United States.- Janet Rice went to the hospital on Thursday night, as she usually does when a tragedy occurs in her community. a barrage of shots had injured several young people, including a 12-year-old girl injured in the head by a stray bullet.
While he was on his way, Rice’s phone rang. She stopped. The girl in a Connecticut hospital fighting for her life was her granddaughter, the daughter of the son Rice lost to the gun violence more than a decade earlier.
The girl, Se’Cret Pierce, he died Friday morning. She was 2 years old when her young father, Shane Oliver, 20, was murdered in the fall of 2012 just a few miles from where his daughter was shot.
Having a son shot brought sadness and despair to the family. Now too a granddaughter had died.
“Never in a million years did I expect to answer a call for my 12-year-old granddaughter,” Rice, a crisis response specialist, said in a text message Sunday.
“I am ANGRY, HEARTBROOKED and NUMBY,” she texted.
The seventh-grader was the seventh homicide this year in Hartford, a city, like other urban areas, struggling to contain gun violence. Last year, there were 39 homicides in Hartford, up from 34 the year before, most committed with a weapon.
For years, Se’Cret’s grandparents had talked about the gun dangers. For a time, Rice worked as the outreach coordinator for CT Against Gun Violence. Now she was part of a team of “peacebuilders” trying to put the youth of her community on the right track.
Even before the death of his son, and now his granddaughter, the Reverend Sam Saylor knew well how gun violence it was eating away at his community, a numbing regularity in too many neighborhoods, he said. Killing after killing, the pastor would show up at as many vigils as he could to pray with bereaved families.
“It’s just trauma on top of trauma,” Saylor said Saturday after friends and family gathered for a vigil in Hartford for her grandson. He never expected, she said, “that he would be back in this parade of pain.”
se’cret she was sitting in a parked car when she was shot, a victim innocent and inadvertent burst of bullets that sent people running for cover.
Investigators said no arrests have been made, but they were still searching for at least two people believed to be in the vehicle that sped away after the crash. shooting.
Oliver’s killer, an acquaintance, is now serving 40 years in prison.
On the day of his death, Oliver had left his home to collect money for a car he sold.
Like many gun-related murders, it started with an argument. The words intensified and a gun was drawn. Oliver tried to run, but he didn’t get very far. Two bullets to the back, and he died a few hours later.
During sentencing in 2015, Rice had asked for more prison time.
“I certainly hope it saves another mother from all the pain I have endured,” the Hartford Courant quoted Rice as telling the judge during sentencing.
Still grief-stricken, Oliver’s parents traveled to Newtown for an audience with then-Vice President Joe Biden, who was visiting the grieving parents of the 20 children shot to death at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Biden met separately with Saylor, Rice and other parents who raised concerns that the deaths of black urban youth are being treated as footnotes in conversations about gun violence.
“They both took Shane’s death and turned it into activism,” said Kim A. Snyder, a documentary filmmaker who met Rice and Saylor while working on her Peabody Award-winning film about Newtown.
Saylor has pushed for stricter gun laws and tried to draw attention to the urban violence that has claimed the lives of so many black youth.
“So it was his own son,” Snyder said.
Even with the slight increase in homicides in Connecticut’s capital, the state has some of the lowest rates of gun deaths, according to the Violence Policy Center.
“But we have to do more,” said Jeremy Stein, executive director of CT Against Gun Violence.
In addition to controlling the supply of guns, Stein wants more to be done to reduce the demand for firearms while strengthening community programs that promote civility and working to reduce the impulse to seek a gun when disputes escalate.
Stein and others are calling on the state to increase funding for an anti-violence commission to $10 million a year.
He called the latest shooting “incredibly personal” because of Rice’s connection to the group.
“She lost her son, Shane,” Stein said, “and now Shane’s daughter has been killed, both by gun violence.”
Suspects in the Se’Cret murder appeared to be targeting three men, ages 16, 18 and 23, who were standing on a sidewalk on a residential street not far from downtown Hartford Thursday night. They were injured, but all three were expected to survive.
Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin urged the three surviving victims to cooperate with police, saying at a news conference Friday that they could bring the Se’Cret killers to police.
“A tragedy like this spreads in a community and affects many,” he said.
Se’Cret’s murder weighed heavily on the minds of protesters Saturday as they took part in the city’s annual Mothers United Against Violence rally. They gathered on Huntington Street, where Se’Cret was shot, to join the vigil for the girl.
Speeches were given. Sermons were said. And prayers were held.
One woman, singing to the beat of a drum, conveyed the sentiment of the grieving community: “Put your gun down.”
Receive more international news directly on your WhatsApp
#ANGRY #shooting #killed #20yearold #son #12yearold #granddaughter #killed