OPD Chief Jordan on a 4-year-old who witnessed his own mother's murder

The young boy's mother was killed on 54th near Shattuck, in North Oakland, on Wednesday, April 24th, 2013, around 8:45 p.m. Officers at the scene had to care for him. The Chief was there, and had this to say:

"This is one of the saddest situations, where you have a 4-year-old that basically witnessed someone getting killed," Jordan said. "That is a memory he is going to have in his mind for a very long time. I'm not sure how he is going to recover from that."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Loud-argument-before-mom-slain-in-Oakland-4463933.php#ixzz2RWwp6BDp
 

Ice City Almanac's Top Stories

From A Violent Thing: Inside an Oakland Gang Call-In 
All gunshot wounds in Oakland are brought to Highland. She tells them, calmly, that the worst case scenario if you end up at Highland is surviving. Surviving a gunshot wound is the worst thing that can happen. It only takes one bullet in the spine and you’re a quadriplegic. No movement, no sex, someone has to wipe your ass. No one comes to visit you because no one wants to see you like that. I become your only friend, she tells them. She approaches the sharply-dressed Participant, points over toward the baby. Is that your baby? Is that your queen holding the baby? He nods politely. He’s looking her in the eye, looking up at her. You want that baby to see you paralyzed, with tubes coming out of you, with a colostomy bag? Imagine that. This is not rhetorical, it’s a demand. Imagine it. This right here today, she tells them, this is a blessing. Because you are alive and free.

From 13: At the Funeral of Thirteen-Year-Old Jimon Clark
Just ahead of me in line at the funeral of Jimon Clark, the last of six homicides to occur in Oakland between August 18th and August 25th, a group of kids in their early teens has reached the coffin. They look like they are not quite sure what to do. In line, all but two of them have been fairly upbeat, nonchalant, possibly faking their cool, or possibly they have done this so many times that it feels about the same as standing in line at a taco truck. I want to think they are faking, that their hearts are beating faster than usual, that they are at least a little freaked to confront the dead body of their friend and schoolmate, that maybe they are hiding secret worries that his gunshot wounds are visible.  I want to think that for these baby-faced, rather slight, early teenage kids from Oakland, neither the day nor the event is routine.

From The Dark Urges: In the ICU with Daryl Starks' Family
Darryl Starks' little sister needs $20. She needs it for a new tattoo, one that will commemorate his death, which is imminent. Starks himself lies intubated and comatose in a narrow hospital bed, in ICU room #19, at the Alameda County Medical Center, a.k.a Highland Hospital. He lies under bright lights. His head is tilted back a little on the white pillow, skewed just slightly to his left, toward where his oxygen tube runs. His eyelids are not completely closed.  It’s Saturday night. Starks was shot on Friday evening, at 78th Avenue and Bancroft, while driving home from the store. He was hit once in the shoulder and once in the back of the head. Now an ICU nurse sits distractedly at a computer station just outside a picture window with a view onto Starks' unmoving body. Occasionally the nurse checks his iPhone.

From Imaginary Pain: At the Grim Geographical Nexus, with Kids

In the neighborhood where these kids live and go to school, shootings and homicides occur with a depressing regularity.  Five days ago a man and a teenager were shot right here on Foothill Boulevard.  Last summer, Jimon Clark was killed on nearby Bancroft.  He was 13.  A few days before Jimon was shot in the back, Melvin Murphy was stabbed to death in an apartment complex on Bancroft.  Derrick Jones was killed on Bancroft by police back in November.  Alvaro Ayala was a student at the same high school as Lovell.  He was killed almost one year ago to the day. And yet, somehow, at least superficially, they remain, like all teens, conventional: self-conscious, social, periodically oblivious, ignorant of or uninterested in decorum.  They do tend to cooperate with the instructions of the preachers, to clap when they are asked to, to stand when they are asked to.  They know when they are expected to say “Amen” or to answer in unison a question about Jesus or the perils of smoking pot. But they don’t take any of the pastor’s words seriously.  Hopefully that’s because they assume they will never kill anyone anyway.  No doubt, being kids, and despite today's evidence to the contrary, some think they will never die.  And they don't seem gloomy. Until it is time to see their schoolmate’s body.

