Sandra Parks
Age 13
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Her dream, deferred. Her life, gone.
As a sixth-grade student at Keefe Avenue School, her essay about gun violence afflicting her neighborhood won third place in a Martin Luther King, Jr. essay contest.
She was “everything this world is not,” her mother said. “My baby was not violent. My baby did not like violence.”
Sandra Parks, 13, was shot and killed by a stray bullet that shattered her bedroom window on Nov. 19, 2018, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Two men were charged, one with first-degree reckless homicide. The last sentence of Sandra’s essay: “(W)e must fight until our truths stretch to the ends of the world.”
