What do you do when your best friend of 15 years suddenly isn’t there anymore, and his leaving was so unexpected and traumatic it’s hard to process?

You tell his story.

You tell his story and with every telling, you keep him alive and with you and in the world a little longer.

Cheyanne Anderson and Donny Krajnyak were a team, raising three children together, navigating teenage years, buying a house, surviving squabbles and even a hard breakup. They had become the best of friends, parenting together even when the relationship changed.

Now, Cheyanne still knocks on his bedroom door before going in, even though he’s no longer there, because she’s still waiting for him to come around the corner.

“I still expect him to come out of the door, or around a corner to check on me,” she said.

Donny, 43, was killed when he and Cheyanne were both shot about 2:45 a.m. Sunday, Oct. 6, in the parking lot behind several bars on East Innes Street. The couple was helping a friend close a bar when a scuffle broke out. Punches were thrown but it all seemed to have settled down when the pair was walking out to their truck to leave.

And then a woman came out of her truck with a gun and shot both of them, killing Donny and shooting Cheyanne in the upper right torso, just missing her lung.

The shooter, later identified as Alexus Burshell Bost, 23, managed to get away, despite hitting another car on the way out of the parking lot. Another woman was driving the truck the two were in when they left.

“I didn’t know Donny was dead at first,” Cheyanne says, almost unaware of the tears running down her cheeks. He was behind the truck and she couldn’t see him so she thought he was OK. But then she saw his feet, and when she saw his body, she was overwhelmed by the blood.

“There was just so much. I tried to pull him to me, and I kissed his cheek. I don’t know if he could hear me, I don’t know,” she says before pausing.

“He was robbed of his life,” she adds. “My children were robbed of their father, he was robbed of his life, I was robbed of the best part of me and I want justice for him.”

Bost was arrested by 6 that same Sunday morning and is facing first degree murder charges and is still incarcerated at Rowan Correctional Facility. She is also charged with attempted first degree murder for shooting Cheyanne, assault and battery and possession of a weapon by a convicted felon. She does have a record, including a charge from just over a year ago of possession of a stolen firearm. It is not clear who owns the gun she allegedly used in the shooting of Donny and Cheyanne.

Cheyenne says they had not seen her before the night of the shooting, and she doesn’t understand why it happened.

“She was at the bar and she was banging on the piano while they were trying to close,” Cheyanne recalls. “The bartender said she needed to stop and she punched the bartender, and Donny and the guys thought she was a man, so they jumped in and put her on the ground. That’s when I realized she was actually a woman that I had spoken to earlier at (another bar). I told Donny ‘that’s a female’ and he immediately backed off, helped her up, but she kept hitting people, so they walked her out the door.” At some point during the scuffle, Bost dropped a gun she was carrying and Cheyanne picked it up. She said she took the clip out and put it in her back pocket.

Another woman, either a friend or girlfriend of the shooter, was trying to get Bost to leave, but she kept asking for her gun.

“I told her I had it but I wasn’t giving it back until she got in her car to leave. I should never have given it back.” Cheyanne said. When the woman first left the bar, she hit Cheyanne again, and the girlfriend apologized. “I said it’s fine, she didn’t hurt me, just get her out of here.” And she gave the gun and the clip to the girlfriend.

A witness at the scene that night who asked that he not be named said he was standing out by his car when he saw Bost get out of the passenger side of her truck, and “as she came around the front of the truck I saw her arm and the gun coming up. She shot Donny in the head, then stood over him and shot him twice more before she shot Cheyanne,” he said. “I was really having trouble processing what I was seeing.”

He and other witnesses remained on the scene after the shooting and gave statements to police, something that Major Justin Crews of the Salisbury Police Department said was essential in solving the case.

“It made a tremendous difference that witnesses talked with us,” he said. “We have the video, but we also have numerous corroborating statements.”

But all that just reflects the end of Donny’s life, and Cheyanne does not want that to be the way he is remembered.

