Anti-gun-violence teen shot dead in her own home
Sandra Parks wrote an awardwinning essay about how the hope inspired by Martin Luther King was being lost in the turmoil of life in her hometown of Milwaukee. The schoolgirl concluded that ‘‘we are in a state of chaos’’ in which ‘‘little children are victims of senseless gun violence’’.
This week Sandra, 13, became the latest victim, killed by a stray bullet that passed through her bedroom window and struck her in the chest.
It was evening and she had been watching television, according to her sister, Tatiana Ingram. ‘‘My sister took it like a soldier,’’ Ingram told the Wisconsin television station WISN. ‘‘She just walked in the room and said, ‘Mama, I’m shot’.’’ Paramedics could not save her and she was pronounced dead in her family home. ‘‘She was only hit one time, in her chest,’’ Ingram said. ‘‘The bullet wasn’t even for her.’’
Charges filed against two young men who were arrested in the neighbourhood hours later told a confused and confusing story. Isaac Barnes, 26, who served a prison sentence as a teenager for armed robbery, was said to have been seen by an ex-girlfriend that night wearing a mask and carrying an assault rifle. He told her: ‘‘You lucky the kids are in the car, I was gonna fan you down,’’ according to court papers cited by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Officers searching houses in the area found Barnes and Untrell Oden, 27, in a house on a nearby street. Barnes was said to have been hiding in a cupboard. Officers found two Ak-47-style weapons, a shorter one in the kitchen rubbish bin and a longer model in a bedroom.
Oden told detectives that he had seen Barnes firing at an unknown target as they walked back from a shop and Barnes had later asked to store his weapons at Oden’s house. Shell casings found outside Sandra’s home were determined to have been fired by the gun.
Barnes faces murder and weapons charges and Oden has been charged with two weapons offences.
Sandra was said to be the latest of a dozen school pupils in Milwaukee killed in the past two years and the
‘‘Many people have lost faith in America and its ability to be a living example of Dr King’s dream ... ‘We shall overcome’ has been lost in the lie of who we have become! So now the real truth is we need to rewrite our story.’’ Sandra Parks in a 2016 essay
seventh since January. Since 2014, the list of victims includes a 5-yearold girl who was struck by a stray bullet while sitting in her grandfather’s house, a 10-year-old girl hit in a playground and a 6-year-old boy killed last year outside his grandmother’s house.
In her essay in 2016, Sandra wrote: ‘‘Many people have lost faith in America and its ability to be a living example of Dr King’s dream ... ‘We shall overcome’ has been lost in the lie of who we have become! So now the real truth is we need to rewrite our story.’’
Her essay was one of several winners from among more than 5000 entries in a city-wide competition and at the beginning of last year she read out part of it on Milwaukee public radio. The programme host asked her what had inspired her essay.
‘‘The truth is that, like, I really don’t know how to put it,’’ she said. ‘‘The world that we have become now, all you hear about is somebody dying and somebody getting shot and people do not just think about whose father or son or granddaughter or grandson that was that you just killed.’’
Her mother, Bernice, has set up an online fundraising page to cover the funeral costs, with a US$20,000 (NZ$29,000) goal. ‘‘She had hope for going to college to be a writer,’’ Parks wrote on the page. ‘‘She was just an innocent child.’’