BUFFALO, NY (WKBW) — “Who should be burying their 14-year-old child? You know you want them to live,” declared Marnetta Malcolm as she reacted to the shooting death of a 14-year-old Buffalo girl.
Malcolm, a community advocate, tells me "it's heartbreaking" to learn 14-year-old Jazzmine Fomby of Buffalo was killed over the weekend when she and five other teens were shot on Buffalo's east side along Alexander Place.
“What happens on the East Side impacts Buffalo. What happens in Buffalo impacts Western New York and by the way, this isn't a Buffalo thing. this is a national thing. you know, you see these types of killings everywhere,” replied Malcolm.
“It's a cycle of violence that has to be disrupted,” responded Garnell Whitfield.
Someone who knows the impacts of gun violence firsthand is Whitfield. He lost his mother two years ago in the Jefferson Avenue Tops Mass shooting.
Whitfield tells 7 News shootings, like this past weekend, have been happening in our community for a long time, defining gun culture and “systemic racism.”
“When people don't have an expectation that life is going to be better, different — then they resort to violence, they resort to by any means necessary. They make bad decisions,” Whitfield remarked.
![JAZZMINE 05-06-24 CrimeStoppers_HomicideVictim_JazzmineFomby[77].jpg](https://ewscripps.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/1151781/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1275x1650+0+0/resize/1113x1440!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fewscripps-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F07%2Fae%2F66a04a2147a6ba50d04d387a0e0b%2Fjazzmine-05-06-24-crimestoppers-homicidevictim-jazzminefomby77.jpg)
“We just got to be adamant about education and about safety, about as far as gun violence,” explained Tanesha Ali, Most Valuable Parents of Buffalo.
But some organizations, like the Most Valuable Parents of Buffalo, known as MVP, work with adults to help families prevent violence.
“How we combat this is there are a lot of resources available, but if they don't know about it, then it makes no sense to provide access and awareness, so whether we get the information to the community or where we need it in order to get the help they need,” noted Ali.
But these organization leaders tell me everyone needs to come together, teens, parents, grandparents, community members — all to help fight gun violence that unfortunately is a reality for some city teens.
“If you can mentor a child, if you can get involved, identify, maybe an organization that you can go in and help and sit down and talk but then have to always be money because guess what? Who impacted me when I grew up around here were some of the teachers,” Malcolm reflected. “I think that we got to start with interacting and engaging with each other.”
“It's all about positive activities and pouring into these youth and if there's no one pouring into them and you have nowhere to go, there's no safe spaces, then, you know, you have situations where it becomes unsafe,” Ali described.
“And then we need to ask the children — talk to them, you know, they've got to be devastated to repeatedly have to go through this type of trauma,” stated Malcolm.
Buffalo police tell 7 News that while these recent incidents are shocking, gun violence has dramatically dropped since skyrocketing in 2020.
The Buffalo Police Department provided the following figures on shootings:
- In 2020, 347 people were shot in 287 incidents
- In 2023, 166 people were shot in 141 incidents
- In 2020, 47 people died in shooting homicides
- In 2023, 25 people were fatally shot
Buffalo police say they believe their strategy of sending patrol officers to hotspots for what they call "directed patrols" is helping.
WATCH: Buffalo police search for person who shot and killed teen; continue effort to prevent gun violence