From Against Nostalgia: After The Death of Raymen Justice
There is a note, handwritten in black, taped to the apartment door, discouraging visitors from knocking. It makes the point that the Justices will have nothing to give you, especially money, and don’t knock unless you have brought something for them.  Marilyn Harris, of course, brings, as always, the promise of help, hope, and healing. She always enters even the tensest, most somber, most fraught rooms with the confidence and even the joy of the gifts she brings. It’s 9:30 in the morning. There are maybe seven people in the small, dimly lit, disheveled apartment. Raymen’s sisters are here. On the day after the killing, Raymen’s brother, Rayven Jr., collapsed and was taken to the hospital. Rayven Jr is a composer and performer of sort-of hip hop love ballads. He seems to be talented and is no doubt a sensitive person. He is recuperating with the boys’ mother at her home in East Oakland. A family friend named Miracle is here. Two years ago her brother was taken from this very apartment building and murdered; his body was burned so severely that the police could not declare the death an official homicide. There is a Tupac poster on the wall. Over the couch there is a narrow, framed portrait in oils of Raymen’s father, Rayven, in his younger days in a suit and round hat with an upturned brim. It was, I believe, a certain favored style in Oakland in the early 80s. Rayven Sr is a slight man, gray-haired, a Vietnam vet, angry as hell, righteous about having raised his two sons on his own, about their potential and their good grades. Raymen had a 3.3 grade point average, he tells us several times. Rayven Sr is sitting next to me on a small sofa. He’s drinking coffee with cream and sugar. Man he is pissed. He gets up a number of times and leans over the coffee table and into people’s faces to declare his independence from any need of the money being offered him.

From The Big Event
That bullet that wounds or kills, it also ricochets. As the news spreads through a family, through the streets, it continues to wound or kill; if one person has been taken from us body and soul, a dozen more are lost to us in lasting bitterness, subversive grief, debilitating fear, and, in the case of a child growing up on streets lorded over by the gun, a way of life they learn from repeated violence and loss.

From (New) Code of the West
In genuine disbelief, I turned and walked back against the tide and stood across from the church entryway to watch, as more and more people staggered out. Soon I heard sirens but only gradually realized they were for us. Within twenty minutes there were dozens of cops from numerous forces -- OPD, CHP, Alameda Sheriffs, Parole, Corrections. Lots of collegiality between them. Hugs and handshaking and "Where you been lately?!?" There were guys in riot gear. That erie modern sight of helicopters hovering over you. Most of the cops had tear gas guns, but at one point a tall, white officer (I'd say 80 to 90% were white) took something that looked like a guitar case out of a van, snapped it open, pulled out a machine gun, clicked the cartridges in, slung it around his shoulders and headed up the street. He looked thrilled. I counted nearly a hundred cops in half a dozen picket lines across at least two streets.

Until You Bleed: The Caheri Gutierrez Story

Until You Bleed: The Caheri Gutierrez Story

This is the story of how it looks and feels when the bullet finds you. It’s the kind of story you encounter in violent neighborhoods across America. Only there's one big difference.

In old modeling photos, the face of Caheri Gutierrez confronts you with one of human history's miraculous hybrids, a sublime symbol of what we can accomplish, over centuries, if we work together: the big, dark, almond shaped meso-American eyes and wide, pre-Columbian cheekbones; the flared, triangular, European nose; the dark skin — burnt, Mexican; the full, downward, frowning mouth pure early 21st century Oakland, California, USA.

Gutierrez thought that face was her ticket to the future. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, came the bullet. Suddenly, on a cold night in November 2008, she found herself bleeding, choking, holding her face together with her hands, calculating her very chances of survival.

Caheri Gutierrez' inspiring struggle to heal herself and the city of Oakland is woven with courage, fear and defiance. In many ways, her personal story is much like the story of Oakland itself, a polyglot city decades in murderous decay, not quite so innocent as it wishes, but a victim nonetheless of the political flailing that comes of desperation and neglect. Like Gutierrez, Oakland is beautiful and wounded, unable to let go of its past and uncertain about its future.

Until You Bleed is a deeply researched, literate and brutally frank portrait of a city under the gun, and a young, wounded woman trying to change that.

Available as an Amazon Kindle Single, for $0.99.

Miss Marilyn

Recently someone asked me to write up a summary of the work of Oakland's Marilyn Washington Harris, whose son, Khadafy, was killed on the campus of McClymonds High School in West Oakland back in the summer of 2000. Marilyn is the founder and executive director of the Khadafy Washington Foundation for Non-Violence. I was asked to write about the background to the problem she addresses, the specific work she does, the impact she has on the community, how she is a leader, and finally to sum it all up. And to do it all briefly. I thought it turned out to be a nice, succinct testament about one of the finest, most courageous people I've ever met, so decided to post it here on the Almanac. First the summary, then the other four sections.

