Couple sheltered child after mom shot Bay police officers. ‘Mamma told me to give her the gun.’
When the gunshots went off, Lisa Walker had just walked back into her room at Motel 6 in Bay St. Louis.
“I am the last one that saw the cops alive, and that hurts,” Walker said. “I can’t get that out of my head.”
Walker and her fiance’, John Hunter, were staying in a room two doors down from the room Coast veterinarian Amy Brogdon Anderson had checked into the same morning she would go on to shoot and kill Bay St. Louis police Sgt. Steven Robin, 34, and officer Branden Estorffe, 23.
Estorffe shot and killed Anderson before he fell to the ground with fatal injuries on the morning of Dec. 14.
The Sun Herald spent weeks interviewing witnesses and talking to authorities and relatives of the deceased to provide a detailed look at the crime, the failed attempts by Anderson’s family to get authorities to take action against her over her deteriorating mental health and the lasting impact the killings have had on those at the scene of the shooting.
Robin and Estorffe had gone to the motel after Anderson called the front desk clerk, River Potter, to ask him to call the police because she thought someone was following her in a white pickup truck.
When Potter checked Anderson in around 2:30 a.m., he said she walked in with her little girl and one of her dogs and was joking around about nothing in particular. Anderson had stayed at the hotel — about an hour from her home in Ocean Springs — in the past.
“She seemed normal,” Potter said, but an hour later a “frantic” Anderson called him to ask that he check the cameras to see if someone in a white pickup truck was following her.
“There was a white pickup truck that checked in after her, but they were from another state and it didn’t seem related,” he said. “I checked the cameras and didn’t see any trucks following her.”
Anderson asked him to call the police, and he did.
“I called the dispatch line,” Potter said. “I didn’t call 911 because I didn’t think we needed all the emergency services there. So, basically it was a wellness check.”
Soon, everything changed.
The couple and staff at the Highway 90 motel haven’t been the same since the deadly shooting.
The motel’s manager, Tiffany Scheid , went back to work for a week or so but then left the job because of the memories of what happened there.
The front desk clerk hasn’t been able to sleep since the shooting.
“Guilt is a big part of it,” Potter said.
Walker and Hunter can’t get the images out of their heads of the dead and dying, and the time they spent sheltering Anderson’s little blood-splattered child in their room after the shooting ended. The 8-year-old was in the passenger seat of Anderson’s SUV at the time of the shooting.
‘You aren’t going to hurt me, are you?’
For the couple, the nightmare started after Walker walked outside their room to smoke a cigarette. She saw the two police officers and Anderson in her SUV with the door open. Robin was standing nearby.
Anderson had just “shoved” a pet carrier she had with her in the back of her Toyota Highlander and was about to leave.
“She just seemed like a normal person at the time,” Walker said. “I thought maybe she had just got evicted ... and she had just packed her car.”
Walker went back into her room when she overheard “the officer (Robin) tell her (Anderson) she couldn’t leave until they finished their investigation.”
“I wasn’t even in the door good, and that’s when the shots went off,” Walker said. “There was no yelling. The cops had just been talking to each other and talking to her. They (the police officers) didn’t raise their voices. They didn’t get mad at nobody.”
Anderson shot Robin in the jaw while he was standing next to the open door. He died instantly. Estorffe was a distance away on the phone with Child Protective Services to get them there over concerns for the child’s safety in her mother’s care, according to authorities. .
Estorffe grabbed his gun from his holster and started running toward the driver’s side of the SUV, when Anderson fired another shot, hitting him in the upper left arm before he got off two rounds, fatally wounding Anderson as she fired one last round that hit Estorffe in his head, ultimately causing his death, authorities confirmed.
Two men from Louisiana staying in a room directly above the shooting scene said they were about to get up for work when they heard gunfire and a woman, believed to be Anderson scream, “’Get off me, get off me.’”
After the gunfire ended, the two men walked out on the balcony and looked downstairs. They saw the two police officers, and Anderson in the car along with at least two of her dogs inside.
Estorffe was bleeding, but still breathing.
Soon after the older couple saw Anderson’s little girl in her blood-soaked checkered flannel pajamas wandering around outside by their room near her mother’s car.
The couple reached out to her to come to them.
“’You are not going to hurt me, are you?” the little girl asked Walker. “’ Mamma said people are looking for us, that they are going to kill us.’”
