OAKLAND — Eba Walker and Marina Guzman do not know each other, but Friday they both shared inconsolable grief. Each mother’s 14-year-old son was gunned down, victims of the city’s raging gang violence.
Michael Walker was killed Thursday night on West Grand Avenue; William Guzman died six hours earlier, miles away in East Oakland.Michael Walker was with two relatives and a family friend, walking home from a fishing trip at a canal near Laney College. Longmire said one of them was a Latino gang member — not Walker — but did not identify him. Longmire said a car pulled alongside them and someone inside opened fire, hitting only Walker, who was able to run a short distance before collapsing. He died at Highland Hospital at 11:58 p.m. Thursday.
Becky was Michael’s second-grade teacher.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est.
Condolences to Becky. It is a terrible grief to see one so young die. Violent death makes the loss so much harder to bear. How sad for the families and friends of these two boys.
becky, i’m so sorry.
Chris, I don’t read your pages every day, but every day that I do, I marvel at your writing skill; how you manage to add so much to my busy day.
Nothing you’ve ever written has touched me so much as the one line “Becky was Michael’s second-grade teacher.”
I wish Becky, and Michael’s family, the best, and my sincere hope that they can pull from the tragedy whatever they need to pull to keep them going.
Jeff
I can only begin to imagine what those mothers felt when they got the news. Becky, I helped to teach a high school class for a semester when I was in grad school about fifteen years ago. One of the kids seemed like he could go either way: He was bright and engaging and fun to teach, but there was something about him that radiated—not quite danger, but something. A year after the class, I read about his death in the newspaper. More gang violence. Such senseless loss.
Oh god, how awful.
In 8th grade, Michael was one of my brightest students. He was a gifted athlete, good looking, popular, an A student. He was quick to anger, but quick to cool down, and his sunny self would reemerge.
I hoped he’d attend the elite high school across town. His parents thought he’d be safer in the neighborhood.
Michael got caught up in gangs near the end of middle school. He was executed in the spring of his junior year.
Most students learn and thrive. Some we lose. Sometimes we know we lose them, and some just slip away. Losing Michael was a knife in my heart, but his classmate, with whom I cried when we heard, is now a junior in college, and thriving. She’ll make it. It could so easily have gone the other way.
My heart goes out to Becky, and to her student’s family.
I’m so sorry, Becky.
i hate the violence, truly. i can’t imagine anything worse than losing a young friend or relative to a senseless shooting.
i really, really hate guns. you know all that baloney about “needing protection,” the stuff of the NRA? that is exactly why some of michael’s friends will start carrying guns. they are scared out of their minds. more jittery kids with more guns is a nightmare.
any kid can blow things out of proportion, make stupid decisions, get nasty for no good reason. that is practically part of the job description for teenagers. give that kid a gun [or a reason to want one—they can find them], and bad things happen. what might have been a drama or a fistfight can easily turn into a slaughter, and it does. often. reliably. tragically.
becky and ruth, you give so much to your students and hope they will succeed. strong and caring adults make the difference for lots of young people, short-term and long-run. i wish it was more of a priority to make sure that every kid has such great people in their lives.
sara asks:
I sometimes wonder what would happen if every gun in the entire world—every one of every kind, everywhere—were suddenly to vanish, simply cease to exist?
Einstein had an answer, when asked about the possibility of nuclear war, he said that he didn’t know why or how a WW3 would start, but he was sure that WW4 would be fought with sticks and stones. If all the guns vanished, you would ask all the bows and arrows to go, then ask that knives (and similar weapons) go, and so forth. Human beings would throw dirt and dust at one another, hoping to conquer and establish territory. It is about power and dominance—and it begins not in the streets with gangs but in the halls of political power with the US military as the only solution to all of our problems.
Have you read about BattleCry and Teen warriors and new horribly violent video games celebrating the slaughter of blasphemous christians?? We need outrage, not after a sad and horrible shooting, but all the time.
Oh, shit. Please tell Becky how sorry I am.