THE SCENE IN WILKINSBURG WHERE A SHOOTING CLAIMED THE LIFE OF 16-YEAR-OLD KEVIN WILSON, MARCH 31.
‘This is not a way that a community should live,’ Tim Stevens says
As the spring has begun, unfortunately, there have been a number of shootings in recent days that have killed African American teens and men.
A shooting in Wilkinsburg on Easter Sunday night, March 31, purportedly preceded by an argument and fight amongst women on Hill Avenue, led to gunshots being fired and a 16-year-old teen being struck, Kevin Wilson. He died at the hospital.
The next night, April 1, a large fight involving many juveniles was occurring in Braddock on Margaretta Street when shots rang out, killing another 16-year-old, Jeramyah Pollard, a 10th grader at Woodland Hills High School. A second teen was also struck by the gunfire.
On Saturday, March 30, a 30-year-old man, Lamont Nichols, was shot and killed, police say, by a 24-year-old woman at the Truman Tower in Duquesne.
The three shooting deaths in 48 hours doesn’t include the shooting of who police believe was a juvenile in Larimer in broad daylight, Monday, April 1, two adult males shot inside an apartment in Knoxville, Thursday, March 28, and a report of 15 gunshots being fired at vehicles and an apartment on Woodlow Street in Crafton Heights on Easter Sunday night, March 31. No one was injured in that shooting.
Nichols was a youth football coach for the East End Raiders, according to his stepfather, Jarrod Johnson, in an interview with WPXI-TV (Channel 11).
“We are all numb, the world has lost another person that didn’t need to leave,” Johnson told WPXI.
The New Pittsburgh Courier reported in its Feb. 28 edition that a “Community Services Directory” was being published for residents in the Pittsburgh area so they would know exactly where to go to find organizations doing their part to fight back against the gun violence. The Black Political Empowerment Project and Coalition Against Violence led the effort on the directory’s creation. During the organizations’ news conference announcing the directory, Shayla Holmes, the B-PEP/CAV Youth Peace Summit Coordinator, noted that the day had been unseasonably warm, and she said it crossed her mind “if there was any shootings today. We have to remember that as the nice weather approaches, that also the risk of losing more lives approaches. We want to protect our youth…”
On that Day, Feb. 26, there were no shooting deaths in the city or Allegheny County. But Holmes’ sentiment is echoed by many other Black adults in Pittsburgh—the thought that the warmer the weather, historically the increase in shootings.
Many Black adults in the Pittsburgh region refuse to let their kids play outside during the spring and summer in certain areas, saying it’s just too dangerous.
WILKINSBURG MAYOR DONTAE COMANS
Wilkinsburg Mayor Dontae Comans, 39, told the Courier in an exclusive interview, April 2, that the recent homicides were “tragic,” and said that “these kids in high school have more dead homies than these adults.”
Mayor Comans said that organizations such as MAD DADS and Community Forge’s CURE Violence East are on the ground in Wilkinsburg speaking with kids as early as elementary school age, trying to reach them before the streets do.
THE SCENE IN WILKINSBURG WHERE A SHOOTING CLAIMED THE LIFE OF 16-YEAR-OLD KEVIN WILSON, MARCH 31.
Mayor Comans told the Courier that when he was younger, he would go to house parties with no threat of gun violence. But in today’s world, he has a teenage nephew who wrote a song about the number of peers he’s lost to gun violence. “I think they’re angry,” the mayor said about many of today’s teens. “They’ve lost a lot of friends in the past. We just have to show them that there’s another way.”‘
Stevens told the Courier in an exclusive interview, April 2, that when members of B-PEP and the Coalition Against Violence hold teen summit-style events inside schools, the teens say they know at least one, even five and even 10 or more peers who have been killed.
“Can we find new and creative ways of having commitments to mediation?” Stevens said, hoping that the community can have adults who teens can trust to help mediate situations before “it gets to having the feeling of the need to draw weapons.”
Stevens added that all the community organizations that focus on violence prevention efforts “cannot do it alone,” and that there needs to be a “commitment to the Black culture in the Pittsburgh region” to “escalate the use of conversation and mediation.”
TIM STEVENS
As for the “Community Services Directory,” Stevens told the Courier that Pittsburgh Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Wayne Walters committed to emailing the directory to every principal, vice principal and counselor in the district, along with having a hard copy of the directory in each school.
“My fear is that the killings and the shootings have become so frequent that, for many Black people, it’s becoming commonplace,” Stevens told the Courier. “We cannot afford to get numb to the power of death. Not only does it take away our young, Black folks, but it impacts for life the perpetrator’s life. It impacts the parents, grandparents and friends of the folks who were killed, and it impacts the family members of perpetrators because they know their loved ones took the lives of other loved ones.”
Stevens added: “This is not a way that a community should live.”
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