The two met in 2008 when they were neighbors, and they challenged each other.

“We decided that we couldn’t be together unless we both got clean, so we flushed the stuff we were on down the toilet and didn’t look back,”she said. Her older daughter, Dakota, was born in 2007, her son Cody a year earlier, and both were still toddlers when she and Donny became a couple. A year after they came together they had a daughter, Abigail, together, and Cheyenne said he loved all three of the children like they were his.

He loved to cook, “smoked everything and my God it was good,” she said. “He made all kinds of soup, and now it’s cold, the kids are saying they want soup, but they want Dad’s soup.” His favorite was zuppa toscana and “they like mine, but they like his better. Now they’ll have to eat mine.”

“He was a clown, always making me laugh,” she said. He also helped her belief in herself. When the two went through a breakup, she struggled for a while before reaching out to him. “I decided I wanted him in my life, in whatever form worked, because we were a family, and he was the only father my children knew. We needed him. I went back to work and began to get my life together and he saw that I was trying. He asked us to come home. He saw that I was doing with my life the things he had always said I could do.”

Donny was a house painter for 30 years, working for Richard’s Painting in Salisbury for 10 years.

“When we bought our house together, it took us two years because he’d walk in and see everything wrong,” Cheyenne laughed. “I’d tell him ‘Donny stop rubbing the walls’ because that’s what he would do, slide his hands along the wall and say he didn’t like the way it looked. Or he’d look up and say he didn’t like the way the corner looked. I told him to stop looking up at the corners, no one else will be looking way up there.” They eventually bought a home on Bringle Ferry Road, and Cheyanne hopes to remain there.

“He hated the house, but it’s where I feel him,” she said. “I hope I can stay.” She also says the reason she went back to the bar where it happened is “because the people here all loved him, and they’re taking care of me, not for me but for him, and that makes him feel close.”

Cheyanne says “there was never a mention of step children. We raised these kids together.” The kids are currently 18, 17 and 15, and the two daughters live at home with Cheyanne, while her son lives in Charlotte.

Cheyenne was adopted after being in the foster system as a child, and she says “Donny and our kids are the only people I have ever thought of as real family.”

“He was the greatest person on the earth, and I am so glad that I had my life with him,” she said. “I finally met his girlfriend, which was strange, but here we were sitting on the couch in my house hugging, both of us crying over the same guy.”

Because they were not married, Cheyanne will not receive any benefits, though their daughter should be able to get some Social Security. And Cheyanne knows she needs to get back to work, because she has to keep moving forward. She lost her job after the shooting because she is unable to lift more than 10 pounds.

“The challenges just keep coming,” she said, “but I’m doing all I can.” She says her children have been strong for her, but they still catch her crying, and she feels like she “is failing” because she can’t seem to keep her emotions in check.

“They have been a lot stronger than me through this,” she says, but they were not there when it happened, something she is grateful for.

“I have to get it together, get back to work, but Donny was the best of me, and I am not sure I know how to be without him,” she said. “I do still knock before going into his room, but I tell him I’m putting his bedroom shoes on, and I can hear him saying ‘you’re going to fall down in those.’ I say yeah well I’ll put them back on my feet if I fall.”

“His advice has helped a tremendous amount of people throughout his lifetime,” Abigail said in a recent obituary. “Most people usually like him from the jump, because of his comedic character, intellect and respect for others. We know he’s still by our side, and will always be, that’s just who he is. He didn’t just love us with his heart and body, he loved us with his soul.”

“My father passed away a hero, and I will never forget the sacrifices he made that night for the people he truly loved,” Dakota said. “He was an amazing father, the best son, best BF to my mother, and the best soul to have ever been around. I wish he had not been taken from us so soon.”

The family has started a GoFundMe to help raise money for a small service of some kind and to help provide for the three kids and their future. You can find it here.

“He was such an amazing person, so good to everyone,” Cheyanne said. “I don’t ever want him to be forgotten.”