Community leaders call for action in wake of 11-year-old's shooting death in South Bend

SOUTH BEND — In the wake of the shooting death Thursday night of 11-year-old T'yon Horston, Group Violence Intervention Outreach Team S.A.V.E. outreach director Mychael Winston issued a call-to-action Friday morning "for my community."

"Let’s sit down, because this is crazy," he said. "There’s no honor in an 11-year-old getting killed, OK?"

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Behind a rickety music stand turned makeshift lectern, Winston stood before a crowd of community leaders, police, neighbors and members of the media gathered for a news conference in the 600 block of North Johnson Street, the same spot where T'yon was shot a few minutes before 5 p.m. the day before.

The news conference was organized by GVI, an organization committed to ending gun and group violence in communities in and around South Bend.

Winston implored people to reach out to him with information and for those who can affect change to do so.

"We can’t wait for somebody else to come save us, because now our youth are being picked off one by one, man, and if our youth are gone, then what future do we have?" he said. "What are we working for? What are we living for?"

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South Bend Schools superintendent Todd C. Cummings spoke of the difficult task faced by school social workers and teachers that morning: Telling T'yon's fellow middle schoolers that the sixth-grader "was not coming home."

For Gladys Muhammad, a mother who has been active in the community for "years and years," that point hits close to home.

"I’m sick of it," Muhammad said. "I’m a mother, and I know how mothers feel, and I know how they stay up at night scared their kid's not going to come home, and many of them don’t come home because they're out there shootin’, and sometimes you know they’re shootin’, and you’re scared of your own kids."

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Muhammad urged all members of the community to come together and solve the gun problem because, "it's not one person's job to stop it."

"And my message is for some of you young people out there who think that a gun is going to solve the problems and the challenges that face you every day as a young Black person in America — and it’s not just here in South Bend, Indiana, it’s all over this country — we’ve got to get it together," Muhammad said.

A former South Bend police officer and the founder of the community organization Let’s Turn It Around, Lynn Coleman served as the emcee and said the press conference wasn’t called to “solve the problem” but to acknowledge it and set the stage for solving it.

“Our kids will do what they see, what they’ve been exposed to, what they watch every day,” he said, “and if we’re not giving them anything positive, if we’re not showing them the right way, what do we expect? … We have to live by example, and if we don’t do it and do it on a regular basis, we’re going to continue to see these kind of events happen.”

Mayor James Mueller condemned the shooting of T'yon and all acts of violence occurring in South Bend.

"We all must come together and unite to figure out how to stop it," the mayor said. "We’re losing our kids in a way that we just simply can’t. Here, in this case, an 11-year-old child taken too soon. We may be a city of over 100,000 people, but it’s a small city. This is a family."

Mueller said, Thursday night, he'd received texts from people shaken up about T'yon's death.

"That’s what these incidents do," Mueller said. "They’re tearing our community apart. They’re ripping into sores, and we need to not only rally around to stop the violence but also rally around each other to begin healing from all the trauma that we’ve experienced here in South Bend."

The press conference concluded with a prayer from Pastor Canneth Lee, who represents South Bend's 1st District on the Common Council.

"We ask God right now that you would look over our city and that you will help us and that you will allow peace," Lee said. "We don't want a summer of violence, so we want to stop it, now."

Police not sure what residents want

Although many neighborhood residents, some still dressed in bathrobes and pajamas, quietly watched the news conference from their nearby porches and front yards, others were not happy to have police and the media in the neighborhood. In separate instances, two women sought to interrupt the news conference, yelling over the speakers before being calmed down by police and fellow onlookers.

South Bend Police Chief Scott Ruszkowski said these disruptions are reflective of the problems police face in this neighborhood.

"You've heard some of the outbursts or comments out here," Ruszkowski said to members of the media. "This is typically what officers deal with every single day. So, when people say we don't do anything, as soon as we do something, we get complained at. We get yelled at and screamed at. If they think that we’re not doing something, the same thing happens, so this is a no-win for us."

Ruszkowski brought a large, yellow notepad to the news conference, but instead of being filled with notes for a prepared speech, the notepad was blank.

"I bought this because a lot of people thought I was going to speak, and I'm not," he told the media. "I've already said what I needed to say. This is blank. I bought this specifically so I can take notes."

Notes on "exactly what" the community wants from the police department, he said, because, right now, "when we are out here, we get complained on because there’s ‘too much police presence.’ Then, when we're not out here, we get complained on because there's not enough police presence."

Ruszkowski said police receive "beyond dozens" of calls to the area, and it is one of the department's "focus areas."

Since the investigation into the shooting of T'yon began yesterday, Ruszkowski said, detectives have interviewed more than 20 people in the neighborhood. Police have already found "a lot of the things" they are looking for in the investigation, he added.

"We've made some progress with the over 20 people that we have interviewed, and I'm confident that we're going to come to a resolution from a case perspective," Ruszkowski said. "But how on Earth … do you ever get a resolution to an 11-year-old that's dead?"

Email staff writer Claire Reid at cereid@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: South Bend 11-year-old's shooting death brings leaders' call to action