Last Monday, 28-year-old Audrey Hale opened fire at Covenant School, a pre-K to sixth grade Christian school in Nashville. Three children, each 9 years old, and three adults were killed in the attack by the former student. As this story unfolded, many people on local social media feeds expressed their shock that this happened at a private school in Nashville, not in Memphis. Others correlated it with a desperate need for mental health resources. And in others, it further spurred fears of sending their children to school at all. Nowhere is safe.
Here at home, just before the clock struck midnight on Monday, a series of loud booms roused me from sleep. Shortly after, a post on the neighborhood Facebook page: “Wow. Hope everyone is okay …” A neighbor shared a clip from her home security footage, which only showed a darkened porch, but the 11 rounds that rang out no doubt came from an assault rifle. We don’t bother calling them in much these days. With no description of the shooter or vehicle and no injuries to report, it won’t make a difference. In the recent past, I’ve had to have the hood of my car repaired — to patch a hole from a stray fallen bullet; thankfully, it was just my car that received damage.
Over the weekend, I saw a post shared from Nextdoor about random gunfire Downtown around 8:30 p.m. Saturday. Danya McMurtrey wrote, “It appears that a couple of expensive sports cars were having a shoot-out amidst a throng of tourists. … My 17 year old niece was one of these tourists buying ice cream at Maggie Moo’s on Main before it all went to hell. She was sobbing, traumatized. Two 87 year old women from Napa CA were tourists enjoying a lovely Memphis evening until this occurred. They were scrambling to return to their hotel, traumatized. A sweet family from Indiana had a lovely day at the zoo and were admiring the lights of Main Street until gunfire invaded their evening. They were traumatized. I hid behind a pillar in a parking garage and came eye-to-eye with a freaked-out shelter-seeking carriage horse. I’ve never seen a horse so afraid. We were both traumatized. … Yet, I’ve seen nothing reporting that this even occurred. I’ve become immune to the sound of gunshots in midtown (heard them Friday night, last night — they are in the distance, not about me, I rationalize). I guess last night made me realize how problematic resignation and apathy are, especially my own.”
I wasn’t able to find any news reports on that incident, but here’s a sampling of gun violence-related stories I did see from Friday to Monday.
“Man fires five shots into car on I-40”
“East Memphis crime spree ends with crash in North Memphis”
“One dead after North Memphis shooting”
“One dead in South Memphis shooting”
“Two injured, one dead in Parkway Village shooting”
“Another suspect in custody after Southaven ‘ambush’”
“Shots fired at deputies in Midtown, deputy crashes on way to scene”
“Man dead after shooting in Soulsville”
“MPD: Suspect shoots, kills man after agreeing to boxing match”
“Shots fired at police after Frayser crash, two detained”
“Teen charged after armed robbery at Olive Branch Piccadilly”
“Two teens in hospital after shooting in Southwest Memphis”
“One dead, one injured after shooting in Frayser”
Four days. This wasn’t an anomaly. It’s a standard news cycle. The scary part lies in the many more incidents that aren’t called in and aren’t covered.
Last week, the Memphis Police Department announced that 44 recruits graduated the 138th training session to become officers. Earlier this month, the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security said 66 Tennessee Highway Patrol troopers were now serving the Memphis District, which covers Shelby, Fayette, Tipton, Lauderdale, Crockett, Haywood, and Hardeman counties. Can law enforcement curb this violence? We can’t arrest ourselves out of this problem.
In a state allegedly so concerned with protecting its children — by banning drag shows and taking away reproductive and other healthcare rights — there sure are a lot of children being killed by gun violence. And more often, it seems, teens and young adults are pulling the trigger.
We need to support the politicians, activists, and organizations who work to elevate, educate, and empower the citizens of Memphis — the youth, homeless, poverty-stricken, the disadvantaged, and underserved.
This is our city. This is about us. We are not immune. Will we resign to apathy?
For Shreya Ganesh, Thursday was supposed to be a day to focus on planning senior class events like the student body election. Instead, she and other students at White Station High School were dealing with the aftermath of another night of violence in Memphis — this time, a shooting spree across the city that left four people dead and three wounded.
But along with the shock, fear, and grief that reverberated through the school, Ganesh said, there was a feeling of comfort in watching students and staff come together to support one another through productive conversations.
The morning began with an announcement from her principal, who told students that resources were available for anyone who was struggling. Ganesh and her fellow seniors discussed the incident at length during their meeting, and her teachers brought up the incident during every class period.
“I feel like our school has a really large support system,” Ganesh said. “The way that it was such an open conversation and we talked about it in a group, it just makes you realize you’re not in it alone and everybody’s having the same fears that you are.”
On Thursday, activists, school officials, and city leaders alike called for the community to similarly come together to find solutions to the violence that has flared across Memphis.
The series of shootings Wednesday paralyzed parts of the city as police searched for a suspect over several hours. Police later arrested and charged Ezekiel Kelly, 19, with killing one man, and said he is a suspect in the other deaths, according to The Commercial Appeal. He had been released from prison just six months earlier.
The shooting spree came just days after Eliza Fletcher, a pre-kindergarten teacher at St. Mary’s Episcopal School and mother of two, was kidnapped and killed during an early morning jog Friday.
In a message posted to social media Thursday morning, Memphis-Shelby County Schools’ interim superintendent, Toni Williams, sought to reassure families and employees. The district increased safety and security measures at all schools — including at Southwind High School, which was the target of a threatening social media post — and Williams promised officials would “continue to monitor and provide additional support to our schools.”
