Shoot-out at the High School

There was a shoot-out — and I mean like a full gansta shoot-out — up the street at 6:30 AM.   Twenty or thirty or more shots fired.   It happened in the parking lot of the A.M.E. church.   The smell of cordite lingered for half an hour.   Sirens, sergeants and paddy-wagons for an hour.    Ghetto birds, police helicopters, off and on for two hours.   Now, as I look down the street, it’s just detectives and such.
One of the social studies teachers, Tyrone, drove right past the shooting.   It was a little more stimulation that he had really needed first thing in the morning.   He prefers coffee.   I drove by shortly after it all happened, when all the yellow tape was going up.   I have no idea who was killed, who was wounded.
But I can guess.   The 56 Span haunts this neighborhood.   They are a branch of the Crips.   I’ve been told that they are being replaced by the Bloods.   But I can only guess at these developments.   In this school, students come here to be away from all that.   We’re a safe school on the edge of a violent neighborhood.
I just wish folks appreciated what my kids walk through in order to get their education.   I had to go to Vietnam in order to see that level of violence.

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Filed under: Prose, Publius