“Why are we here?” asked Pastor Eric Mounts at Calvary Baptist Church at a special service in honor of Amani Smith Thursday night. “We certainly want to communicate to you that there are people in this community who care for you, and who are here for you and who hurt with you and share in this grief.”
This was the second service honoring Smith, who was 14 when he was killed on Tuesday. The first service was Wednesday night at Latonia Christian Church on Decoursey Avenue, close to where Smith was killed. His friends and family attended that service, unperturbed by the winter rain. Reporters gathered outside, hoping to talk to the congregants, who released balloons and lanterns into the air in Smith’s honor.
“The last words he ever said to me were ‘I love you too,’” his younger sister, Amaya Walton, told WCPO. “He was my best friend.”
At the service on Thursday, business leaders, members of the Covington Independent Public Schools Board of Education and others lined the pews. Many wept.
“We are afraid. We are anxious. We are angry. We are mourning,” Pastor Larry Karow of the Trinity United Methodist Church said, leading the attendees in a prayer for help. “We have seen that we’ve been surrounded and consumed by the troubles that have been visited on our community over the last days, weeks and months that have recently passed. It seems like our community is at the center of a storm of wrong.”
Karow’s statements reflected what many in Latonia and Covington schools were feeling in the wake of the week’s events. Two days in a row, children had died as the result of gun violence–the first was two-year-old Khalil Adams on Monday, who was shot with a handgun that had been left loaded in his house, and then Smith only a day later.
As media coverage of the children’s deaths–and the fallout of their deaths–flooded the internet and airwaves, the community has been left with mixed emotions not only about the incidents themselves but about the role of parents and the schools, the proliferation of guns among young people and what to do about it all.
The Thursday service was one of lament, prayer, comfort and hope, a banner on a TV on the wall said.
Pastor John Walsh gave a definition of the word lament to the attendees: “to cry out in sorrow,” citing instances in the book of Psalms where the word is used. He said the modern translation of the word comes from the Hebrew word qadar, which means, he said, literally “to become dark.” It comes from the ancient mourning practice of flinging oneself into the dirt to express grief, such that one’s clothes become darkened with earth.
“A student came in to our ministry last night…,” said Youth Pastor Greg Zink. “I come to find out he had witnessed what had happened, and he could barely talk about it… A 14-year-old should never have to witness anything like that.”
In spite of all of this, Mounts proclaimed near the end of the service, “There is hope.”
One can agree with Mounts’ proclamation, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions.
Smith’s parents, for one, stated that tension leading up to Tuesday’s shooting had been rumbling in the background for some time in the form of bullying and harassment. What’s more, Buddy Walton, Smith’s father, said that they had tried to resolve the tension through established channels to no avail.
“This is something we talked about for weeks with the school. We even went to the board of education,” Walton told WCPO. “We talked to everybody about this. We did what we were supposed to do to try to alleviate this situation.”
Frustration of this kind spilled over again at the Covington Board of Education meeting on Thursday, which took place just before the service at Calvary.
“I’m here because the community is hurt and angry with the school district,” said Holmes High School teacher Nathaniel Bell, choking back emotion. “And that hurt and anger did not start on Tuesday.”
People dripping from the rain that had kicked up that afternoon filled the meeting room at the district’s central office on 7th Street. Reporters and camera crews crowded one of the room’s back corners.
“I want my students to feel heard, and I want my students to have a good future. I want them to feel safe” Bell went on to say.
“The trust between the community and Holmes has been broken, and it is our responsibility to repair that,” Bell concluded his statement. “I hope that we can work together to regain their trust.”
In the days between the shooting and the meeting, rumors of threats of mass shootings, not only in Covington but in cities throughout the region, tendriled out across social media. Chatter online indicated that parents were fearful of sending their kids to school. The district released a statement on social media, saying that they were aware of the threats, had informed the police and that the threats appeared to be unsubstantiated. Other institutions in other cities released similar statements.
Covington Schools Superintendent Alvin Garrison told LINK nky that about a third of the student body did not attend school following the threats. In addition, Newport Independent Schools canceled classes on Friday in the face of threats, according to an announcement from Newport Superintendent Tony Watts, although his statement indicated that Newport Police didn’t believe the threats were credible.
At any rate, many of the attendees shared Bell’s frustrations with the district.
“I think one of the major issues that I have with the district is the lack of communication and the gaslighting,” said April Williams, who has a 17-year-old son in the district.
Williams had spoken at board meetings before, expressing her frustration at what she characterized as the district’s negligence in enacting her son’s individualized learning plan, or IEP, which districts are legally bound to uphold. Mirroring the comments of Smith’s parents, Williams criticized what she viewed as the district’s lax attitude in addressing her grievances. She also encouraged the district to ramp up its security protocols, recommending mandating clear backpacks and the installation of metal detectors at school entrances, among other measures.
Others recommended different measures to mitigate violence and bullying.
Charles Kirkland, a Holmes graduate and Smith’s cousin, recommended inviting alumni to the schools to engage in intensive mentoring and guidance.
“I’m not blaming the board; I’m not blaming anybody here, but something’s not right,” Kirkland said. “Something, you know, something’s got to give here.”
Jerome Bowles of the NAACP encouraged the district to work both with the community and with other institutional partners, saying that, based on conversations he’d had with community members, people often felt isolated from the institutions that represent them.
“Sometimes the community feels like it’s cut-off from the decision making process,” Bowles said. “… Somehow the perception is that the school district may not be interested in developing partnerships and listening to the community voices…”
The board finished all of its business in time to allow people to attend the service at Calvary, but community members stuck around to discuss the issue in the lobby after the meeting had adjourned.
Kirkland told some of the people there about conflicts with his peers he’d had when he was younger and how they compared to the violence from earlier in the week–statements from Smith’s parents indicate the shooting was contextualized by a conflict involving Smith’s older brother, but the details of this situation have not been confirmed.
One woman in the group said that the key difference between the past and today was the kids’ easy access to guns, even if she wasn’t sure where they were getting them from.
The appeals to ruling institutions indicate what many in the community were feeling: All of this could have been avoided.
But where does one go when the problem seems too big for any one aspect to society to handle? Even city leaders said they struggled to keep it all under control.
“When something happens, the police respond. We are not big enough, and we don’t have sufficient resources to put a lot of programs in place on domestic violence, for example,” Covington Mayor Joe Meyer told WCPO, saying that funding for interventions generally wasn’t available.
Back at Calvary, the community prayed for help in navigating an issue that seemed especially acute in Latonia.
Pastor Dan Francis of Latonia Baptist Church, also a Holmes graduate, told the attendees about how he had lost his brother to gun violence.
“By God’s grace, I can say I am healed and whole today,” Francis said. “And I hope, and I pray that we as a community will experience the same thing.”
Outside, the rain continued.
Jessica Hart, Molly Schramm and Madeline Ottilie of WCPO all contributed reporting to this story.
UPDATE: Following reader inquiry, lines relating to student attendance and the timing of the board’s meeting were revised to avoid confusion potentially arising from imprecise word choice. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.–LINK nky editorial, Jan. 28, 2024.