“We understand that our students and staff may be upset and confused by what occurred — I believe the whole city is shaken — and we will encourage thoughtful discussion with a focus toward healing,” Williams wrote. “We have counselors, social workers, and mental health supports to assist our students and families.”
And in a tweet late Thursday afternoon, Williams encouraged the city to “channel our fears and frustrations following recent events into actions and solutions.”
Daniel Warner, a government teacher at East High School, began his classes Thursday by handing out small pieces of paper to all his students and posing a simple question: Given the recent events in our city, what are you bringing with you today?
Students were free to write down some of the emotions. Warner didn’t collect the papers. He let students decide what to do with them: throw them away, keep them, or hand them to him if they needed help or support. They closed the exercise by saying some affirmations together.
“I just wanted to give them space to process whatever they were feeling,” Warner said. “Learning how to tend to their own hearts and spirits amid troubling events is something that’s going to really sustain them in their life.”
MSCS board Chair Michelle McKissack called for a comprehensive approach to crime and violence in Memphis. A day after district officials hit back at Mayor Jim Strickland for linking rising truancy and declining school enrollment to juvenile crime, McKissack suggested local elected officials should convene an emergency summit to explore solutions.
“It’s not just the one problem of getting guns off the streets or tackling truancy — it’s all of it,” McKissack said. “We’re operating too much in silos. We should not be making national news time after time.”
Board Vice Chair Althea Greene also said the district is focused on collaborating more with the county, Juvenile Court, and other organizations.
But on Thursday, Greene focused on Memphis students and families. She started her day at Promise Academy-Hollywood, where she said she witnessed a somber school drop off.
People looked tired, Greene said. Many parents waited in the car with their students until the school doors opened, rather than sending them off to line up in front of the school. One parent in a car was crying because she had lost two family members the night before.
Wednesday’s shooting spree was all students were talking about. That was also the case at the three other schools Greene visited Thursday morning during breakfast and in between lessons.
“They weren’t talking about reading and math today — they were talking about what happened in our city,” Greene said. “That’s just not the culture and climate we want for our students. So we’re going to have to work together as elected officials to change that and to make sure we put the correct policies and laws in place.”
Samantha West is a reporter for Chalkbeat Tennessee, where she covers K-12 education in Memphis. Connect with Samantha at swest@chalkbeat.org.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
Gov. Bill Lee signed an executive order Monday directing Tennessee schools and law enforcement to double down on existing school safety protocols in the wake of a shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers at a Texas elementary school.
But the Republican governor said restricting access to guns is off the table, and he called for continuing the state’s “prioritized practical approach to school safety.”
That means greater fortification of schools to make it more difficult for an intruder to enter them — a policy that former Gov. Bill Haslam, another Republican, stepped up in 2018 after a shooter killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida.
At a morning news conference, Lee said school communities can expect more unannounced security inspections to make sure all doors are locked so that visitors have only a single point of entry when the new school year begins.
The governor directed the Tennessee Law Enforcement Training Academy to work with the state safety department to evaluate training standards in active-shooter situations, and announced required training for security guards at private schools. He called on state troopers to familiarize themselves with school patterns and school communities in their regions to become more involved in school safety.
And he directed the state education department to seek federal permission to use federal COVID-relief funding to conduct independent school safety assessments that identify needed building upgrades.
“There are things we can control, and there are things we cannot,” Lee said after signing his order. “And one of the things that we can control … (is how) to improve the practical, pragmatic steps to making a school safer.”
Democrats, however, characterized Lee’s order as a photo opportunity that won’t lead to meaningful change.
“I reject the notion that we are helpless against confronting gun violence,” said state Sen. Raumesh Akbari, of Memphis.
“Tennessee families believe in responsible gun ownership, and they support laws that would deny firearms and weapons of war to people who can’t pass a background check,” Akbari added. “That’s not radical. That’s just common sense.”
Lee’s four-page order comes two weeks after an 18-year-old legally purchased an AR-15-style rifle and opened fire on a classroom filled with children and teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, before being killed by law enforcement.
And over the weekend, a string of shootings left at least 15 people dead and more than 60 others wounded in eight states, including in Tennessee, where three people were killed and 14 were injured early Sunday morning outside a nightclub in Chattanooga and two people died of gunshot wounds in southeast Shelby County.
Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly, who described himself as an “avid hunter” and gun owner, called on Congress to enact “common sense regulations” such as mandatory background checks and a ban on high-capacity magazines that let shooters fire dozens of rounds without having to reload.
But Lee rejected those ideas when asked whether Tennessee would seek to issue its own regulations.
“We are not looking at gun restrictions or gun laws as a part of a school safety plan going forward,” he told reporters.
Tennessee has one of the nation’s highest rates of gun deaths, including murders, suicides and accidental shootings. But the state has loosened restrictions on gun ownership since 2019 under Lee’s leadership. Last year, it joined more than a dozen other states that allow most adults 21 and older to carry handguns without first clearing a background check, obtaining a permit, or getting trained on firearms safety.
Asked whether the rise in gun violence constitutes a public health crisis, Lee called it a “serious and rising problem” and added that his executive order is a “first step” in addressing it.
“If we work together and implement the things that we have put in place in our state and strengthen those things — and we will be strengthening them over the next months — then we can work together to ensure that our schools are in fact safe places,” Lee said.
He added that he wants every Tennessee K-12 campus eventually to have a school resource officer and noted that his 2019 grant program has helped place more than 200 officers in public schools.
Marta W. Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
Gov. Bill Lee said Thursday that his administration began reviewing Tennessee’s school safety policies and programs the day after an 18-year-old gunman walked into an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and killed 19 children and their two teachers.
