A night that was supposed to be just another weekend out ended in the worst possible way for a 19-year-old Brandon girl. Alana Duck never made it home from The Hideaway nightclub in Jackson, Mississippi, early Sunday morning — and right now, nobody’s behind bars for it.
Jackson Police Department officers got the call around 1:00 a.m. on May 17, pulling up to the 5100 block of I-55 North after reports of shots fired. What they found when they arrived painted a grim picture — a black Honda Accord sitting in that parking lot with Alana inside, a gunshot wound to her upper body, and chaos all around her. Emergency responders rushed her out of there as fast as they could, but the injuries were just too severe. She didn’t make it. Hinds County Coroner Jeramiah Howard officially identified her as Alana Duck, 19, of Brandon.
Alana wasn’t even the intended target of whatever beef broke out that night. Investigators say the whole thing started as a physical fight between several males in the parking lot — one of those loud, ugly confrontations that can flare up anywhere on a late Saturday night. But it didn’t stay a fistfight. Somebody pulled out a gun — maybe more than one somebody — and bullets started flying. Alana, sitting in that car, never stood a chance.
Two other people also caught gunfire during the shooting and were rushed by AMR ambulance to local hospitals. Their conditions haven’t been released publicly, and it’s unclear at this time what connection, if any, they had to the fight that set everything off. Three people shot in one parking lot. One of them a teenage girl who had her whole life ahead of her.
What makes this even harder to swallow is that Alana was just 19. She was barely an adult. Somebody’s daughter. Somebody’s friend. A young woman from the Brandon community who had every reason to expect she’d wake up Sunday morning and keep on living her life. Instead, her family woke up to the kind of news no parent, no sibling, no friend should ever have to receive.
The people who knew Alana are now carrying a grief that doesn’t have any easy answers attached to it. They’re remembering her laugh, her presence, the little things that made her who she was — and they’re doing all of that while waiting on a justice system that, as of now, hasn’t produced a single arrest. No suspects named. No charges filed. Just an open investigation and a community holding its breath.
Jackson Police are still working to piece together exactly what triggered the altercation and who fired the shots that killed Alana Duck. For everyone who loved her, every day without answers is another day the wound stays open. This city has seen too much of this kind of loss — and Brandon is now grieving right alongside Jackson, united in mourning a young woman whose life was stolen in a parking lot at one in the morning for absolutely no good reason at all.
