The Skyway community will come together Wednesday evening in a prayer vigil to remember 12-year-old Alajawan Brown, who was shot to death last week walking along the street.
The vigil is 6 p.m.-8 p.m. at the 7-Eleven store on Martin Luther King Jr. Way where Alajawan died last Thursday at about 6 p.m.
Alajawan got off the bus at the 7-Eleven to walk up the hill on South 129th Street to go home. Just a half block or so up the street, more than 20 shots were fired in a volatile argument at the Cedar Village Apartments.
Alajawan was hit, but he had the strength to run back to the 7-Eleven, where despite the efforts of two passersby to help him, he died after collapsing.
His death was ruled a homicide by the King County Medical Examiner’s Office. A 27-year-old man was critically wounded by the gunfire. His condition is not available under privacy rules.
The Sheriff’s Office is asking for the public’s help, including posting fliers in the neighborhood, for information that will help solve the two shootings.
The community is reacting to Alajawan’s death with grief, worry and help.
A memorial fund has been set up for Alajawan’s family at the US Bank in Skyway.
His friends and the teen staff at the Renton-Skyway Boys and Girls Club are planning to set up a snack table after school Wednesday near Dimmitt Middle School to raise money for the family, too.
Alajawan was not a student in the Renton School District, according to district spokesman, Randy Matheson.
He was the same age as the middle schoolers who attend the programs at the Boys and Girls Club near Dimmitt. He wasn’t a member of the club.
His death “has really bothered the kids,” said club director Dorina Calderon-McHenry. She just took over the job from Meg Pitman, who is taking a position overseeing programs with the Boys and Girls Clubs of King County.
“They are frightened, understandably,” she said of the club members.
The youngsters have talked amongst themselves in the teen room and with the adult staff of the club. They talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Calderon-McHenry said. There’s talk of fate.
“He was doing nothing but getting off the bus,” she said. “It’s hard to make sense of it.”
Just after the shooting, Rev. Steve E. Baber, pastor of the Skyway United Methodist Church, got calls from some Skyway grandmothers asking him to talk with them about how to stop “children killing children.”
“I am willing to do whatever it takes to save our grandchildren,” he said.
He frames the problem of black children dying violently and living in poverty as a national problem. He wonders why 40 percent of the black children in King County live in poverty in the Seattle and Northwest, which are home to such large corporations as Microsoft and McCaw.
“If these were children who were white, if this was happening in Medina, everything would halt,” he said. The reaction to poverty and shootings depends on skin color but also on “zip codes and census tracts.”
He points to a case where four members of a family were murdered in Kirkland, Rightly so, he said, the public was outraged. But there was no similar outrage when four men happened to drive into the wrong driveway and were shot to death in Skyway, he said, because assumptions are made.
“You expect that to happen in that census tract,” he said.