“We will be taking steps in the days and weeks to come that will enhance our ability to secure students in the classroom,” said Lee, speaking with reporters for the first time since the May 24 massacre at Robb Elementary School.
His top two priorities: make school campuses more secure and support mental health, especially for young people.
Lee has sought to strengthen both areas since taking office. In 2019, the new Republican governor raised the state’s annual investment in school safety funding, especially to increase the number of schools supported by law enforcement personnel known as school resource officers. And in 2021, he championed a $250 million mental health trust fund that dedicates annual investment income to support students’ emotional well-being.
He also expects school safety to be on the minds of legislators when they return to Nashville next January.
“There will be a long list of items that people will talk about and propose — one of them being whether to arm teachers, another being passing a red flag law,” Lee said. “I think we’re going to see a robust conversation all across America about what strategies to implement.”
Lee spoke with reporters in Fayetteville, Tennessee, after announcing that Wisconsin-based Ariens, a maker of commercial lawn mowers and snowblowers, will bring nearly 370 new jobs to build its products in the rural Middle Tennessee town.
Asked later by Chalkbeat about the Texas shooting, the governor characterized his office as “very engaged” on student safety.
“I’ve had very emotional conversations with parents who are afraid to send their children to school,” he said about how the shooting has shaken families and school communities anew.
A day earlier, about 50 pastors, parents, and physicians gathered outside of Lee’s office at the state Capitol to call for “common sense” gun control regulations. Among their demands: Ban semi-automatic assault weapons, armor piercing ammunition, and high-capacity magazines.
In Fayetteville, Lee answered five questions from Chalkbeat on gun violence and student safety. Chalkbeat lightly edited his answers for clarity and brevity.
Q: While the school year has ended, school safety is on the minds of Tennesseans after the Uvalde massacre. How are you working to prevent a similar tragedy here in Tennessee?
A: For three years, we have made investments, but we have to do more. From day one after that tragedy, we started an assessment of what has been done, and we’re developing a strategy. Part of the strategy is to make certain schools are using the resources that are available to them.
School resource officers are a key first step. A lot of accountability is necessary to make sure schools are actually carrying out established protocols, and that can be part of the SRO’s responsibility. We’ve learned that, in this event in Texas, a missed protocol or a lack of attention to detail can have tragic outcomes.
Q: After the 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, several Tennessee lawmakers proposed letting some teachers carry guns at school. The bills generally stalled, but there’s talk again of turning some teachers into armed security guards. Would you support such legislation?
A: I have said before that I would be in favor of a strategy that includes training and vetting and a very strategic and appropriate plan for (arming teachers). There are a lot of details that have to be right for that to be considered. But if lawmakers brought it forth, I would certainly consider it.
Q: Some of your critics have pointed to the 2021 “constitutional carry” bill you signed as part of the problem by allowing people 21 and older to carry handguns, openly or concealed, without a permit — all at a time when Tennessee has one of the nation’s highest rates of gun deaths. Was widening gun access the wrong direction?
A: Constitutional carry is a law that applies to law-abiding citizens. What we’re talking about in Texas was criminal behavior. Criminals don’t follow permit laws. They don’t follow gun laws. They break the law. Constitutional carry has nothing to do with criminals who break the law. In fact, when we passed constitutional carry, we also passed laws that strengthened penalties for those who broke the law with guns. It’s very important that we separate criminals who use guns in criminal activity and law-abiding citizens.
Q: What about limiting access to guns by people who are most likely to misuse them? Many are urging passage of red flag laws that permit police or family members to petition a court to order temporary removal of firearms when a person may present a danger to others or themselves.
A: That’s connected to mental health, but who is the arbiter of mental health? There are a lot of concerns about red flag laws — not only on issues of mental health but their effectiveness in general. Buffalo, New York (where another gunman killed 10 people on May 14) has red flag laws. So there’s just a lot of questions around those approaches.
Q: When it comes to support for mental health, Tennessee trails the rest of the nation. The state ranks 34th worst nationally for prevalence of mental illness and lower rates of access to care, and 40th for youth mental health, according to the 2022 report by Mental Health America, the nation’s leading community-based nonprofit for preventing mental illness. How are we bolstering mental health supports?
A: That is exactly why we established the mental health trust fund a few years ago. And our state’s new education funding formula actually strengthens our ability to tap into resources for mental health needs, for children in particular. The pandemic exacerbated all of the reasons why we need to be investing in these areas. So we have a commitment to investing in mental health resources and services across the state.
Marta W. Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
I’m one of the lucky weirdos who is both right-handed and left-eye-dominant. I discovered that fact when I was about 10 years old and was allowed to join in the “target practice” in the hills behind my grandparents’ house. When my uncle handed me a light rifle, I took it with my left hand and raised the sight to my left eye. Either my dad or my uncle corrected me, but I responded with something like, “It feels wrong.” Frankly “wrong” isn’t the half of it. It feels downright unnatural for me to shoot right-handed.
I’ll never forget my uncle laughing out loud at his bookish, right-handed nephew shooting like a southpaw. I remember my dad shrugging his shoulders with that “What are you gonna do?” expression on his face.
I share this story to underline this fact — I was raised around guns. I was never one of the cousins who really got a kick out of shooting, but I don’t think of a gun as some sort of mythic creature that can act of its own accord. I haven’t only seen them in movies and on TV. So I can only hope that you won’t write me off when I share this next story.
When I was about 10 years old, I lived with my mother and younger sister off Jackson Avenue in Midtown. We lived in a little gray duplex that, in my memory at least, sat on a small hill.
