kids, and with the others I get a description, but with Emma they tend to describe the feeling after she enters. They describe tranquility. Sometimes they portray it radiating from her, settling over her surroundings, other times it’s her little body absorbing the tension, drawing anxiety out of the air. Her smile is often mentioned, but more often the smiles in the room.
About a dozen MFOL kids were bouncing around Emma’s spacious living room. Big relief, ice broken, now what? “Honestly neither side knew why we were there,” Alex said. “It was like, put Parkland and Chicago together and hey, let’s just see what happens. And we got to connect right off the bat.”
They ate pizza on the lanai, and chicken wings. The food just kept coming. They played a lot of icebreaker games, splashed around in the pool, and spent time just being kids together. “We became friends before we went into the deeper conversation of what we have to do to change this,” Alex said.
They went back inside, piled onto the puffy off-white couches, pulled in dining chairs, and shared their terrible stories. Alex described his nephew DeShawn Moore getting gunned down the previous spring. May 28, 2017.
“It was a Sunday afternoon, I believe. He was on the porch with his girlfriend at her house and this car was circling the block and one time when they came around the block again, they started to shoot. He pushed her in a panic into the house, he tried to run home but— He tried to run away from the shots, but it turned out he was running towards them, and when he turned around trying to get away, it turned out he was shot twice . . . once in the back of the head and once in the back.”
Alex learned his nephew was dead on Facebook. Was that common? Yes, pretty common. Alex had lost several family members to gunfire, but losing DeShawn was the one that sent him reeling. He leaned forward on Emma’s cozy couch to recount that story, then confessed his plunge into self-destruction, and his road out.
Self-destruction, the Parkland kids hadn’t seen that coming, but Alex’s buddy D’Angelo McDade had a similar tale. D’Angelo is even taller than Alex, with a similar big frame, a high and tight haircut and chinstrap beard. He’s a bit more serious than Alex, and a natural orator, with a preacher’s cadence when he gets going. He sat back from the circle a bit, on a dining room chair, directly across from Jackie and Emma, who leaned in intently. D’Angelo spiraled downward after he got shot in August 2017. He was hanging out on his porch with his grandfather and a dozen family friends, when a man they’d never seen before came walking down the street and opened fire. “I was shot in my left leg, one from the left side and one from the right side,” he said. “The left side, it went in but did not come out; the right side, a bullet ricocheted off a doorframe and hit my leg. I was on crutches for six weeks.” His grandfather and another relative were also hit. Everyone survived. “And to be clear, we don’t have drug dealers in our houses—gangs, or anything,” he said. “It’s literally just an old-time place with old folks and children.”
The shooter was caught and released multiple times, and D’Angelo believes he will likely get away with attempted murder—three counts. “There is an assumption that if your house is being shot up that you are a drug dealer and/or gangbanger,” he said. So getting shot was another strike against him; he could feel the thud of doors slamming shut in his future. Victimization of the victim.
“I had a really bad attitude,” D’Angelo said. “I had this attitude of, ‘You can’t tell me anything.’” Then he found the Peace Warriors. Violence is woven so deeply into these kids’ lives, and the Peace Warriors seek to unravel it, one strand at a time. But the key step is stopping violence at the source. The Peace Warriors call themselves interrupters. “Interrupters of nonsense,” D’Angelo said. “We associate nonsense with violence, whether verbal or physical. If two students are engaging in horseplay and then begin showing verbal aggression, our Peace Warriors immediately step in. Mediating that situation to make sure that conflict does not rise to a pervasive or worse problem.”
That required a whole lot of bodies to be present when it mattered. Their goal was to