A 13-year-old girl who was gunned down Monday in her Milwaukee bedroom wrote about the dangers of gun violence last year in a haunting, award-winning essay — saying her city was mired in a “state of chaos.”
Sandra Parks was killed after bullets pierced the bedroom wall of her North 13th Street home less than two years after she warned of violent gunplay in her neighborhood, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.
“In the city in which I live, I hear and see examples of the chaos almost every day,” Parks wrote in a sixth-grade essay to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “Many people have lost faith in America and its ability to be a living example of Dr. King’s dream!”
The essay, titled “My Truth,” encouraged Milwaukee residents and others to “rewrite our story” and to decrease “black on black crime” with increased compassion and kindness.
“We shall overcome when we begin to understand and accept each other,” Parks wrote. “We shall overcome when we eliminate the negative and nasty comments people make about each other. We shall overcome when we love ourselves and the people around us. Then, we become our brother’s keeper.”
The five-paragraph composition concluded: “We must not allow the lies of violence, racism, and prejudice to be our truth. The truth begins with us. Instead of passing each other like ships in the night, we must fight until our truths stretch to the ends of the world.”
The essay took third place last year in Milwaukee’s annual celebration at the Marcus Center for Performing Arts. Parks and the other winners were later featured during an interview on Wisconsin Public Radio in January 2017, according to the newspaper.
The girl’s death marked the fifth time in four years that a child was fatally shot inside a Milwaukee home, and she was the seventh student at a district school to die by homicide this year, according to a statement released by Milwaukee Public Schools.
Police could not say if the girl was the intended target.
An unidentified 26-year-old Milwaukee man has been taken into custody in connection with the shooting, Sgt. Sheronda Grant, a police spokeswoman, confirmed to The Post.
“The Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office will review the case for criminal charges in the upcoming days,” police said in a statement. “The investigation is ongoing.”
The girl’s distraught mother, meanwhile, said her daughter was simply looking for a way to escape the rampant violence she witnessed and endured for the bulk of her life.
“She was a star that was trying to get [out but] didn’t know how,” Bernice Parks told WTMJ. “Don’t never forget my baby.”