Late one night, my mom had to run an errand. I don’t remember what the errand was. Maybe she just desperately wanted a Pepsi. My mother has a fondness bordering on mania for Pepsi. I’m not sure where we were going, and I’m not sure why she decided to take us with her. It’s likely this was after our house had been broken into, so maybe she felt safer letting us sit in the car while she ran inside.
So she woke me up and stuffed me into a coat and rolled my sleeping sister up in a blanket like a burrito, and, with me in the lead and my mother carrying my sister, we made our way to my mom’s beat-up old Toyota. I was sitting up front in the passenger seat and my mother was bent over sliding my sister into the back seat when a man ran up and grabbed her purse.
He had a gun, a handgun, and he was pointing it at my mom. She screamed, hands up framing her face like a cartoon character who’s seen a mouse. I was frozen. But the mugger ran off and my mom eventually stopped screaming. This story has a happy ending. We survived, and we lost only a cheap faux-leather purse and its paltry contents.
It can happen so quickly. That’s what I’ll never forget, even though in reality, this is something of a non-story. No one was shot; no one was killed or even hurt. Still, people are shot and hurt and killed every day. There’s the thinnest of membranes between a regular day and the worst day of your life. And, unlike with disease or catastrophic storms, this is a problem of our own making.
I admit it’s not a problem with only one solution. It’s not even a problem with only one symptom. There are so many kinds of gun violence, and so many causes. It will take effort and expense and coordination to fix.
Last week, a 24/7 Wall St. study was published; it cited Memphis as the most dangerous city in the United States. Reports such as that one aren’t helping anyone. Writing off a city — or a community or neighborhood or ZIP code — as inherently dangerous is in itself a kind of violence. It says it’s socially acceptable to ignore that problem, to judge or avoid a place and its people. And of course, legislation like Tennessee’s “permitless carry” bill, which Governor Bill Lee signed into law earlier this year, isn’t helping either. We will have to do challenging work, on multiple levels, from different angles, to have a hope of living in a safer country, state, and city.
Fall brought a grim parade of violence to Memphis. On September 23rd, 29-year-old Uk Thang was fired from his job as a sushi vendor at the Collierville Kroger. He returned to the store with a gun and shot 14 people, one of whom, a widowed mother of three named Olivia King, died. Thang turned the gun on himself before police arrived.
On September 29th, a 13-year-old at Cummings K-8 Optional School shot and injured a classmate in a stairwell. Then, in the early morning of October 3rd, 36-year-old Rainess Holmes and three others broke into a home on North McLean occupied by several students at nearby Rhodes College, looking to steal electronics. When he and Andrew “Drew” Rainer scuffled over an iPad, Holmes shot him in the chest. Rainer died at the scene, and a second person was injured.
Then, on November 17th, Young Dolph, one of the most successful Memphis rappers of the last decade, was in Makeda’s Homemade Butter Cookies on Airways when two men rolled up in a white Mercedes. Armed with an assault rifle and an automatic handgun, they fired through the store’s front window. Young Dolph was pronounced dead at the scene, leading to an outpouring of grief for the man who had become known in the community for his generosity. No suspects have been arrested.
These high-profile stories of gun violence are the tip of the iceberg. In 2019, there were 237 homicides in Memphis. In 2020, there were 327, a 38 percent increase. By early December 2021, 310 Memphians had become victims of homicide, virtually guaranteeing that by year’s end the final toll will be higher than 2020. But killings alone don’t tell the whole story. So far this year, there have been more than 5,000 violent assaults in Memphis.
The alarming rise in gun violence is not purely a Bluff City phenomenon. According to the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive, the rate of firearms killings in the United States rose 24 percent from 2019 to 2020. Mass shootings rose from 417 to 611 over the same period. Curiously, this rise in violence comes at a time when all other crimes are trending downward. Property crimes like larceny and burglary are at their lowest rates since the mid-1960s.
“We’re seeing cities across the country that had a bad year in 2020, a very violent year,” says County Commissioner Mick Wright. “But it seems to be continuing here in Memphis, and that’s very concerning. I think it should be concerning to all elected officials, as well as everyone who lives here in Shelby County. We see it on the news every day. I think people are certainly tired of the shooting and looking for answers.”
What’s Going On? There are a lot of guns in America. In 2017, the Small Arms Survey found that there were about 393 million firearms in the United States — 122 guns for every 100 Americans. A 2020 survey by the RAND Corporation found that Tennessee ranked 14th in the nation in terms of gun ownership, with 51.6 percent of adults saying they had a gun in the home. The two states bordering the Memphis metro, Mississippi and Arkansas, ranked seventh and sixth, respectively, with 55.8 percent and 57.2 percent of households owning a firearm. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) statistics, there is a strong correlation between the number of guns in a state and the state’s gun death rate. Alaska, the state with the highest gun death rate, has the third-highest rate of gun ownership. Tennessee’s gun death ranking is 12, two positions higher than our ownership ranking. Meanwhile, Massachusetts, tied with New Jersey for the lowest gun ownership rate, is also the state with the lowest rate of gun deaths.
“Gun crime is top of mind everywhere we go,” Shelby County District Attorney Amy Weirich told a Rotary Club audience on November 30th.
And yet, the Tennessee Legislature is dead set on relaxing gun laws. In 2014, they passed a bill making it legal to store any firearm, loaded or unloaded, in a motor vehicle, as long as it is kept from “ordinary observation.” Weirich called the law a “contributing factor” in the escalation of gun violence. “Back in 2010, we had less than 300 guns stolen from cars,” she said, referring the audience to a chart her office produced. “You can see as of October 12, 2021, we’ve had 1,286.”
