Whenever I read something like this it makes me go to dark places in my worried mind that a mother should never go. A billboard bearing photos of four murder victims was unveiled in South Los Angeles Wednesday to raise awareness of gun violence and encourage witnesses to come forward and find suspects in unsolved murders.
Lawanda Hawkins, founder of Justice for Murdered Children, said the billboard was designed to bring those who killed these children to justice. And she’s quite right in saying that we are all responsible for the children of our communities. Not just the one’s who belong to us personally.
When I first met my husband we were both living in Los Angeles. I was living in Hollywood and he was living in what we called, “the hood” –South L.A. He lived in a beautiful house in the middle of ground zero for LA violence and crime. This billboard is not far from where he lived and where we spent an enormous amount of time. When the L.A. riots errupted, his neighborhood was on fire. And we watched everything around us burn to the ground. It was a very sad time, I can’t imagine what it would have been like had we had children with us in that house. Maybe something like we felt watching the towers fall on 911–but my children were a year old and I was in Seattle.
It is an unimaginable pain I would think–losing a child. A grief I think one could never recover from fully. And then to complicate that thought with the idea of them dying from violence. No parent should ever have to go through that. No child should ever die from gun violence. We as communities need to do more.
Posted on May 10th, 2006 by Sam
Filed under: Uncategorized
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