The Hardest Days
By Albert B. Kelly
I love the Bridgeton community and I love serving my
community as mayor, but there are days when it can break your heart. Last
Tuesday was just such a day as I learned of the passing of a 9 year-old little
girl in my city that was struck by a stray bullet while sleeping in her home. I
am broken-hearted for her family because nothing will ever be the same for them,
because their grief is monumental, because how do you come back from that?
At the same time, there is an extraordinary amount of anger
and frustration. Home is supposed to be a place of safety and comfort. No
matter what’s “out there”, no matter how crazy or chaotic the world might be
beyond the four walls of home, it still follows that the place we call home is
the place we go to feel safe, to find shelter from the storm, to take refuge.
What represents home more than an innocent child sleeping in her bed?
And there’s the outrage that some thug, some punk, some
unbelievably careless individual or individuals, for reasons unknown- maybe to
settle a score or in pursuit of revenge- starts throwing shots with the end
result being a stray bullet breaching the safety and sanctity of a family’s
home and taking the life of a 9-year-old little girl while she lay asleep.
It’s personal, so what do you do with the heartache, the
anger, the frustration and outrage? What you’re certain of is that all of these
emotions will energize the efforts of many in turning over every leaf and
looking under every rock to ensure that whoever’s responsible will be brought
to justice. It won’t be enough, but at least it will have a face, a name, maybe
a motive. It won’t be enough.
Weeks and months from now it’s still personal and it still won’t
be enough, but you press on with doing whatever can be done to impact the teens
and the grade-school kids so that a few short months or years from now they’re
somewhere else; maybe a night shift at a job or a dorm room and not on a street
in this city in the wee hours of the morning firing stray bullets that end
lives and shatter families.
You keep working on a hundred things with all of your
strength because the alternative is to stay in some type of defensive crouch
the way some politicians do. You work on getting more police on the streets equipped
with the resources they need because no matter what, people need to be safe in
their neighborhoods and in their homes.
The other thing you do is implement programs, like
Cumberland County Thrive, aimed at eliminating gang violence and gun violence
because you have to address the root causes and it has to be done as a
community. You also work with youth leaders and volunteers running youth
athletics and PAL programs because these fill up the empty time and provide
young people with positive role models and mentors.
You bring together the best minds from as many fields as you
can to undertake everything from job training and college-readiness, to
substance abuse counseling and everything in between. You do these things
because you also know that whoever fired the stray bullet wasn’t born destined
for just that one tragic moment- that a lot of decisions, big and small, led to
that moment and things could have been different.
But things weren’t different and now it is about ensuring
that the person or persons responsible for the death of a 9 year-old little
girl are held accountable for the choices they made. As I write this, we still
don’t know who fired the shots. If that is still the case when you read this,
then my appeal is for anyone with information about this crime to step forward
and contact police at 451-0033 or utilize the department’s TIP411 anonymous
TEXT line subtitle, “BRIDGETON.
First and foremost, this senseless crime victimized a
family, but it also victimized our community and because of that, when justice is
served, it will be in the form of “The State versus”. This is particularly
fitting here because the place we call home is the place we go to feel safe, to
find shelter from the storm, to take refuge. This wasn’t the case for an
innocent 9 year-old girl and her family and that’s what breaks your heart.