A Fatal Night Out With the Boys

It was going to be such a happy occasion, celebrating a friend’s birthday with lifelong buddies at a rap concert in a glamorous nightclub.

Instead, Tony Lorenzo Galloway found himself miserable and just wanting to go home, so drunk that he never ventured inside the Century Club with his pals. Half an hour after he called his fiancee to describe his sorry state early Monday morning, the young man just out for a good time was dead, slain by a gunshot wound to the head.

“He was drunk, and normally he didn’t drink,” Aldreama Wozny, 21, said Wednesday. She held the couple’s 3-month-old son, Trillion Anthony Galloway, as she spoke at an Inglewood fast-food restaurant.

“He was almost passed out on the bus,” Wozny said of the chartered vehicle that was raked with multiple shots by an attacker who remains at large. “He was telling me he was drunk, throwing up, and he wasn’t even going into the club. He wasn’t going to get off the bus. He was going to go home.”

After hanging up, Wozny, who lived with Galloway, 26, and their son in a Fontana apartment, was worried. Soon, she tried repeatedly to call Galloway back, only to get no response on his cellular phone.

At 5 a.m., a friend of her fiance called. Galloway had died minutes after being shot. Three others with him were wounded.

“The friend said they had turned up the music, and the blinds were lowered, as the bus drove away from the nightclub,” Wozny said. “They didn’t even hear the shots fired. They didn’t know anything had happened until all of a sudden a girl yelled she was shot.”

Wozny said that although some had speculated that the shooting might be a gang attack, she wants the world to know that her fiance “wasn’t a gangbanger. He was living for tomorrow. It shouldn’t have been him.”

Galloway was studying computer technology at Riverside Community College and working for FedEx. “We had plans,” she said. “Both of us were working hard. He was interested in making it in life. He was in love with his son. We were supposed to take a family picture this weekend.”

Now, Galloway will be buried Saturday. His mother, three sisters and two brothers, all of Los Angeles, are expected to attend. Wozny said that for privacy’s sake she would not disclose the location.

Galloway’s friends, whom she did not name, told her that after the shooting, “they looked over and Tony was sitting there, bent over, trying to breathe.” They attempted CPR.

They conveyed to her, she said, a few last words, about how he said he loved her and their baby. Wozny said she would like to believe that, but suspects that it was only meant to give her solace.

Wozny said she and Galloway had known each other about a year and a half. He had played fullback at the Riverside college, Wozny said. The couple didn’t have a lot of money, but, she said, “he would give everybody his last dime, if they needed it.”

Later, the Los Angeles police captain who is leading the homicide investigation, Richard Webb, said that Wozny’s secondhand account was consistent with what investigators have been able to learn.

Webb said witnesses told him there was a fight outside the Century Club before the bus left. Someone then opened fire on the bus minutes later a block and a half away from the fashionable club. “We don’t know if the shooting was related to the fight,” he said. “Maybe it was a separate dispute.”

Webb did not dispute Wozny’s contention that Galloway and his friends weren’t gangbangers.

“Sometimes people mistake other people for gang members,” Webb said. “We’re definitely following up leads. I’m pretty confident we’ll find out what took place.”