Kids Shooting kids
this two-day series chronicled the number of kids who were picking up guns and turning them on one another in Columbus, Ohio. On average, one teen is a victim of gun violence every day, and about half are assaulted by other teens.
Published in The Columbus Dispatch on Oct. 13 and 14, 2013
Eamon Queeney / The Columbus Dispatch
Teens at war
The crack of a gunshot woke the child, who saw his father bleeding from his belly but alive. It was the 3-year-old’s first brush with gun violence.
By the time he was 11, his cousin had lent him a gun. He felt powerful walking around his South Linden neighborhood with the chrome pistol in his pocket.
At 15, he bought his own gun for $50 and took it to a fight. For protection, maybe to shoot someone, he said. But he got caught with it and was locked up.
“I used to feel grown and everything with a gun. It was crazy how it makes you feel,” said the boy, who spent his 16th birthday this summer in the Central Ohio Youth Center in Marysville, where the state won’t allow inmates to be quoted by name.
But the guns are not just for show.
Teens tend to shrug off being shot
Lee-Divine McCrae was almost home from Walnut Ridge High School one afternoon in March when an insult and a fight ended with the crack of a gun.
“F--- Courtney!” someone shouted, evoking the memory of Courtney Wallace, a 15-year-old Columbus boy who had been gunned down in an East Side neighborhood in August 2007. A 17-year-old youth, jealous because his girlfriend had been hanging out with Wallace and another boy, had ambushed those two boys and started shooting.
McCrae was only 10 when Wallace was killed and had nothing to do with it. But bad feelings linger, and insults — even against a dead teen — come easily in his neighborhood. So on March 21, the 16-year-old, who had been walking with a group of friends, found himself in the middle of a fight with another group at E. Livingston Avenue and Simpson Drive.
He started running when he saw one teen pull a gun.
Eamon Queeney / The Columbus Dispatch
Teens think no one cares as friends are killed
Ebony Crosby wonders who will be left to date her daughters.
The way she sees it, more and more young men in Columbus are falling victim to senseless violence. If it continues, who will remain in her East Side neighborhood for her three girls — ages 13, 11 and 4 — to get a crush on, marry and someday give her grandchildren?
This summer, Crosby’s 17-year-old nephew, Lamont Frazier, was shot three times, his body dumped on a South Side sidewalk.
That was four months after her 16-year-old son, Lee-Divine McCrae, hobbled into her kitchen, bleeding from having been shot on his walk home from school.
Friends and schoolmates of her son have been buried before they could get their driver’s licenses.
“Every child around him is dying for nothing,” she said from her front stoop, wiping tears from behind her glasses. “It’s senseless. It hurts.
“I wish I could wrap my arms around all these little boys and let them know somebody loves them. Because I think at this point in life, they think nobody cares.”
AFTER SO MANY SLAYINGS, TWITTER HASHTAG OFFERS GLIMMER OF HOPE
In some of Columbus’ toughest neighborhoods, kids have the grieving process down to a near-science.
A friend is shot and killed. Before police have even released the victim’s name, posts appear on Facebook. Photos go up on Instagram. Tribute videos show up on YouTube. Twitter handles are changed — “RIP whoever.”
If the death was in a public place, liquor bottles, stuffed animals and candles are placed on the corner or stoop or sidewalk. Airbrushed tribute T-shirts are ordered with such sentiments as “ Fly high,” “RIP,” “Gone too soon.”
The funeral is packed. Teenage girls and boys cry. Tattoos are etched on young skin.
And too soon, it happens again.