he was going to tell me that."