CLEWISTON, Fla. — One year after the deadly shooting at the annual Brown Sugar Festival, Evereonna Sankey’s killer is still roaming free.
“A nurse graduate, 20 years old, and her life was just cut short for literally no reason,” her sister Teresa Addison said. “Her life mattered.”
“For somebody to come in and bring a gun and take a life, and then just walk away like nothing happened,” Trish Routte with Southwest Florida Crime Stoppers said. “Unacceptable.”
Investigators arrested one man, Larance Humphrey, on a first degree felony charge days after the Brown Sugar Festival in 2021. Hendry County deputies said he tried to buy surveillance video of the shooting.
Humphrey is still in custody right now on a $100,000 bond, but the shooter is still out there.
Crimestoppers said delays like this are frustrating, but not unheard of.
“Unfortunately it happens more often than we would like,” Routte said.
For many Floridians, the Brown Sugar Festival is a homecoming: a chance to see family and friends and celebrate. That’s exactly what Evereonna’s family went to Clewiston to do, alongside 3,500 other attendees.
Everonna’s family shared with us earlier this year what happened when they started to go home. They stayed all day and into the night, and were starting to leave around 9 p.m.
“And then 15 minutes later shots rang out,” Addison said. And I had to walk up to my sisters on the ground, shot. Everybody feels like they’re not cool if they don’t have a gun or everybody wants to be able to say they shot a gun. It’s just different.”
The Hendry County Sheriff’s Office (HCSO) said they’ve spent more than 1,400 hours on this case, interviewed more than 200 people and traveled to cities all over Florida trying to find Evereonna’s killer.
“They have done interviews, they’ve checked tag numbers coming in and out of the areas,” Captain Susan Harrelle said.
Investigators also immediately started looking through digital evidence for clues, including video taken immediately after the shooting.
“People kept calling me because apparently there was a video on Facebook of my baby,” Teresa Sankey said, “laying out there in the road bleeding out.”
The sheriff’s office said they got seven anonymous tips after the shooting. While the amount of information coming in has slowed, the case is not cold. Investigators want anyone who remembers anything from that night who has stayed silent to speak up.
“Maybe you don’t necessarily know all of the information of the identity of the person who pulled the trigger,” Routte said. “But you saw that person, you can provide some identifiers: what they looked like, if they had any tattoos or scars, anything that was unusual. The community deserves closure, but most importantly the family deserves closure.”
“They have good information but they need more,” Harrelle said. “And so does the family.”
“This isn’t something that we can just skate past,” Evereonna’s sister La’Tresa Tillman said. “We’re gonna have to deal with this trauma for the rest of our life.”
There is a reward for tips leading to the arrest of Sankey’s killer.
There is a “Festival in the Yaad” planned for Saturday, May 7. Instead of the standard Brown Sugar Festival, organizers want families to celebrate in their own yards with barbecues and music.
The HCSO said they’ll be there to help this go smoothly and safely.
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