Weirich advocates for several measures that would streamline the process for the 150,000-200,000 criminal cases that pass through her offices every year, allowing prosecutors to focus on getting violent offenders off the street. She said the permitless carry law that went into effect on July 1st is a step in the wrong direction. “It takes away the ability of law enforcement to come up and ask to see your permit, if you are openly carrying in a restaurant or walking down the street or going into Home Depot. And that is an issue for law enforcement and will continue to be an issue. You know, there’s a lot of talk about penalizing and criminalizing car owners that don’t lock their gun up in their car safely, and that type of thing. My philosophy is always let’s punish the people that are stealing the guns to wreak havoc in our community, and let’s be serious about that. But I don’t know of any common sense legislation that’s floating around.”
Beyond Statistics Michael LaRosa, associate professor of history at Rhodes College, says the murder of Drew Rainer “has had a real chilling effect on the campus, and on that neighborhood, and on the whole city life, I think, because of how visceral it was. I’ve been working at Rhodes for 27 years. I’ve never seen anything like this. … The students are afraid, you know? They’re not afraid in the sense that they’re not going out or staying in their rooms barricaded. But they’re worried about their own personal security in what is really a very safe neighborhood.”
LaRosa does not hesitate to blame the proliferation of guns, thanks to what he calls an “antediluvian” attitude of Tennessee state lawmakers. “Everybody has a gun and that affects the way we interact with one another on the street, and it obviously affects the way the police do their job,” he says. “That’s why we had seven murders [in Memphis] this weekend.”
Erika Kelley (Photo: Courtesy Erika Kelley)
For Erika Kelley, gun violence is a personal issue. On March 18, 2016, she was preparing for her father’s wake. “The day before I buried my father, I got a call that my son, Dontae Bernard Johnson, had been found dead in a parking lot. We later found out he was robbed, shot, and killed due to senseless gun violence. This happened in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. At the time, he was 23 years old. In my last conversation with him, as he was preparing to come home for my father’s funeral, he shared with me that he and his high school sweetheart at the time were expecting their first child. He was so excited about that. My granddaughter is now 5 years old. He never got a chance to meet her.”
Dontae Bernard Johnson (Photo: Courtesy Erika Kelley)
Soon afterward, a friend who had also lost her son to gun violence reached out to invite Kelley to a meeting of Moms Demand Action (MDA), a grassroots group founded in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. She is now the local group leader for the Memphis chapter. Kelley and her group spent the last year lobbying against the “constitutional carry” law. “We have been back and forth to Nashville, going to the governor’s office, talking to him, trying to stop them from passing that law. There’s already enough gun violence. Constitutional carry is just asking for more. And as you can see, that’s what’s been going on.”
Erika Kelley and Pastor Brian Kelley (Photo: Courtesy Erika Kelley)
Ultimately, the group’s meetings with lawmakers were fruitless. “They would listen to us and say, ‘Well, we hear you.’ But obviously, that’s all they did because you see that law they passed. … We were with the chief of police and different local community leaders here in our city … The sheriff, he shared in a town hall meeting a couple of weeks ago that he drove all the way up there and met with the governor for five minutes. Basically, they didn’t care. They were already going to do what they want to do.”
Last June, Governor Bill Lee, who made permitless carry a top priority, called the law “long overdue.” He made the remarks during a ceremonial bill signing at the Beretta USA gun factory in Gallatin.
Searching for Answers Charlie Caswell Jr., executive director of Frayser’s Legacy of Legends CDC, is on the front lines of the fight against gun violence. Growing up in the Dixie Homes public housing projects, Caswell was no stranger to violence. “At 14 and 15 years old, both years, I witnessed my friends being murdered in front of me. It had a traumatic impact on my life that led to me acting out with anger over the years. That led me to want to reduce and mitigate that in the lives of other children.”
Charlie Caswell Jr. (Photo: Courtesy Charlie Caswell Jr.)
At the core of Caswell’s program is the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) questionnaire, which is administered to determine if people have experienced violence, abuse, or neglect; have seen a family member die by suicide; or are growing up in a household with substance abuse, mental health problems, or chronic instability due to parental separation or incarceration. About 61 percent of adults who take the test have experienced at least one ACE, and one in six say they have experienced four or more. ACEs disrupt the development of young brains. High scores on the ACE test are predictive of chronic disease, depression, and violent behavior. “Trauma comes in different capacities. It doesn’t have a color to it, or a gender, or a socioeconomic capacity. It happens. ACE tests that show physical abuse, emotional abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect, and household dysfunction before their 18th birthday, if you have four or more, you are 1,200 times more likely to attempt suicide, and 40 to 50 percent more likely to use drugs and alcohol.”
Caswell says that thousands of people in the predominantly Black neighborhoods of Frayser and South Memphis are caught in a cycle of poverty, neglect, and violence. “When these children and families are referred to us, we basically sit down with them to assess the trauma that they have experienced in their lives, and then we assess their resilience. We begin to focus on their strengths, which many of them, because of the trauma, have never really paid attention to. … What we recognize through this work, is that many of them have generational trauma. Some of the things that these young men and young women are going through, when we sit down and talk to the parents, the parents went through the same thing.”
Christina Gann is the program director for in-home services for Youth Villages, a Memphis-based nonprofit. “We work with a wide array of young people who are at-risk, and I see a lot who have juvenile justice involvement,” she says.
