13-year-old who penned letter about gun violence killed by stray bullet.

When she was in sixth grade, Sandra Parks wrote an award-winning essay about gun violence and crime in her hometown, Milwaukee. This week, two years after she described how “we are in a state of chaos,” she was fatally shot when someone outside fired a gun at her home and a stray bullet went into her bedroom. The shooting happened Monday as Sandra, 13, was watching television at the time, her sister, Tatiana Ingram, said.“My sister took it like a soldier: She just walked into the room and said, ‘Mama, I’m shot,’” Ms Ingram said. “She was only hit one time, in her chest. The bullet wasn’t even for her.”Sandra’s mother, Bernice Parks, said that her daughter “was everything this world is not.”“My baby did not like violence,” she said of Sandra, her middle child, adding, “She was my angel from the time she was in my womb to the time she came out.”
In Sandra’s essay, which placed third in her school district’s 2016 Martin Luther King Jr. essay contest, she called for more empathy and less negativity, and emphasized the importance of getting an education to make the world a better place.“We are the future leaders, but if we don’t have an education, we will accomplish nothing,” she wrote. She described a world where “little children are victims of senseless gun violence” and “there is too much black-on-black crime.“Sometimes, I sit back and I have to escape from what I see and hear every day,” she wrote. “When I do; I come to the same conclusion … we are in a state of chaos.”Sandra, then a sixth-grader, said on her local Radio that she chose to write about violence because “all you hear about is somebody dying or somebody getting shot and people do not just think about whose father or son or granddaughter or grandson who it was that was just killed.”Vickie Brown-Gurley, who worked as the principal of Keefe Avenue School when Sandra was in fifth and sixth grade, remembered Sandra as a confident student with a “really good sense of humour.”Over the past two years, 12 students in Milwaukee public schools were homicide victims, a spokeswoman for the school district said. Sandra is the seventh since January.
“It’s part of the insanity we see in Milwaukee,” Mayor Tom Barrett told reporters. “I look at where we are now as a city and it breaks my heart to stand here. As a dad, it breaks my heart.”The Milwaukee County district attorney’s office charged Isaac D. Barnes, 26, and Untrell Oden, 27, with first-degree reckless homicide and other counts in Sandra’s death. Both men have previous armed robbery convictions and were charged with possession of a firearm by a felon. A criminal complaint said that during a search of a nearby home, officers located Mr Oden, and found Mr Barnes “hiding in a closet” there. A detective who later processed the scene recovered a pistol from a garbage can in the living room as well as a semiautomatic rifle from the bedroom. Experts later test-fired the pistol, compared the casings to the ones found outside Sandra’s home, and found that they matched.“The motive is still being determined,” Sgt. Sheronda Grant, a spokeswoman for the Milwaukee Police Department, said. On Sandra’s family’s GoFundMe page, Ms Parks said her daughter had hoped to attend college and become a writer.“Sandra was special,” Ms Parks said in an interview. “She didn’t deserve to leave this world like that.”
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