COLUMN: 25 years in Pottstown and still writing about gun violence
POTTSTOWN — It was 25 years ago, just a month into my tenure at The Mercury, that I covered my first shooting in Pottstown.
Joseph Torrence was paralyzed after being shot at the corner of Chestnut and Washington streets in December, 1997. “Wake up call for Pottstown?” The Mercury headline shouted a day later.
A community meeting was held, Town Watch was activated and a park was created at the corner at the site of the old Houck Funeral Home to try to make the community safer.
In August, 25 years later, Dakari Rome, 25, was shot and killed within sight of the Ricketts Community Center; a place were kids are supposed to feel safe.
And, just last week, two Pottsgrove High School students, 17-year-old Skyler Fox and 18-year-old Brandon Bacote-Byer, were shot dead less than a block from my house. Sitting in my kitchen eating a late dinner of homemade sausage soup, I heard the shots.
There is a grim joke on social media that there is a game played in Pottstown when sharp retorts are heard: “Gunshots or fireworks?” but I knew these were not fireworks.
What has changed in 25 years?
From what I can see through the eyes of someone who did not grow up here, is there seem to be fewer things for kids to do and even less unity than there was when I got here.
At least two community meetings have now been held, one before the Fourth Street shooting, one after. In both meetings, only one of which I was able to attend, the themes were the same:
— Mentors are needed to turn young people away from violence and hopelessness toward inclusion and a sense of belonging, a sense of usefulness.
— Pottstown, particularly the Black community, has lost the things that used to provide some of that sense of belonging, and activities after school, things like Pottstown-centered PAL Football and Little League, Gruber Pool, local control of The Ricketts Community Center, affordability at the YMCA are all gone.
— There is an inability, or unwillingness, of well-meaning, like-minded community organizations to work together comprehensively, hand-in-glove without concern for who gets the spotlight.
— Loss of neighborhood cohesiveness: Truly the neighborhood once raised the child, teaching among other things, accountability and responsibility.
When the village falters
It may take a village to raise a child “but the child not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”
That’s how Tiffany Thurman, the vice president for government and community affairs at the Greater Philadelphia YMCA started the meeting on gun violence Tuesday, held one day after the murders on Fourth Street.
One resident raised in Pottstown and now 32 recalled that longtime resident Quanzella Jones “raised me. Every day after school I was in her house. And if she saw me doing something I shouldn’t, she would beat my ass, and then she’d call my mother who would beat my ass again.”
Now, without that neighborhood cohesion, without those known neighbors, without the activities children here once enjoyed, “the town has collapsed. We can’t afford the Y, Ricketts is closed on the weekends, Gruber pool is gone, and the kids are entertaining themselves,” she said.
They are entertaining themselves with a culture that revels in drugs and gun violence. And there seem to be fewer and fewer adults in their lives offering them any alternative.
‘All the things we’ve lost’
David Charles is one of them. His S.T.R.I.V.E. Initiative runs a mentoring program at Pottstown Middle School and he too lamented what has been lost.
“We’re boxed in. All the things we’ve lost, it’s systemic. When I was young, we couldn’t go to North End Pool, because we were Black. We couldn’t go to Stowe, because we were Black. We couldn’t go across the river, because we were Black. But we had Gruber and we had the center and one by one, everything we needed was taken away.”
Although Charles said his program is having some success, which he measures one student at a time, “we don’t have them when they leave school. We don’t have them on the weekends.”
And that, said Thurman, is one of the problems that needs to be addressed — how to get programs that already exist, to work together to close those gaps. “It’s like a puzzle,” said Thurman. “Each of these programs is a piece and the community has to work together to see how the puzzle fits together.”
Consistency is key
None of those puzzle pieces can be any use if they aren’t funded.
Jocelyn Charles, the director at the Ricketts Center and recently named executive director of Multi-service, the Boyertown-based non-profit that runs programs there, agrees.
She warned that seeking grants is a tedious process with a long timeline and mixed success. “I can apply for a grant in August and not get any money until January,” she said. Nevertheless, all efforts must be made because funding brings what kids need most — consistency.
“Once you get a kid into a program, it has to be consistent, they must be able to rely on it. Because their parents are working and if it goes away, they’re right back out on the street,” Charles said.
Echoing the need for consistency, Sharron Grinnage began a program for teens this summer that, he said, they are clamoring to run again.
Called Breaking the Cycle Mentoring Academy, Grinnage is a former drug dealer who spent time in prison, was the victim of a violent home invasion in which his girlfriend was killed and who has now dedicated his life to preventing the kinds of crimes he committed. That experience, he said, gives his programs an authenticity with teens who have already started down the wrong path.
