A 13-year-old girl who wrote an award-winning essay about gun violence two years ago was killed by a stray bullet Monday night as she watched television in her Milwaukee bedroom, WISN reported.
Sandra Parks wrote the essay when she was in the sixth grade. She described the constant shootings in Milwaukee and the emotional toll it caused to students like herself, the television station reported.
Parks’ essay won third place in a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. contest. She wrote "We are in a state of chaos. In the city in which I live, I hear and see examples of chaos almost everyday. Little children are victims of senseless gun violence."
Parks' mother said her daughter, an eighth grade student, "was everything this world is not."
"My baby was not violent. My baby did not like violence," Bernice Parks told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "Everybody she knew, everybody that came past, she made them happy. She didn't like for nobody to be sad or down. She was my angel from the time she was in my womb."
Wednesday, police announced the arrest of two men in the shooting, the Journal Sentinel reported.
Isaac D. Barnes, 26, and Untrell Oden, 27, were arrested within hours of the shooting, the newspaper reported. Barnes was charged with counts of first-degree reckless homicide with a dangerous weapon, endangering safety and being a felon with a gun. Oden was charged with two counts of being a felon with a gun, the newspaper reported.
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