Victim of McKeesport murder was kind to a fault, family says
Tameka Dallas was meticulous. She had an eye for design, expensive taste in fashion and a compulsion to keep things clean. She couldn’t stand to see her kids leaving the house looking unkempt.
“You look like don’t nobody love you,” she would say.
“If you came outside looking crazy, she was the first to tell you,” her daughter, Talasia Dallas, said.
But more than anything, Tameka — affectionately referred to as “Meka” — was a lover, and she wanted to be loved, her family said. She desperately wanted to help other people, and “she would try until it broke her,” Raymont Dallas, her son, said.
It was that willingness to open herself to others that led to her death, her family believes.
Tameka’s body was discovered Sept. 12 off a trail in Renziehausen Park in McKeesport. She was 44 years old.
Police have charged Daron Parks, of Bridgeville, and Ramonta Yancey, who has ties to McKeesport and the East End of Pittsburgh, with the killing.
Allegheny County investigators this week discovered blood stains found on a pair of Mr. Parks’ jeans matched both his and Ms. Dallas’ DNA.
Discovered by a man walking his dog, Ms. Dallas was strangled, bound with cloth above the ankles and had blood coming from her nose and mouth.
“My child is gone and I miss her every day,” Laura said. “I talk to her. I say goodnight to her, tell her I love her. Because that’s one thing she really needed: she needed us to love her.”
She was killed when her life was on an upswing, her brother, Brandon, said. “This was a new Meka, a reinvented Meka. She was onto something, man.”
After struggling with depression, she was making more time to see her family, her mother, Laura, said. The two frequently would spend time together in the months before her death, going shopping and getting their nails done.
“I haven’t had my nails done since we did,” Laura said.
In addition to Raymont and Talasia, Tameka had another son, Larrell, and she was a grandmother to Talasia’s son, who she loved more than anything, Talasia said.
She was unabashed and unapologetic.
Even if she and her mother were in public, Meka would snatch her mom’s wig off, fix her cap and make sure Laura was looking good.
“She was loud in public,” Brandon said, laughing.
But more than anything, she had a big heart, Raymont said.
One day, Raymont came home
to see blood on the kitchen floor and his mother crying.
“What happened?” he asked her repeatedly. A neighbor, Tameka told him, had been contemplating suicide and had harmed herself. Tameka saw it as her responsibility to help.
“She was always willing to help anybody, good or bad,” Raymont said.
Tameka was convicted in 2016 for possession and use of drugs when police obtained a warrant, searched her apartment and found stamp bags of heroin and crack, according to a criminal complaint.
The warrant was issued after police went to the apartment for a domestic dispute involving two other individuals, and saw suspected heroin laying out on the table, the complaint says.
But her family maintains that was another case of her trying to “bring people to the good side.”
“That was a wrong living situation,” Talasia said. “One of the neighbors was into a lot of stuff, and it ended up impacting the whole building.” Tameka was trying to be a friendly neighbor to the wrong neighbors, she said.
“She was never a street person, all right?” Brandon said. “She didn’t grow up like that,” and she started befriending the wrong people because she didn’t have the intuition to know otherwise. He believes that’s what led to her murder last summer, but the family still can’t understand why.
But the family is grateful Tameka made efforts to get closer with them just before she passed. Brandon thinks it was some divine intervention that led her to forge a deeper connection with her family in her final months.
“I still can’t wrap my head around it, man,” Brandon said. “Not a day or minute go by that I don’t think about my sister.” For someone to kill Tameka at a time when she was on the right path made it more painful. “She was growing into the person God wanted her to be.”