This oral history project is focused on gun violence and how it has affected the East of the River community. Initially, the project was designed to focus on mothers of the deceased children. It became difficult to get enough mothers to participate. Thus, we expanded our reach to the entire community, knowing that death has a rippling affect. A local minister, Pastor Staples, who had presided over several children’s funerals agreed to participate. He conducted several funerals for children lost to gun violence, the youngest DC victim loss, Carmelo Duncan. I connected with a boys’ baseball coach at Stanton Elementary School, Kirk Keys. One of his baseball players, Karon Brown, was shot and killed around the corner from the school. The third community representative was Detective Chanel Howard. She is assigned to the Special Victims Unit which handles all indirect deaths of children under the age of 15 years old. The detective was the investigator for both Carmelo (mentioned above) and Nyiah Courtney’s (6 years old). Her case received a lot of media coverage. All three community representatives offered fascinating oral histories.

The hardest part of the project was finding mothers who agreed to participate. Among the mothers who were contacted, three participated: Kathren Brown, mother of Karon, killed near Stanton Elementary; Nakia Blacknell Ramos, mother of Lavarus Blacknell killed while at a party, sitting in a friend’s car; and Tameka Boatwright, mother of Kareem Wilson Junior, who was killed outside his new home in Maryland. Although Ms. Boatwright no longer lived in D.C. at the time of her son’s death, she was included for two reasons. First, she is a longtime D.C. civil servant as a Department of Public Housing employee. Secondly, because of the increased gun violence in D.C., she ironically had just moved her family out of the District six months before her son was shot and killed.