Marilyn Washington Harris aids Oakland's forgotten and its shunned. Since losing her only son to the gun in 2000, and finding no help available, she has dedicated her life to stepping into the immediate aftermath of homicides to provide help, hope and healing to stunned, angry, mourning families. Daily, she guides Oaklanders through the craziness, the hopelessness, and the business -- coroners, funerals, city offices, police -- of being a survivor. In 13 years, at homes, at crime scenes, at churches, chapels and funeral homes, she has aided thousands of families, making appointments and arrangements, accompanying them, protecting them from exploitation and beginning the healing process with patience, love and trust. A government clerk when her son was killed, she has become a vocal advocate for peace, a model of selfless service, an inspiration to a generation of violence prevention workers, and a healer of the city and its victims.

Background (of the problem Miss Marilyn addresses in her work)

For more than three decades now, Oakland has had one of the highest homicide rates in the nation. Police and programs exist for the prevention of violence, but very little has ever been done for the survivors of the killed who, lost and scarred, frightened, often friendless and poor, must continue to live and function in the community. When her son was killed in 2000, Marilyn Harris found that there was no one to guide loved ones through the great uncertainty, through the grim business so suddenly at hand in the wake of the violent death of a son, husband, daughter, wife. Suddenly, in a mental and emotional daze, there are police to deal with, coroners, city clerks, funeral arrangements, often with very limited funds. The opportunities for neglect and exploitation are many. Through the lonely, often bitter process, the anger, sadness and alienation of the survivors are only increased and solidified. To ignore their needs is to let their wounds fester. It is to risk returning them to the community utterly bereft and hopeless. To aid them, is to demonstrate that love and healing are still possible.

What She Does

Sometimes she gets a text, or a colleague calls. Often, the police call Marilyn Harris when there has been a homicide in Oakland. Sometimes neighbors of the killed call; they know it's time for Harris to do her work, as only she can. She steps into the bleakest environments, at crime scenes, in homes under a cloud of shocked mourning. She connects with the sufferers, demonstrates rare understanding in the face of anger, confusion, even hostility, casting a balance between compassion and necessity. She finds the right moment for the business at hand, then provides knowledge, will, and a clear mind. Harris knows the system, from cops to florists to morticians. She makes appointments at funeral homes, at the coroner's office, at victims' services. She meets you there, or drives you, assures you are cared for and not exploited. She scrapes and scrounges for funds if you need them, checks if you have taken your medications, if you need food or childcare. She is with you at the funeral, there for you as you return to life. For many, she becomes for a time the one person they know they can trust and believe in. They never forget it.

Her Impact

More than 1,000 people have been killed in Oakland since 2000, when Harris' son was murdered in West Oakland. Nearly all of the 1000-plus victims' families have been helped through their most excruciating days by the sure hand of Miss Marilyn, as Harris is known throughout Oakland. With a minimal staff and small budget, Harris has almost single-handedly aided thousands of Oaklanders. When her son was killed, there was no one to help the survivors; they were the forgotten people, often shunned even within their own communities. And they would remain bitter, sometimes bent on revenge. Now, instead of returning survivors of the killed to the world alone and lost, she returns people who have begun the process of healing. The impact of her work spreads far beyond the individuals she guides, far beyond the days and weeks after a homicide. Even the police rely on Harris to calm the roiling souls of survivors so they can do their investigative work. To grieving families, she is a vivid reminder that the whole world is not against you. To anyone who knows her, she is a symbol of the possibility of carrying on against the greatest odds. Marilyn Harris saves lives.

Her Leadership

When her son was shot dead in 2000, Marilyn Harris had billboards erected across West Oakland with his picture and the stark question: Do You Know Who Killed Me? We still don't, but ever since then she has been an unapologetic defender and proponent of the victims of Oakland's implacable problem with violence. She is the inspiration for countless survivors and for violence prevention specialists throughout the city. An accomplished public speaker of unimpeachable credibilty, Harris is an articulate and reasoned voice of reality in a city grasping for healing. She has the ear of everyone, from city leaders to wounded and disaffected victims. In her own life, with self-effacing modesty, she demonstrates acceptance without surrender, while cajoling the powerful and the seemingly powerless to move forward, to see reality, to choose peace and forgiveness, and to maintain faith in the city and its people. With her humor, her honesty, her belief in the necessity of love and healing on a personal and a civic level, she is an example of the strength and fortitude to be found deep inside all of us. Every day, she leads individuals towards healing and Oakland toward its better self.