Gann and her Youth Villages colleagues say they have seen a change in the populations they serve. “I think one thing that did not help was the pandemic,” Gann says. “Kids are back in school this year, which has helped tremendously, but I think that that also made things more challenging for families, and then also for the kids. We saw an increase in a lot of different behaviors. But something else that we’ve experienced is, there’s a lot of exposure to trauma, whether it’s direct or indirect. There’s so much violence in the communities our families live in, and those kids are experiencing the effects of being exposed to that trauma, whether it’s defiance or their concern for their safety. So they feel like they need to get a gun to protect themselves.”
Caswell believes the social upheaval of the pandemic exacerbated his community’s existing problems — but he is quick to point out that his services have been in demand not just in Frayser, but all over the city, and a recent trip to the predominately white, rural community of Crossville, Tennessee, revealed the same problems of poverty, drug addiction, and generational trauma. “I say, there was an epidemic before the pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control, the same people who told us to wash our hands, stay six feet apart, and kept us in quarantine, were the same people who came out with the research in 1995 on the impact of trauma. When you take the people who are dealing with dysfunction, and you keep them in the house all year — they didn’t go to school, they didn’t go to work, they stayed in with the same family — all that trauma and negativity, just like a volcano, it then erupted. What we’re seeing is an eruption of what was already building up and was not being addressed, before we left them in that mess.”
“It’s Not a Mystery” On the streets, the grim parade continues. Friday, December 3rd, three teenagers and a nine-month-old baby were ambushed while sitting in their car at a Marathon gas station on Elvis Presley Boulevard. Breunna Woods, a 16-year-old cheerleader, and Phillexus Buchanan, a 15-year-old student at Hamilton High School, were killed, while another 16-year-old and the baby were wounded. Twenty-two people under the age of 17 have been murdered in Memphis so far this year.
Kat McRitchie, a longtime MDA activist, believes a public health approach is the only way forward. “It’s not a mystery, what causes gun violence. It’s a question of whether or not we have the political will and are willing to commit the resources to preventive measures that don’t always campaign well. They take lots of work, lots of coordination of multiple offices at various levels of government, nonprofit, healthcare, and education. It’s hard work, and sometimes, it’s expensive work. But in similar cities like St. Louis, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh, we have seen success when they treat gun violence like a public health epidemic and treat it strategically and take prevention very seriously. In Memphis, we’re used to taking a lot of problems for granted and accepting them as things we just have to respond to because they’re a given. Gun violence, like many other problems facing our city, can be prevented. It does not have to be this way. And if we, as a community will come together, it won’t be this way.”
In 2005, Cormac McCarthy released a novel called No Country for Old Men, a relentlessly brutal tale of a man who stumbles onto a drug deal gone wrong on the Mexican border and makes off with the loot he finds on a dead man. It doesn’t end well. Almost everybody in the book eventually gets murdered. No one gets a happy ending. The characters in the novel (and the subsequent movie) are driven by greed, revenge, grief, and blood-lust. There is no love story, no kindness, no forgiveness, no hero. Only senseless violence and death.
We learned a couple weeks ago that Memphis was no city for Young Dolph, a rising rapper who was assassinated at, of all places, Makeda’s Homemade Cookies. It was reportedly the third attempt on the artist’s life in the last five years. The first two were suspected of being the work of a rival rapper whose name I won’t mention here.
But Young Dolph was nothing if not resilient. Following a 2016 attempt on his life in Charlotte, North Carolina, which involved more than 100 shots being fired at his bullet-proof vehicle, he released an album called Bulletproof, which contained such songs as “100 Shots,” “In Charlotte,” “But I’m Bulletproof,” “I’m Everything You Wanna Be,” and “So Fuk’em.” Young Dolph’s response to a murderous attack on his life was to boast about his superiority to his attackers in his music and to gloat about their bad shooting.
Let me issue a “trigger warning” of sorts here: I — an old white guy — dug into the lyrics of Bulletproof, seeking to learn more about the art of Young Dolph, a performer who is revered by many hereabouts for his good works in the community. His was a name I’d heard, but I didn’t know his music.
Unsurprisingly, I guess, I found Young Dolph’s lyrics revolting. I get that the brutish misogyny, the profanity, the porn-ish sexual swaggering, the celebration of money, drugs, and violence found in Bulletproof’s lyrics is performative. I understand that it’s a genre, a trope; it’s “gangsta” — a celebration of outlaw life similar to Mexican corridos — songs that celebrate cartels, coyotes, and drug-runners. And I get that outlaws have been celebrated in country music and rock-and-roll forever. In “Folsom Prison Blues,” Johnny Cash brags that he “shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”
But this stuff seems next-level and not a healthy next-level. The language is disgustingly demeaning to women; it glorifies casual violence, avarice, and death. And it’s depressing to me that so many of America’s young people love this stuff and take it to heart — like whoever shot and killed two high school girls at a gas station drive-by shooting in Memphis recently. Gangsta.
But, here’s the thing: This toxic version of humanity is everywhere, and it crosses the country’s ethnic and cultural divides. You want to see another soulless, empty celebration of the cult of death? Look at Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert’s Christmas card tweet, wherein she poses with her young male children, all of whom are gleefully brandishing firearms. Listen to her intentional racism in video clips, read her blindingly stupid tweets. What the actual “fuk” is wrong with her? And with us, a country that contains districts in which a majority of the citizens vote for humans like this asshole?
And how do you explain Ethan Crumbley, the Michigan 14-year-old who took a gun his parents had just bought him and murdered four high-school classmates. I’d venture to say that his folks were not influenced by gangsta rap. They are more likely members of the far-right, white-supremacy death-cult that infests the Trump wing of the Republican Party. White American boys committing mass murder is no longer considered unusual. It’s just another trope. Like gangsta rap.