Part of the cause of the recent uptick in violence in Pottstown is a surge of drugs and distributors from Philadelphia who come to Pottstown because they think it will be easier to operate outside the city, Grinnage said.
“We’re not ready,” he warned, adding that more needs to be done to reach kids “where they are” and intervene before it’s too late.
One speaker at Tuesday’s meeting, a working mother who asked that her name not be used, knows a thing or two about the damage that can be done by Philadelphia’s drug culture and about the need for intervention.
Her 17-year-old daughter was shot in the head, but survived, and mom continued to work. Subsequently, she found out her 14-year-old was making trips down to the Kensington section of Philadelphia, which has a reputation as an open-air drug market.
As her younger child had increased contact with law enforcement, mom eventually had to quit her job just to ensure all the constantly shifting court dates and programs trying to offer help were met and attended.
“I need to do everything I can for my child, but this court system is like a full-time job, except it’s not putting any food on the table,” she said. And so the attempt to solve one problem gives way to another for those without sufficient income.
Learning from success
Also important in the seemingly intractable continuation of gun violence is experience with what works.
“We don’t want to re-create the wheel. We need to glean what works from people who are running programs that work,” said Marlene Hedgepeth. She is the vice president of the Montgomery County Mentor Association which convened a gun violence town hall at Mount Olive Baptist Church on Oct. 15.
Among the panelists at that gathering was Dorothy Johnson-Speight, who founded Mothers in Charge after her son was killed in Philadelphia in a fight over a parking spot.
Her violence-prevention programs center on education, intervention, grief counseling and “working with the whole family. They take a wholistic approach,” Hedgepeth said.
Reuben Jones, who runs a program called Frontier Dads, is also a clinical therapist and understands the early warning signs when a child is considering the wrong path., Hedgepeth said
Hakim Jones, no relation, is a Norristown Borough Councilman who heads a program called Men of Excellence, and he has expertise in the finances of funding anti-violence efforts. “We need to understand that aspect of things so we can make use of them,” Hedgepeth said.
Other speakers included Charles from STRIVE; the Rev. Janet Simmons from Victory Christian Life Center in Pottstown; the Rev. Darrell Brown from The Word Church; Johnny Corson, president of the Pottstown chapter of the NAACP, and the Rev. Justin Valentine of Kingdom Life Church in Pottstown.
Week Without Violence?
Monday, the same day that Fox and Baycote-Byer were shot and killed was the day that kicked off the YWCA’s Week Without Violence event. The irony and the tragedy is not lost on Stacey Woodland, executive director of the YWCA Tri-County Area.
“We are hopeful our elevation of the issues of gun violence and domestic violence in this community will help people find solutions to violence,” Woodland said Saturday.
A string of festive looking banners was strung across the front of the YWCA’s King Street Day Care Center. However the festiveness faded when Woodland pointed out that each flag represents a child who was killed by a gun this year across the country.
Woodland chided a politician, who she declined to name, who recently expressed anger at the teens involved saying “they don’t understand the actions that they’re taking, and how permanent they are. But I’m not angry with children at all. I’m really angry with politicians. I think there’s opportunity for our politicians to take action on gun violence and it would have tremendous purpose in our communities and tremendous impact,” she said.
Hopefully, Woodland said, highlighting the programs available at YWCA and at other organizations “will encourage people to put their children “in activities that will keep them out of harm’s way, on either end of the gun.”
‘We need unity’
Hedgepeth said her take-away from the meeting at Mount Olive was similar to the takeaway from the YWCA meeting, which she also attended. “The kids in our community need more structure, which means we need more partnerships,” she said.
“And we need unity. Part of our problem is everyone wants to be in charge. Everyone wants to be the one with the microphone,” said Hedgepeth, who organized the Juneteenth Celebration at the Ricketts Center. “We can’t do that any more. We need unity if we’re going to reach these children.”
Perhaps Congresswoman Madeleine Dean, D-4th Dist., put it best during her own town hall Wednesday when the subject of the shootings and gun violence was raised.
“This year, 44,000 people were killed by gun violence, in a single year; 4,400 of them were children. It touches us directly here when children are gunned down on the street,” said Dean. “This is a man-made problem. This not a natural disaster, it’s man-made. And therefore, we have to do something about it.”
She’s right. Only we, as a family, as a community, as a country can solve this problem. The lives of our children literally depend on it. They need us to be the adults in charge.
I hope we can do it, because I don’t want to be writing this same column 25 years from now.
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