Reggie Bullock, whose two sisters were killed in Baltimore, pleads for government to take action on guns

NEW YORK — Reggie Bullock has spoken extensively about the killing of two of his sisters in Baltimore, in 2014 and 2019, but his pain and desperation were particularly evident in a Players’ Tribune essay published Friday.

The essay is loosely pegged to National Gun Violence Awareness Day, and Bullock, a Knicks free agent, gets there. But what’s most clear is how brutal the last seven years have been for Bullock and his family.

In 2014, his older sister, Mia Henderson, was stabbed to death in Baltimore. Henderson was transgender and there was an acquittal in her murder trial three years later.

“She was so comfortable in her own skin that, I think in a way it just made me be more myself, too. I knew that there was trans hate out there, but I just wish I had known more about what my sister was going through on the daily,” Bullock wrote Friday. “When she died, I felt like I had failed to protect her. Like I had failed to be the big brother.”

The acquittal particularly eats away at Bullock, as he writes:

“You know the thing that hurt me the most was they didn’t put my sister’s name first,” Bullock told the Detroit Free Press in 2016. “They didn’t put Mia Henderson first. It was Reggie Bullock’s sibling, and that’s just crazy to me, for someone to be able to write a message like that. It should’ve, obviously, been Mia Henderson, the sister of Reggie Bullock.”

And that was before Bullock’s younger sister Keoisha Moore was shot to death in 2019, in a case that remains unsolved.

“Everybody knows what Baltimore is like. I don’t have to say it was a rough area. I don’t have to get into it. It’s Gun Central. S---, it’s Violence Central, period,” Bullock writes. “Just knowing about what happened to my sister Mia, what happened to so many other transgender women all over the city of Baltimore. ... There’s a lot of cold cases that haven’t even been solved. Never will be. They ain’t done nothing about it for years and still ain’t gon’ do nothing about it.”

He at first writes that it’s hard for him to see far beyond his late sisters. “I don’t want to preach or nothing. I don’t have some big public service announcement about gun violence,” he says. “And I don’t have all the answers about how to make communities safer. I just wanna try and treat this as a day of remembrance, if that’s alright with y’all.”

But he concludes the piece with a wounded plea to the federal government to do something, anything, even just slightly stemming the flood of guns.

“I guess my question to the men and women in Congress is really just ... WHY?

“Why won’t you take more action on gun reform? Background checks, reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act … There’s so much that could be done to make a difference and save lives!

“That’s all I got, man.”