A terrible trend.
CLEVELAND, Ohio — Cuyahoga County saw a surge last year in the number of children who succumbed to fatal violence — both those killed by it and those accused of perpetrating it.
Samad and two experts in criminal justice and gun violence — Daniel Flannery, the director of the Begun Center for Violence Prevention at Case Western Reserve University, and Ronnie Dunn, a professor of Urban Studies at Cleveland State University — all said the main factor is how easily kids can get handguns.
The number of children charged with murder in the county has spiked to levels not seen in decades, according to statistics and Plain Dealer archives. Samad said he is alarmed to see the number of children involved in homicides reaching the heights of the early 1990s, when the city and the country were at the height of gang and crack wars.
“We like to talk about how tough it was growing up,” Flannery said of older generations. “But it’s just different now.” “In young people, there’s a pretty pervasive attitude of, ‘Everybody has got a gun, so I better have one, too,’ " Flannery said. “Then when something occurs, they’re using guns in these instances more quickly.”Politicians and the gun lobby have for years restricted groups that receive federal funding from conducting meaningful research into gun violence.
The group met Devon Orr, 19, who took them up to his apartment in a public housing complex in Ohio City. The boys drew their guns on Orr, who was armed with a pistol himself. The teens made Orr hand over his gun and robbed him, prosecutors said.The group ran back to a Jeep that was waiting outside and escaped.
“His son will never hear a sound, a word or anything from his own father,” Mary Orr said. “All for a senseless robbery.” Among those in the other group was then-19-year-old Ce’Matizea Matthews, who asked Bonner for marijuana, the filings said. The two groups argued before they moved on. Bonner, now 21, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced in June to 10 years in prison. He is scheduled to be released in 2032.Samad, the activist, and Dunn, the Cleveland State professor, said that criminal justice reforms in the wake of the violence in the 1990s — including laws that mandated that 16- and 17-year-olds charged with committing violent felonies be tried as adults and the war on crack cocaine — resulted in a crisis of over-incarceration of mostly Black men.
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