Oakland Violence Prevention Workers Grant and Gutierrez in the Media

In the past couple of weeks, two of the three violence prevention workers I profiled in No Escape, No Surrender (San Francisco Magazine, April 2012) have been featured in local media. First, Caheri Gutierrez and some of the students she works with at Castlemont High School (in the Teens on Target program, out of the nonprofit, Youth Alive) were interviewed for a KTVU news spot. Then Kevin Grant was the featured guest on KQED's Forum program. Caheri and her students talked about life in East Oakland and their work to create change. Kevin talked about trying to keep the peace between gangs and answered some tough questions about the state of things in Oakland here in the beginning a new year. Here are links:

Caheri Gutierrez on KTVU

Kevin Grant on Forum

Oakland's Kevin Grant Awarded California Peace Prize

I've written about Kevin Grant a lot on this blog. He has been a key participant in the city's Ceasefire gang call-ins and was one of the three Oakland violence prevention workers I profiled in San Francisco Magazine in April 2012. Kevin has been tireless in his efforts to keep the peace on the streets of Oakland and to lead young people here to a better way of life. Much of his work is funded by Measure Y. Now he has been recognized, along with two other Californians, by The California Wellness Foundation. They've awarded Kevin their annual Peace Prize. It's a big deal. Here's the press release, with what they had to say about him and his work:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE November 12, 2012 Contact: Laurie Kappe i.e. communications, LLC (415) 616-3930 Adriana Godoy Leiss The California Wellness Foundation (818) 702-1900

The California Wellness Foundation Announces 20th Annual California Peace Prize Honorees

Kevin Grant

Kevin Grant is a renowned expert in street outreach, violence mediation and re-entry programs. Growing up on the streets of Oakland, Grant himself was in and out of the juvenile justice system at a young age. Released from federal prison in 1989, Grant says he gained from his experience the motivation to change the direction of his life and the compassion to help others like himself. As a consultant, he provides probation and parole re-entry services and conducts trainings and workshops for law enforcement agencies, community service providers and school districts at local, state and federal levels. Grant is the violence prevention network coordinator for Measure Y, which was passed in Oakland in 2004 to fund violence prevention and public safety. He leads skilled street outreach teams made up of members of the community, who intervene to prevent conflict and/or retaliation before they happen in Oakland's most dangerous neighborhoods. 

"I believe that a lot of the violence in our communities is preventable," Grant said. "Through building relationships, we can give the power back to the communities." 

The California Wellness Foundation is a private, independent foundation created in 1992, with a mission to improve the health of the people of California by making grants for health promotion, wellness education and disease prevention.

The Foundation prioritizes eight issues for funding: diversity in the health professions, environmental health, healthy aging, mental health, teenage pregnancy prevention, violence prevention, women's health, and work and health. It also responds to timely issues and special projects outside the funding priorities.

Since its founding, TCWF has awarded 6,544 grants totaling more than $815 million. It is one of the state's largest private foundations. Please visit TCWF's website at CalWellness.org for more information, including a newsroom section devoted to the California Peace Prize and the three honorees. High-resolution photos are also available. Video interview clips are posted at TCWF's YouTube channel.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan Profiled

Unraveling the Tangled Web She Weaves
by Jim O'Brien
in the October issue of San Francisco Magazine

Oakland "Ceasefire" Returns

After a hiatus, Oakland is bringing back the call-ins. Not sure precisely how they will look this time around, but here's a link to my description of the ones I attended in the summer of 2010:

A Violent Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

                      Inside a Gang Call-In

Also please see my October 2014 article in San Francisco Magazine on Oakland's Operation Ceasefire - Guns Down. Don't Shoot.

Insight and Denial in a Jean Quan Quote

With 4 homicides last week, among them the 16-year-old mother of an 8-month-old, Oakland has had 69 killings in 2012, including the 7 slain in the Oikos massacre in April. That is 69 killings in the 32 weeks of the year so far. 

 I interviewed Oakland Mayor Jean Quan on August 10th, for an upcoming profile in San Francisco Magazine. I think it will be in the October issue. We spoke in her office at City Hall for over an hour and covered a wide range of issues, including economic development, crime, the effects of mayoral fame on her life and family, the differences between life in the hills and life in the flatlands and what, if anything, connects or could connect the two seemingly alien parts of Oakland.

Mayor Quan talks quickly, swallows words, and sometimes follows whatever stream her consciousness takes her down. She is capable, in answer to any question, of demonstrating insight and a keen awareness of Oakland's problems before very quickly saying something that sounds like she's in denial.

