LifeStory
Deonka Drayton
Family loved her and called her "Dee Dee"
The 32-year-old was a bartender at Pulse.
Kareem Gray, her cousin, said family called her "Dee Dee."
Gray remembered watching her grow up. "She used to dribble the basketball around me," he wrote.
The Orlando Sentinel reported that she was turning her life around:
She was loving, but had "an attitude" and was quick to tell someone off if she thought they were in the wrong. That was her way of showing she cared.
Drayton, 32, had her demons, but she was in the midst of a renaissance when she was killed in the mass shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando early Sunday morning.
"She was doing better [when I spoke to her last month]," said Ashleigh Alleyne, Drayton's girlfriend from 2010 to about 2015. "She was still on probation, but she wasn't getting in trouble."