Ruth Espy spent part of her Thursday afternoon washing bloody handprints off her front door in East Lake, an unnerving reminder of what she saw the night before.
She said she was in bed at her home on the 3500 block of Clio Avenue when her grandson came in shortly before 1:30 a.m. to tell her someone was at the front door.
A man was banging on the door with both hands, yelling that he had been shot, she said. When she answered the door, she came face to face with a frantic man, soaked in blood from gunshot wounds in his neck and shoulder. He asked her and her grandson to get help and check on his friend in a nearby car, who he said wasn't moving.
"He was saying, 'Please help me. Please help me. Call 911, I've been shot,'" Espy said. "'Please call 911 and please call my daddy.'"
She called paramedics and tried to calm him as he sat on her porch step, but she could also see the second victim, a 16-year-old girl, slumped over in the driver's seat of a red sedan parked next to the house.
"All we saw was her head on the steering wheel," she said. "We wouldn't go up there because after he'd been shot, I couldn't handle it."
As Espy called 911, she tried to calm the man, who was dripping blood on her porch and repeatedly saying he was going to die. She said he finally quieted down when he sat on her porch step and pulled his hat off, setting it on the ground beside him.
Paramedics arrived and took Cody Nunley, 20, to a local hospital with minor injuries. The girl, who police have not publicly identified, died before police arrived.
Espy said Nunley told her they had picked up a man at a local church a bit earlier. He remembered hearing shots and stumbling out of the car, but the man was nowhere to be seen when Nunley reached her front door, she said.
Another neighbor, Lebron Dave, said he didn't see or hear what happened, but he was awakened by flashing police lights and went to the porch to see what was happening.
"I could tell something was wrong because they kept staring at the car," he said.
Dave said he's been living in East Lake for several months and has only ever known it to be peaceful. Now he just wants police to catch whoever killed the teenaged girl.
"I hope they find who did it," he said. "They need to put them type of people away."
The shooting is not thought to be gang-related or connected to other shootings, said CPD spokeswoman Elisa Myzal.
"Based on what investigators know at this point, there's no reason to believe this shooting is connected to any others," she wrote in an email.
Five hours before police responded to that shooting, another man, Daniel Smiley, 30, showed up at a local hospital with a minor gunshot wound.
He arrived via a private vehicle, but police were able to locate a crime scene on the 2300 block of East Main Street.
No suspect has been identified in either shooting, but members of the violent crime bureau are investigating.
Chattanooga has seen 26 shooting incidents in 2017 so far with 27 people suffering minor injuries, according to numbers provided by CPD. Thursday's homicide is the seventh this year.
Contact staff writer Emmett Gienapp at egienapp@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6731. Follow him on Twitter @emmettgienapp.