I don't think her denial is necessarily reflected in her policies or her work. And maybe she sees it as necessary to her role as booster-in-chief of all things Oakland. But I wish she would stop it anyway.

The following Quan quote from the interview is an example that shows 1) how well she understands the depths of the city's generations-long problem with violence; and 2) her willingness to use vague numbers to, at least verbally, brush aside what I believe she knows is Oakland's open wound.

"I think for the kids in the poorest neighborhoods we're really talking about people who for now a couple of generations who just are, their families have been under attack for one thing or the other. You know, have kids who grew up without parents who were lost to the crack epidemic 20 years ago when I became a school board member; the murder rate was twice as high in the city. And a lot of people, so a lot of people think 'oh, it's really high now;' well, it was, it used to be much higher and it's been coming down so that if you look at a map (I think she means "graph" - JO'B), it's like the murder rate's been going down, hit an all-time low the last year of the Dellums administration when we had the most police, it's a little bump up and now I'm trying to get it back parallel, and then on track to being where [we were?], I don't know, we just had a murder today... no informatoin, no information, we've been having about 1 a week, and last year we were having about 2 a week." 

                                                                                                 - Jean Quan, Mayor of Oakland

How to Rate a Visit from President Obama

Sorry, no results found for 'oakland oikos.'

How big must an American massacre be to rate some Presidential consoling? Twelve murdered in the nightmare in Colorado beckoned the President, and rightfully he traveled there to address the stunned survivors and a wounded community. 

Seven dead in Oakland in a massacre in April did not rate a visit.

(Although the President will be in Oakland this month, to give a campaign speech at the beautiful Fox Theater, and to raise money in the town of Piedmont, the exclusive municipal island of unimaginable wealth completely surrounded geographically by Oakland.)

Maybe it is out there somewhere, I hope it is, but as for the Oikos University massacre, which took place here in early April of 2012, I can barely find a Federal government statement beyond this boilerplate from the Secretary of Education:

"I was saddened to learn of the senseless violence and loss of life at Oikos University in Oakland. My thoughts are with the community and families of the victims." -- Arne Duncan.

On the other hand, here's some of the White House reaction to Colorado:

"As we do when we are confronted by moments of darkness and challenge, we must come together as one American family. All of us must have the people of Aurora in our thoughts and prayers as they confront the loss of family, friends and neighbors, and we must stand together with them in the challenging hours and days to come." 

-- President Barack Obama

The President dedicated his weekly address to the Colorado massacre, as he should have: Remembering the Victims of the Aroura, Colorado Shooting.

Here is a list of the President's weekly addresses in April 2012:

April 7: Easter and Passover

April 14: It's Time for Congress to Pass the Buffett Rule

April 21: Calling on Congress to Prevent Student Interest Rates from Doubling

April 28: Helping Our Veterans and Servicemembers Make Informed Decisions  

                 about Higher Education

What were the differences between the massacres? The obvious difference is the number. How many must be killed in a day by one crazed gunman to inspire the President to come? I honestly don't know the answer, nor do I know what's right, but I suspect you need to get into the double-digits in deaths. Over the course of each year, Oakland does that easily. Many years we reach the triple digits in killings. Last year there were over 100 homicides here. But it is a slow-motion massacre. It takes too long to spark a visit, a Presidential comment, or even much if any debate about gun laws.

Here's a another difference: unlike in Aurora, Colorado, many of the dead at Oikos were immigrants or foreign nationals, some with unfamiliar-looking names, others with names reflective of our immigrants' historic desire to become American-ized; and they were killed not at a famous university like Virginia Tech, but at an obscure school with a name no one was quite sure how to pronounce. The names of the dead at Oikos:

Kathleen Ping

Doris Chibuko

Judith Seymore

Sonam Choedon

Grace Eunhae Kim

Lydia Sim

Bhutia Tshering

Otherness is often key to the emotional processing of homicides. Some refuse to separate themselves from the killing and the killed. But in many parts of Oakland, so long as the killed are not like you, you can deal with the shock and sadness quickly and neatly. You might be moved, but only for a moment. The flatlands, the Deep, the lives and deaths of the victims, they are all a foreign country. Same with the dead and wounded at Oikos. And so, as far as I can tell, and again, maybe I am just not finding it out there, the White House had little or nothing to say to us about the slaughter.

But the White House is all over the killings in Colorado, supposedly a swing state, unlike California.