Let's Talk
There are times when even the experts who know gangs best seem ready to throw up their hands. Gangs heve been killing for years. People become numb to violence. If it's not your neighborhood, not your city, it's one more sad story - if it even registers at all.
Inside the neighborhood it can be worse. I remember a man who had lived in Riverside's most notorious gang neighborhood for decades. A young man had been killed in his driveway, shot point blank with a hunting rifle.
It wasn't the first body that landed in his yard.
"What can you do about the gangs?" he said.
Indeed.
Forty days after 3-year-old Ethan Esparza was gunned down outside his grandmother's Pomona home, after the vigils and the calls for the killers to come forward, Ethan's life seems dangerously close to becoming a "what can you do?" moment.
That's where you come in. We want you to be honest, open, clever, thoughtful, practical, impractical, even angry (to a point). Tell us what we can do to prevent another innocent - and even not so innocent - person from dying in gang violence.
A lot of kids are killed, I was told recently. Why focus so much on Ethan?
Then he gave me the answer.
Ethan was murdered at his 4th birthday party. He was killed because too many people said "what can we do?"
Let's make him the face we remember.
Let's talk about solutions
- Mark Petix