‘It’s happening again?’ Sacramento community groups respond to Grant Union High shooting
Berry Accius of the Sacramento community advocacy group Voice of the Youth was busy on the phone Tuesday as news spread of a shooting at Grant Union High School. He was frantically calling Grant High students who are in his group’s mentorship program.
“I was on the phone hitting up my kids, my kids hitting me up, telling me what was going on,” Accius said. “And you get fearful because you don’t want it to be your kid. And secondly, you get frustrated because it’s like, ‘It’s happening again?’”
On Tuesday morning, a 14-year-old Grant High student shot a fellow 17-year-old student in a parking lot on campus, police said. The 17-year-old suffered a non-life-threatening gunshot wound to his arm, and the 14-year-old was arrested in connection with the shooting.
It doesn’t happen just at Grant High, Accius said. Gun violence happens at other schools and throughout Sacramento. But he said these alarming events continue to happen without substantive change as community efforts trying to attack the root causes of youth violence continue to be inconsistently funded.
Priorities are necessary for anti-violence funding, he said.
“And that’s in young people, giving community organizations more opportunities where we can get funding that can help us create safe spaces for these kids,” Accius said. “And we’re not talking about funding that just keeps some staff, creates spaces for the kids to go to that are not closed at 8 p.m., they’re not closed at 5 o’clock.”
Accius said there isn’t enough of a community focus on youths having access to guns before they have access to educational or job opportunities and “thinking violence is the only way” to resolve conflicts.
“We don’t ever go to the root of the problem outside of these isolated incidents,” Accius said. “How is this kid even thinking about having a gun on campus?”
He said the community needs to be asking why the 14-year-old accused of shooting a fellow student on Tuesday felt it was necessary to arm himself.
“I think the biggest issue for me is that there’s too many guns out there and young people have access to it,” Acccius said Tuesday while standing outside Grant High waiting for more information.
‘Make sure my baby is OK’
Debra Cummings, a member of the community group Healing the Hood, was among parents and other community groups gathered in front of Grant High seeking more details about what happened. Healing the Hood, which is part of the Black Child Legacy Campaign, sends out response teams to help community members and victims’ families when a crisis occurs. She said it’s important to respond quickly, and only advocates who live in that community can do that.
“At the end of the day, it’s about our community’s kids,” Cummings said.
Last week, members of Healing the Hood were among other community advocacy groups who spoke about the need for consistent government funding with California Attorney General Rob Bonta. At the panel discussion in Sacramento, they spoke about the importance of reaching people closest to the problem, unified work from neighborhood groups and a trained, culturally diverse staff of trauma-informed intervention workers to reduce gun violence.
“You got to have heart for this work to show up for families,” said James Willock, a community intervention worker for Mutual Assistance Network.
Alfonso Miller, whose daughter is a sophomore at Grant High, rushed to the school Tuesday to make sure his child wasn’t hurt. He was relieved his daughter was OK, but he was disturbed about what happened to the student who was shot and wounded.
“As long as she’s OK ... make sure my baby is OK,” Miller said. “Everything is OK with her. Now, this other student? I don’t know. I’m sorry to hear that.”
