Pictured are three-year-old Cleveland drive-by fatal shooting victim Major Howard (wearing white shirt), five-year-old Cleveland drive-by fatal shooting victim Raymon Burnett (wearing red shirt), Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson (wearing beard), state Representative Bill Patmon (D-10) (wearing red tie), and greater Cleveland community activist and Black on Black Crime Inc. founder Art McKoy (wearing turban).
By Kathy Wray Coleman, editor-in-chief, Cleveland Urban News. Com and the Cleveland Urban News.Com Blog, Ohio's Most Read Online Black Newspaper and Newspaper Blog. Tel: 216-659-0473.
Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com. Coleman is a 22-year political, legal and investigative journalist who trained for 17 years, and under six different editors, at the Call and Post Newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio. (www.clevelandurbannews.com) /
CLEVELAND, Ohio — Hundreds turned out on Tuesday at the Greater Friendship Baptist Church in Cleveland for private funeral services for three-year-old Major Howard, who was shot in the chest on Sept. 15 on the block of East 113th Street on the city's largely Black east side.
An arrest warrant for 22-year-old Donnell D. Lindsey has been issued in conjunction with the tragic drive-by shooting.
Howard is the second Black kid in a week in Cleveland that is under six-years-old that has been buried after dying from gunfire.
Meanwhile, state Rep Bill Patmon, a Cleveland Democrat and former city councilman, is joining Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson in calling for stricter gun control laws, both locally and statewide, and federally too if their clout could reach there, Patmon told Cleveland Urban News.Com yesterday during a one-on-one- interview.
"I have been one of the most prolific authors in the Ohio House of Representatives on gun control legislation from universal background checks to metal detectors, and they are doing nothing ,"said Patmon of his Republican dominated legislative colleagues in both the House and state Senate.
Jackson successfully pushed city council to adopt ordinances that were to take effect this year to minimize gun control, including the requirement that gun offenders released from prison or new to Cleveland register with his safety department within five days, legislation met with a lawsuit filed by Ohioans for Concealed Carry.
The lawsuit says, in part, that the city legislation, some of which mirrors state law, such as more intrinsic background checks, is irresponsible, violates the second amendment's right to bear arms, and is trumped by state gun control laws per Ohio Supreme Court rulings.
Asked if Jackson, the largely Black major American city's three-term Black mayor, is doing enough to quell gun violence, Patmon said that nobody is doing enough when kids are dropping like flies.
"None of us are doing enough when our children and babies are getting shot and killed," said Patmon.
Grieving friends and family members all said farewell to Howard Tuesday morning, whose shooting death, says police, is likely gang related.
He was hit by gunfire as he sat in a parked car with a 24-year-old woman who also was shot but survived the ordeal.
The funeral of the three-year-old Howard comes on the heels of the burial on Saturday of five-year-old Ramon Burnett, who was shot and killed last month, also on the east side where gun violence against young Black people is skyrocketing.
Burnett was gunned down by crossfire while playing football outside of his grandmother's apartment on Louis Harris Drive.
Marlon Antwon Hackett Jr., 19, and Dontavious Williams, 18, both of Garfield Heights were indicted last week in the shooting by a Cuyahoga County grand jury, and are both charged with aggravated murder, and both remain in jail, each with a a $1 million bond.
The week of Burnett's death five people were killed in Cleveland, and two others found dead.
Last week Mayor Jackson and police chief Calvin Williams, who is also Black, held a press conference calling for calm, with Jackson saying that "I do not want another child to die."
And last month, Jackson and Williams sponsored a buy-back guns event that drew in some 150 guns off the streets.
Forbes ranked the city of Cleveland the 9th most violent city in America for the year 2014, citing economic decline, locationon prime interstate drug routes, and a of population where most of its residents live below the poverty line.
Violent crime, including murder, assault, and rape, occur in Cleveland at an alarming rate of 1,363 per 100,000 residents, the Forbes report says.
Cleveland had the fifth-highest violent crime rate in the nation in 2013, an FBI Crime Report reveals.
The data show a disturbing trend over the years.
This time last year Cleveland had roughly 64 murders, up by two from the year before.
Figures for 2015 are being calculated, Cleveland city officials said.
Just in May James Sparks, 19, was charged with five counts of aggravated murder in the shooting deaths of five people last November at a home in Cleveland, also on the city's east side.
And as crime rates either increase or remain stagnant, the city population continues to decline.
Cleveland is in the top two among big cities, also including Detroit, that have seen dramatic population declines since 2010, U.S. Census reports reveal, the city population going from some 396,000 people in 2010 to a current population of about 375,000 people.
"It a conspiracy, Black on Black Crime Inc. founder Art McKoy told Cleveland Urban News.Com, Ohio's most read digital Black newspaper. "Whenever there is in crime involving chaos and murder millions of dollars are allocated that do not reach the inner city, and that never change the problem.
A longtime local community activist, McKoy has led vigils relative to the aforementioned killings, and many others in greater Cleveland over a period of years, and he said yesterday that he does not believe that the Major shooting is gang-related.
Some 150 Cuyahoga County residents, including Cleveland and its suburbs, died last year from shootings, stretching across 33 cities and villages, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Ohio's largest newspaper, reports. Roughly a third were suicides and some 41 of them were suburbanites, an indication that escalating crime is transcending socio economic parameters, and race.(www.clevelandurbannews.com) /
(www.kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com).
