The Apology
She was commenting from a thousand miles away in response to my question who got shot this time. She remarked on what a strange world it is where I am able to ask the same questions being ask of her by neighbors in the next block, at approximately the same time.
The headlines I had read on the glossy screen of this computer made me fairly certain that the two shootings seven blocks apart, while not known to be related by the news agency, were in fact not only related, but that the shooting two blocks from her probably included young people that she had some ongoing contact with.
She had already been to the hospital and had names that the news agency had not released. The 17 year old with the bullet in his stomach is the only one of the young men I have met, if only briefly, on those ocassions when his father left him on the porch as a much younger boy, quite a few years ago. His stomach wound is serious but she was led to believe he would live. In her opinion his getting out of the hospital alive was only a precursor to his eventual violent death. She reminded me that he was afterall the intended victim in the shooting back in April that mistakenly left two boys dead in front of her house.
The 19 year old was the son of a dwarf woman in the next block and he had been hit twice in the head with bullets from an assault rifle used in the first shooting. The mayor’s wife was attending services at a nearby Treme church and Swat teams rushed in to clear the church of its 30 occupants because a suspect or just someone trying to escape the spray of bullets had run in there.
Suspects of the shootings abandoned the red Ford Focus marked with at least one bullet hole near the Iberville Projects and police spent several hours looking for them, without success.
Within minutes of the online reporting of this crime citizens were once again spewing their vitriol in the comment forums with so much apparent fear and hatred that it would almost seem to match, albiet from the theoretical comfort of an easy chair, the desperation some of these street kids experience from birth to coffin. Razing the Iberville was seen by some as a solution.
I have mixed feelings about the Iberville but know without a doubt that the razing of it will have little or no influence on whether or not young people continue to kill each other. And I at best as little more than a casual observer of this violent phenomenon have no answers either.
And my friend, with now 15 years in the trenches, ended her brief email report this way--everything I try to do seems like an apology. I can’t stop this.
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