One minute Caroline Dove’s boyfriend, Marine Lance Cpl. Skip Wells, was texting her about how excited he was to see her – then came two disturbing words: “ACTIVE SHOOTER.”
Sickening silence followed.
The ominous text message was the last Dove would ever receive from Wells, her 21-year-old boyfriend of more than two years who was one of four Marines killed by a Kuwaiti-born gunman in Tennessee on Thursday.
“You are so weird,” she had replied, unaware that Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez had fired on the Chattanooga military reserve facility where Wells (below) was finishing two weeks of training.
She followed up with another text, this time telling him, “I love you.”
When Wells hadn’t responded hours later, Dove grew desperate, writing, “Hon, I need you to answer please.”
She said she spent Thursday night checking news updates on her phone to see whether any of the victims’ names had been listed.
“There was nothing I could do at that moment,” she said.
It wasn’t until the next morning that Dove learned he was among those slain at the Navy Operational Support Center and Marine Corps Reserve Center.
One of Wells’ best pals broke the terrible news, which “was probably the worst way for me to find out,” she told CNN.
The couple had made plans to meet the next week after spending months away from each other.
“Can’t wait anymore,” Wells, a Georgia native who graduated from boot camp last year, had written to Dove just before his final text Thursday.
“Yes you can honey,” she responded.
Being a Marine was all Wells had ever wanted, Dove recalled on Friday.
“I just want everybody to know that he really wanted to fight for his country,” she told CNN. “He wanted to be remembered fighting for his country.”
Wells graduated from high school in 2012 and briefly studied history at Georgia Southern University, but was soon drawn to follow in his mother’s footsteps and join the military.
“He went to college,” family spokesman Andy Kingery told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “[but] felt he wasn’t called to that and felt a calling to serve — in the Marines.”
His pal Tony Wolcott played with Wells in the high-school marching band.
“He was a really good leader,” Wolcott told the newspaper.
“He was someone you could always depend on. Whenever something needed to be done, he would take charge and do it, but not in an overpowering way.”
Additional reporting by Yaron Steinbuch