The Sun Herald reached out to authorities to confirm the information the child shared prior to publication.
‘Mamma told me to give her the gun’
Once the couple got the child in the room, Hunter wiped some blood out of her eyes but left the rest because he thought police might need to do a forensic test as part of their investigation.
The girl kept asking if the couple and an adult daughter who was with them planned to hurt her.
They reassured the little girl that they had no intention of hurting her.
“We didn’t know what was going to happen next,” Hunter said. “We wanted to protect the little girl.”
After a minute or so, the child started talking.
The couple asked her what had happened and recounted the conversation.
“‘Mom told me to give her the gun, and I gave it to her,’” the little girl told the couple. “’‘My mamma shot the cops, and my mamma got shot, but she’s still got her eyes open, and she’s still breathing.”
The child kept asking the couple if her mom was going to be OK.
“We told her we didn’t know, that we’d have to wait until the police came,” Walker said.
After police and firefighters started to swarm the scene, the couple walked outside their door to let authorities know they had Anderson’s little girl.
“She was a little upset, but she wasn’t crying,” he said. “She had a good grip about what was going on.”
Hunter said his family’s main goal was to comfort the girl until help arrived.
“I put my arm around her,” he said. “I told her, ‘Stay strong, stay strong baby girl.’ It hurt. I knew she was about to go through hell.”
A paramedic soon came and gave the little girl a bottle of water and tried to comfort her.
A firefighter walked down shortly after that and started wiping the blood off the child.
Soon after, someone from Child Protective Services showed up and took the little girl away.
“I’ll never get over it,” Walker said. “My prayers go out to all the families.”
Living with the loss
For Scheid and the others at the motel, the horror of what happened there is a memory that likely will never fade.
“I just can’t be here,” she said. “It’s too hard. I just can’t, I can’t stop seeing what I saw.”
Scheid knew Estorffe’s father, veteran law enforcement officer Ian Estorffe, long before the killings because she had gone to him 13 or 14 years earlier for help to overcome a bad situation.
Though Scheid wasn’t there when the shooting occurred, she saw all the camera footage of what happened when she downloaded the motel footage for authorities.
For Potter, it’s hard knowing he made the call for police to come to the motel. He was also among the last to talk to Robin before the shooting.
“My last conversation with Robin was in the office that morning, “ he said. “He was really concerned for them at the time. He asked me, ‘What can we do to find out if she is being followed?’ He was trying to help.”
Potter showed Robin all of their camera footage from the time Anderson arrived at the motel around 2:30 a.m. because Robin was determined to check out Anderson’s concerns instead of brushing them off.
“He told me she (Anderson) seemed very distressed, and he wanted to help,” Potter said. “He was concerned about her well-being and that of the little girl. And then he walked out.”
Robin and Branden Estorffe spent about 40 minutes talking to Anderson and the child in and outside their motel room before the fatal shooting.
“That kinda stuff, you can’t shake from your mind,” Potter said. “Everything just kinda pops up in my head. Mostly, I feel bad for that little girl because she had to witness all of that.”
Some things have changed at the motel since the shooting.
The front office door remains locked at night.
And Potter, still overcome by what he describes as survivor’s guilt, said he isn’t doing what he did for Anderson in the future.
“I am apprehensive about calling the police, so when guests ask me to call now, I just tell them if they are able to call me at the front desk, they can call the cops themselves,” Potter said.
After the shootings, the motel staff locked up the door to the room where Anderson and the little girl had checked in before the shooting. When they finally returned to clean it, they said it looked as if it had not been used.
An empty candy wrapper sat on a table, and a small indention in the bedspread suggested someone might have sat on it for a time. Other than that, some pet carries Anderson left behind remained.
“I don’t think they ever used it,” Scheid said.
Since the shootings, the staff has mostly kept quiet about what happened there, and they don’t intend to discuss it more.
“It seemed like we had no right to say anything, that it would be disrespectful,” Scheid said.
For the family and friends of the police officers involved, the memories of that day will live on forever.
“It has changed our lives forever,” Ian Estorffe said. “But there is one thing I will continue to lean on, and that is knowing that Branden’s actions and his bravery saved lives. Branden was able to stop the threat, and she (Anderson) wasn’t able to hurt anybody else because of him.”
This story was originally published February 1, 2023 at 5:00 AM.