We are a wounded nation. We need to quit glorifying those who appeal to our basest instincts — guns, greed, racism. We need to rediscover the power of kindness and generosity, and do better. Or soon we’ll have no country for anyone.
The outlook for a hotly contested 2022 district attorney general’s race was intensified this week by an announcement from former Shelby County Commissioner and University of Memphis law professor Steve Mulroy that he very likely would seek the Democratic nomination to oppose the re-election of incumbent Amy Weirich, a Republican.
Mulroy would thereby become the second Democrat in the race, along with the already declared Linda Harris.
Much of the contest, in either eventuality, would hinge on party-line issues. But in a luncheon address last week to members of the Rotary Club of Memphis, Weirich demonstrated why she is credited with having substantial crossover potential.
She bit the bullet on an issue on which her GOP party-mates in state government can be — and have been — seriously faulted.
“Gun crime is top-of-mind everywhere we go,” said Weirich to the Rotarians. Referring to figures on a PowerPoint slide, she noted, “We are up probably over 21 percent.”
She continued: “Now as we sit here today as compared to when that chart was made, but gun crime is prevalent and of great concern. One of the contributing factors is legislation that was passed in 2014.”
This was the guns-in-cars bill, passed by the General Assembly’s Republican majority and allowed to become law by Republican Governor Bill Haslam. “Back in 2010, we had less than 300 guns stolen from cars,” Weirich said.
Referring again to the slide, she said, “You can see, as of October 20, 2021, we’ve had 1,286. Now that it is November 30, I would imagine that the figures are probably close to 1,400 guns stolen from cars.”
As she reminded her auditors, “When guns-in-cars legislation passed in 2014, it enabled people to travel around with guns in their cars without a special permit. And that meant more guns in cars on the street.
“It’s susceptible to theft. And people that are stealing guns are not doing so to do anything altruistic with it, correct? They’re doing it to continue to victimize citizens in our community, to continue to prey on innocent people. So that’s kind of what the landscape is right now.”
Moments later she dilated further, “One of our senators a few weeks ago made the comment about how far we’ve come economically as a state because everybody in the former governor’s [Haslam’s] administration was focused on turning that economic engine around.
“And it occurred to me just like if we had that same focus for public safety, just think what we could do, if everyone in Nashville and beyond was focused on victims of crime and doing everything we can to respect the victims of crime, to hold offenders accountable, and to treat public safety as the number-one priority that it should be.”
When audience members raised concerns about potential gun massacres occurring in Tennessee, Weirich said, “The answer to everyone’s nightmare is yes, it could very well happen here, particularly since the governor [current GOP Governor Bill Lee] signed into law permitless carry.
“And so now it takes away the ability in law enforcement to come up and ask to see your permit, if you are openly carrying in this restaurant or walking down the street or going into Home Depot. And that is an issue for law enforcement and will continue to be an issue.”
She would add, on the prospect of corrective action by the General Assembly, “I don’t know of any common sense legislation that’s floating around.”
Credit Weirich, on that issue, for some nonpartisan candor.
DJ Squeeky and Young Dolph (Photo courtesy DJ Squeeky)
“That’s the day my life and his life changed forever,” says DJ Squeeky on looking at the photo above. It was taken when “100 Shots,” the track he produced for fellow Memphian Young Dolph, went gold. “It took everybody to new heights. It showed everybody that you can do it as an independent. People didn’t believe that you could do that.”
DJ Squeeky is speaking with me about the murder of Young Dolph, aka Adolph Robert Thornton Jr., age 36, last Wednesday while he was visiting Makeda’s Cookies. Like Drake, Megan Thee Stallion, Gucci Mane, Rick Ross, Quavo, and others, the city of Memphis is still trying to process the sudden loss of a hometown hero.
“It’s heartbreaking,” says DJ Squeeky, aka Hayward Ivy. “It shouldn’t be like that. I promise you, it shouldn’t be like that. As humans, we’ve gotta fight back against the devil, cause the devil’s got his hands in everything right now. He’s passing out these guns to all the young folks. He’s got their minds different.”
Like so many Memphians, the producer relies on his faith when confronting such loss. He still has deep roots in the church he grew up attending, First Baptist on Beale. Indeed, that’s where he learned to play drums. “My mama still goes there every Sunday,” he says. “I still go there from time to time. And I know Dolph’s family was affiliated with a church.”
It may sound incongruous in the context of the harsh world evoked by trap music. But DJ Squeeky knew Dolph the man, not just the icon, and he’s quick to point out the principles behind Dolph’s artistry. “Look at it this way: Dolph didn’t even have guns and violence in his music. He didn’t pay any attention to that. He wasn’t talking about killing anyone in his songs. That’s the thing nobody paid any attention to. He didn’t kill anybody in his songs.”
Indeed, Doph’s attitude conveyed nothing so much as the triumph of the wit. As Harold Bingo, writing in Complex, puts it, “The Memphis rapper’s braggadocio was underscored by a gift for introspection and a willingness to make sure that everyone went along for the ride with him. Fans who heard his booming bravado and hilarious deadpan punchlines got to feel like they were riding shotgun through South Memphis in his fleet of luxury cars.”
And though tracks like “100 Shots” evoked a world of violence, and his survival against all odds, Dolph’s actions in life belied a generous, compassionate soul who was committed to staying true to his roots. “He ought to be remembered as a person who looked out for his family, who was kindhearted, who was a giving person,” says DJ Squeeky.
