Durham Reporter

As Durham struggles with a rising number of crimes involving firearms, mothers of those who have fallen victim to shootings gathered Saturday at Cook Road Park to raise awareness of how such events leave devastation in their wake.

The event included an unrolling of the Durham Homicide and Victims of Violent Death Memorial Quilt, where each quilt square represents a life lost on the streets.

“You never get over it basically,” Tammie Goodman, whose son Charleston was kidnapped in 2018 in a case that remains unsolved, told WTVD. Less than two years later, Charleston’s godson Z’yon Person was shot to death while he was in a car waiting to get a snow cone.

“You learn to live with it, and you take the memories of that person and you go forward with it,” Goodman said. “I thought they would wake up when Z'yon was murdered. I really thought that they would put the guns down and start some love."

It’s the ones left behind who bear the brunt of the pain.

"Nobody's focusing on the little children suffering in silence,” Goodman said, likely referring to Charleston’s then 5-year-old daughter, among others, like Ronda Watson’s grandchildren.

Watson’s son Otha Ray was slain near a fast-food restaurant in Durham in September 2020.

"My son was a fun-loving dad, who was very supportive of his children,” Watson recalled. “He worked with his hands a lot. He loved his children. He really adored his children. And to have this impact on them is really hard and difficult to deal with at this time.”

The number of fatal shootings in Durham this year, through April 23, is at 17, up from 12 during the same time frame a year earlier and six the year before that, city statistics show. 

"It's personal and it's real,” Durham Mayor Elaine O’Neal said on the newscast, “so we have to, as a community, come together and speak up and do the things that we can to be supportive of one another and to help to quell the violence."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that 2020’s firearm mortality rate in North Carolina was 16 deaths for every 100,000 people. That was the 21st highest rate in the United States. The Gun Violence Archive statistics show that shooting deaths, excluding suicides, increased by more than 25% that year from 2019, WTVD reported. This year’s pace is on track to beat those numbers.

"When I hear about the murders, I cry,” Goodman said. “I don't care where it is. I just cry. Even if I don't know them, I cry.”