Save articles for later
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.
Janet Rice headed to the hospital on Thursday night, as she routinely does when tragedy befalls her community. A barrage of gunfire had injured several young people, including a 12-year-old girl struck in the head by a stray bullet.
While en route, Rice’s phone rang. She pulled over.
Se’Cret Pierce, 12, was shot dead in a drive-by shooting not far from where her father was killed a decade earlier.Credit: Facebook
The young girl in a Connecticut hospital fighting for her life was her granddaughter – the child of the son Rice lost to gun violence more than a decade earlier.
The girl, Se’Cret Pierce, died Friday morning. She was two years old when her father, Shane Oliver, 20, was killed in the autumn of 2012 only a few kilometres from where his daughter was shot.
Having a son gunned down brought sorrow and despair to the family. Now a granddaughter had perished, too.
“Never in a million years did I expect to respond to a call for my 12-year-old granddaughter,” Rice said in a text message, as she prepared to lay her granddaughter to rest.
Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin addresses a crowd gathering for a vigil on the same street where Se’Cret Pierce, 12, was shot in the head by a stray bullet during a drive-by shooting.Credit: AP
“I am ANGRY, HEARTBROKEN, and NUMB,” 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 gun.
For years, Se’Cret’s grandparents had spoken out about the dangers of guns. For a while, Rice worked as the outreach coordinator for CT Against Gun Violence. Now she works as a crisis response specialist.
Even before the death of his son, and now his granddaughter, Reverend Sam Saylor knew well how gun violence was eating away at his community — a numbing regularity in too many neighbourhoods, he said. Killing after killing, the pastor would show up to as many vigils as he could to pray with bereaved families.
Never in a million years did I expect to respond to a call for my 12-year-old granddaughter.
“It’s just trauma on top of trauma,” Saylor said after friends and family gathered for a vigil in Hartford for his grandchild. Never did he expect, he said, “that I would be in this parade of pain again.”
Se’Cret was sitting in a parked car when she was shot, an innocent and unintended victim of a barrage of bullets that sent people running for cover.
Investigators said no arrests had been made, but they were still looking for at least two people believed to be in the vehicle that sped away after the shooting.
Oliver’s killer, an acquaintance, is now serving 40 years in prison.
A crowd gathers were Se’Cret Pierce was shot. Credit: AP
On the day he died, Oliver had left home to collect money for a car he had sold.
Like many gun-related killings, it began with an argument. Words escalated, and a gun was drawn. Oliver tried to run, but he did not get far. Two bullets to the back, and he died a few hours later.
During sentencing in 2015, Rice had pleaded for more prison time.
“I certainly hope it will save another mum from all the pain I’ve endured,” the Hartford Courant quoted Rice telling the judge during sentencing.
Still welling with grief, Oliver’s parents drove to Newtown to get an audience with then-vice president Joe Biden, who was visiting the grieving parents of the 20 children gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Biden met Saylor, Rice and other parents who raised concerns that the deaths of black urban youths were being treated as footnotes in conversations about gun violence.
“Both of them took the death of Shane and transformed it into activism,” said Kim Snyder, a documentary film director, who became acquainted with Rice and Saylor, while working on her Peabody-winning film about Newtown.
Saylor has pushed for stricter gun laws and has tried to shine a spotlight on the urban violence that has taken so many young black lives.
“Then it was his own kid,” Snyder said.
Even with the slight rise in homicides in Connecticut’s capital, the state has some of the lowest death rates from guns, according to the Violence Policy Centre.
“But we’ve got to do more,” said Jeremy Stein, the executive director of CT Against Gun Violence.
In addition to controlling the supply of guns, Stein wants more done to reduce the demand for firearms while strengthening community programs that promote civility and work to reduce the impulse to reach for a gun when disputes escalate.
Stein and others are asking the state to boost funding for an anti-violence commission to $US10 million ($14.9 million) annually.
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 murdered — both by gun violence.”
The suspects in Se’Cret’s killing appeared to target three males — ages 16, 18 and 23 — who were standing on a footpath on a residential street not far from downtown Hartford on Thursday night. They were wounded, but all three were expected to survive.
Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin urged the three surviving victims to co-operate with police, noting at a press conference on Friday that they could lead police to Se’Cret’s killers.
“A tragedy like this ripples outward in a community and affects so many,” he said.
Se’Cret’s killing weighed heavily on the minds of marchers on 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 girl’s vigil.
Speeches were given. Sermons were said. And prayers were held.
One woman, chanting to the beat of a drum, carried the sentiment of the grieving community: “Put down the gun.”
AP
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.
Most Viewed in World
From our partners
Source: Read Full Article
