Pictured are five month-old Cleveland fatal drive-by shooting victim Aaavielle Wakefield, 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), Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty (wearing green suit and green tie), Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams, state Representative Bill Patmon (D-10) (wearing red tie and white shirt), Cleveland Ward 2 Councilman Zack Reed (wearing red tie and blue shirt), Cleveland Ward 10 Councilman Jeff Johnson (wearing blue suit and gold tie), and greater Cleveland community activist and Black on Black Crime Inc. founder Art McKoy (wearing turban). Community activists Valerie Robinson and Pierre Napier, who are also among those quoted din the article below, are not pictured.
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-The office of Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty has put up a $25,000 reward in the drive-by shooting death on Thursday of five month-old Aavielle Wakefield, who was killed by sporadic gunfire as she lay in a car seat as as her mother drove down East 145th Street near Kinsman Avenue on Cleveland's largely Black east side.
Police have no suspects in the shooting death, and no viable clues thus far, and the community is in fear, some Regional Transit Authority bus drivers taking alternative routes, Black clergy urging residents to stay in their homes if at all possible, and east side gangs and their national affiliates allegedly on standby if police decide to recklessly ambush the Black community.
"A possible riot is not inevitable," said a greater Cleveland Black elected official speaking on condition of anonymity. (Editor's note: Community activists said yesterday that in general they do not advocate violence, but that they do support civil disobedience, when necessary).
Whether people with felonies qualify to get the reward money that McGinty is offering and exactly what information the county prosecutor is looking for from a person that steps up to help him in the case is unclear.
The unprecedented tragedy that quickly gained national attention is the third Black child under six-years-old gunned down by gunfire in drive-by shootings in under five weeks in the major American impoverished city that will next year host the Republican National Convention.
In unrelated shootings, five-year-old Ramon Burnett and three-year-old Major Howard were killed last month, also on the city's east side.
Murders are on the rise in Cleveland.
Stats as of Sept. 28, three days before the death of baby Aavielle, reveal 97 murders in Cleveland to date, up from 83 during the same time span in 2014.
Fifty-seven people were murdered in the city in 2013, 61 in 2012, and 48 in 2011.
"When are they going to bring in the National Guard?" asked an elderly resident in the Lee Harvard community in Ward 1, a Black ward with a stauch middle class voting base.
Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams, who is Black, was brought to tears and said "no more," as he and Jackson, a three-term Black mayor and former city council president, fight to keep the peace .
State Rep Bill Patmon, a Cleveland Democrat, told Cleveland Urban News.Com, Ohio's most read digital Black newspaper, that he is angry, and that the Black on Black crime and gun violence must stop,
"This is the demolition of the Black community, and I am angry," said Patmon, who is Black. "We cannot afford to kill each other."
Asked if he foresees the National Guard taking camp in Cleveland anytime soon, Patmon said no.
"The National Guard is not coming in because the crisis does not meet the criteria," said state Rep Patmon, also a former city councilman who lost a non-partisan mayoral run-off to Mayor Frank Jackson in 2009.
Community activists are angry too, but are blaming the mayor, some of them, and the mayor's largely White police force, which is the subject of a court monitored consent decree between the city and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on police reforms, a consent decree that follows a scathing report of systemic problem, including illegal excessive force deadly police shootings.
"The mayor has lost control of the city," screamed local community activist Art McKoy while taunting the Jackson with a bull horn relative to a City Hall press conference in which the mayor and police chief called for the killer of the five month-year old child to come forward, and for those with any information on the shooting to speak-up.
Other activists, many of whom have taken to the streets in protests, are blaming the police, as racial tensions continue to mount.
"The police are the problem," said community activist Pierre Napier. "Police do not police the Black community because they are angry with Black citizens, and they are afraid of young Black males."
Others, including Napier, say that the problem is larger than Mayor Jackson, and that the underlying reasons for the killings are a submissive and disenfranchised Black community, poverty, the struggling city schools that lack adequate resources to adequately educate Black children, and racial and economic injustice.
Racism and White supremacy, which bring heightened crime, induced poverty, failing public schools, and community decay in general, are also at the heart of the problem, some say.
Data show that while Whites, and some Blacks, including some Black elected officials, will sometimes publicly criticize Black people for Black on Black crime, they often will not take on police brutality issues, including the arbitrary police killings of unarmed Black people, a dilemma also on the rise in Cleveland.
Under pressure from Black east side councilmen, namely Ward 2 councilman Zack Reed and Ward 10 councilman Jeff Johnson, whose wards are where the baby killings have occurred, Jackson said yesterday that he will put more police on the streets.
Some activists, however, say that more police means more trouble.
"They are killing people and we do not need more police," said longtime activist Valerie Robinson, 77, at a meeting at the offices of the Call and Post Newspaper in May this year with activists and regional representatives from the office of the DOJ from Chicago and Detroit.
That meeting, led by DOJ representatives, Arlene Anderson of the Cleveland NAACP, and community activist Kathy Wray Coleman of the Imperial Women Coalition, was a strategy session on how to keep calm during community protests over police killings and what activist should do to avoid retaliatory police harassment. (Editor's Note: Coleman, a former Call and Post reporter who now edits Cleveland Urban News.Com and the Kathy Wray Coleman Online News Black .Com, has said that two days after the DOJ session, specifically on May 15, University Heights police came onto her property without a warrant, and pointing guns, and allegedly calling her "nigger." She said that she got away safely by backing out of her driveway, neither touching nor hurting anybody, only to become the ongoing target of police angry over her activism relative to police murders and otherwise, her writings, and public exposure on issues such as the housing discrimination by judges, mayors and Cuyahoga County officials, and ongoing public corruption).
(www.clevelandurbannews.com) /