And he would know, having worked with Dolph arguably longer than any other producer. “I’ve been knowing him since the beginning. Since 2008 or 2009,” he says. “All the time I was with him, I didn’t know him to do anything — I never saw him do wrong. Or even heard about him doing wrong.”
Instead, the rapper was committed to doing right. Reflecting on Dolph’s famous acts of charity, such as donating to his former high school, or handing out Thanksgiving turkeys, DJ Squeeky notes, “You know, if you’ve been broke all your life, that’s what you want to do. You know how it feels to have nothing. Literally nothing. So you want to give back. That’s what I do. You just want to help people. And he walked the walk, he talked the talk. That’s why I believed in him, man. I believed in everything he did. Nobody told him to do it. He did it out of the kindness of his heart.”
With tragic irony, Dolph was scheduled to hand out this year’s batch of turkeys, typically running in the hundreds, on the very day he was killed. “He had a good, kind heart,” says DJ Squeeky. “People don’t like that. They don’t like it if you’ve got a good kind heart. They want the devil to win. They want everybody to be evil. It’s just crazy. Someone just didn’t like the man. I’m just hoping they bring in whoever did it. They’ll go on and get them on in there and let the process begin. Everybody needs that. It ain’t gonna be right until then. That ain’t gonna bring him back, but you can’t let it be senseless.”
Like many Memphians, DJ Squeeky is leaning on his faith heavily now, and reflecting on the family values that Dolph himself embodied in the way he lived. “Your mom’s teaching is the key,” he explains. “Moms and dads have already faced it. They’ve already lived their lives, they already know how it’s supposed to go. They can’t do anything but tell their children to be safe out here. Stay away from certain people that don’t mean you no good. Sometimes your parents can peep out the people that’s good and bad in your life, even though you accept them for who they are. ‘Your friend ain’t right.’”
Beyond that, DJ Squeeky blames the prevalence of guns as the core problem. “One thing’s for sure: We didn’t bring those guns over here. We had no access to all the new kinds of guns on the streets right now. You’ve got to think about it: 10, 15 years ago, there was no such thing as these guns that are on the street right now. It’s a whole new thing going on right now. Everything’s different. That’s what people have got to look at, more than anything: How did we gain access to them? We never had these guns before. So that tells you one thing: It’s about the money.
“They’re trying to turn us into something like what they’ve got going on overseas. America’s got to be strong, and not be dumb like that. They’re trying to force us into a situation. But not everybody wants to live like Rambo. Killing people at the age of 13, 14 years old.”
In contrast, DJ Squeeky sees Dolph as presenting an alternative way of life, breaking free of such social trends. As Squeeky sees it, it all grew out of Dolph’s faith in his own vision. “He was definitely one of a kind. There ain’t gonna be no more like him. Dolph was something different. He was the definition of independence. When they need an example of independence, just put his face right there. That’s what it looks like when you do your own thing.”
Boo Mitchell and family, keepers of producer Willie Mitchell’s legacy and the ongoing musical productions at Royal Studios, are currently in the throes of tragedy, as they hope and pray for the recovery of Boo and Tanya Lewis Mitchell’s eldest son, Elijah. Friends and colleagues across the world were shocked to read a social media post by Boo on August 16th:
This is the most difficult thing for me to post. Please excuse me if I’m a little scattered. Yesterday our oldest son Elijah Mitchell (Elijah Lewis) was taken to Regional One Health for a gun shot wound to the back, broken ribs and other injuries. Suspect, his girlfriend’s ex lover, broke in her house and waited for him, shot him in the back then beat him after he was down. His front teeth were all beaten out. Unfortunately the bullet went through his spinal cord and he has lost all of the feeling in his legs. Suspect has been arrested and is in custody. We are grateful and thankful that Elijah is alive. We have a lot of work ahead of us. This is the most devastating [thing] that has ever happened to me or my family. We are thankful for the amazing team of doctors and nurses at Regional One Health; they have been nothing less than angels through this. Please keep Elijah and my family in your thoughts and prayers. We know that God is in charge and we are praying and hopeful that one day he will fully recover.
As a testament to the tragic situation — and the good will Boo and family have inspired throughout Memphis — hundreds have stepped up to help. Elijah, at 26, can no longer be covered by his parent’s insurance and has none of his own. Accordingly, the Memphis community has risen to the occasion. Yesterday, Vicki Loveland, a Memphis music veteran, launched a GoFundMe campaign, Elijah Mitchell Medical Emergency Fund, to assist the family with the coming onslaught of medical bills.
courtesy Boo Mitchell
Elijah Mitchell
Today, the campaign has gathered roughly 20 percent of its fundraising goal of $50,000. The fund is steadily growing thanks to contributors from all walks of life, but of course the Mitchell family’s importance to music is reflected in the list. Indeed, the importance of music to so many is evoked in Loveland’s statement on the campaign page:
Music lovers all over the world, and certainly the Memphis music community, know the beautiful history of Royal Studios. We have lived our lives listening to hits from Al Green to Bruno Mars. But the biggest reason Royal has continued to be so vitally important to this world is because of the Mitchell family and the love and kindness they show, not only for Memphis but for people everywhere. Now, they need all of us to reciprocate and show them what we all can do to lift them up from a horrible tragedy that has stricken their family.
Her words reflect the deep connection between music and community, but it’s the last word, family, that best expresses the heart of the matter. For what parent has not imagined what a crushing blow such events would be?
As of today, there have been no updates on Elijah’s condition, but Loveland did add this postscript to the GoFundMe page: “Just want to say THANK YOU once again for keeping the love train rolling around the world. It really does matter.”
courtesy Boo Mitchell 
courtesy Boo Mitchell