Normally, I try to save fun, uplifting posts for holidays like MLK Day. But I don’t feel right moving on without at least touching on the terrible tragedy here in Camden last week, with a 13-year old murdered. Frankly, I’m not going to add a lot to what’s being said, other than to share some of what I’ve read that’s helped me wrestle with this. The week after a murder isn’t the time to talk policy. But here’s some of the things I’m reading about the murder:
April Saul pulls together the details at the Courier Post, moving from a story of violence to what of the wider systems that supports (or don’t support) families in difficult spots. Here’s here lede:
Taisha Mercado got a phone call Friday from a behavioral health company to tell her that her son, 13-year-old Nathaniel Plummer Jr., had been approved for in-home counseling.
“I said: ‘There’s no need to do anything. He was murdered last night,’ ” Mercado said.
On the same day, the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office informed her that the family’s relocation to a nearby suburb had been approved even though Nate was gone, and that she would receive up to $2,500 in assistance. It was a move she’d desperately wanted after their home in Camden’s Carpenter Hill development was riddled with bullets on Dec. 10 — when, luckily, no one was home.
But it came too late to help save the life of Nathaniel, who was gunned down shortly after 11 p.m. Jan. 7 on the 2900 block of Line Street in East Camden.
For Mercado, 29, a certified medical assistant at Lourdes Medical Associates and single mother of three, the bittersweet offers were the culmination of a terrifying month in which she watched her seventh-grade son spiral out of control.
Please, go read the whole thing. It’s the kind of thoughtful, detail-oriented reporting on urban violence that is powerful and helpful for understanding these heartbreaking incidents. In the piece, Saul embeds an audio clip of the mother of Nathaniel Plummer, the murdered boy, rejecting gang members and gang culture. Here that is:
This conversation dominated my social media newsfeeds, and I wanted to share a video by a Camden activists, Gary Frazier Jr., that got a lot of local attention, and even some media attention:
The video got picked up by Fox News:
It’s sobering, it’s hard, and it didn’t feel right to move on without acknowledging and sharing some of it.
Share it!
