Gun violence hits home as Durham Mayor Elaine O’Neal reflects on State of Bull City
The lead-up to this year’s State of the City address was unnervingly similar to last year, with Durham police reporting shootings up again and the city mourning a string of recent deaths.
Mayor Elaine O’Neal, a former judge who made reducing gun violence central to her election campaign, acknowledged the “senseless violence” midway through her speech Monday night.
“Each person taken away from our community continues to tear holes in the very fabric of who we are,” O’Neal said.
The wave of gun violence struck her own family, she later revealed, and not for the first time.
“I got a call yesterday. I’m in church. And it was one of my sister-in-laws,” O’Neal said. “She said the young lady’s name, and she’s a family member. The father of her two kids had been killed in the apartment in front of the kids.”
For the second year, O’Neal called in a group of men she calls “The Reformers,” men who abandoned criminal pasts to help mentor and protect the most common victims of gun violence: young Black men and boys.
C.J. High is one of them. He said in an interview after the meeting that he’s an ex-gang member recruited for the work he was already doing to usher kids along a different path.
“We all come from different parts of Durham and have kids who look up to us from the neighborhood, from school, from church,” High said.
They gather every Wednesday at 6 p.m. at Tati’s place, a home at 1607 Angier Ave., to offer mentorship and a safe place to hang out. There’s a basketball court across the street.
High said he was grateful for O’Neal’s work to bring folks together.
“We’ve got the gang members working with police officers,” he said. “We’re all together working as one.”
Durham’s affordable housing crisis
O’Neal, who was elected mayor in 2021, said she has realized solving the affordable housing crisis is central to addressing gun violence.
“Your most basic need as a human being is shelter,” she said. “I believe that ensuring that our residents have access to safe and affordable housing would have a stabilizing effect across many areas of our society.”
She spoke about the “eye-opening experience” of participating in the city’s annual count of the homeless and unsheltered in January.
“It was then that I grasped where we are in terms of what we have to do,” O’Neal said. “Homelessness, though, that’s not the problem. It’s the symptom of the larger societal failures and disinvestment in our people.”
O’Neal has voted against most proposed developments in southeast Durham, the fastest-growing part of the city, due to environmental concerns raised by some homeowners.
She touted a “deep dive” on housing that the council has been taking this year, bringing in experts to speak about eviction, the housing market, development processes and solutions.
“At the end of that, we hope to have a document that will help to guide how we approach housing,” she said. “So that when you come on as a newly elected person, or you come into the city working in those departments, you have something that can help you get up to speed. It was really hard for me to figure out housing in Durham.”
The mayor’s two-year term ends in December and she has not yet said whether she will run for re=election. The filing period begins in July.
Later in the speech, O’Neal called on businesses to participate in Durham YouthWorks, which gives teens summer jobs, and said she is committed to keeping buses fare-free until at least next summer.
Among O’Neal’s guests were:
- The local team she’s working with on the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative to help solve justice-involved residents find housing
- Leaders of the Hayti Reborn Justice Movement, Lisa Jones and Steve Chalmers, who got $5 million in county and private money to build a one-stop-shop connecting organizations that address social, economic and criminal justice matters
- Former City Council and Durham school board member member Jacqueline Wagstaff
Recently killed include 17-year-old
Three people were killed in shootings in Durham over the past week.
Daryl Paige, 37, was found dead near Duke University’s East Campus early Sunday morning. Another victim was hospitalized with life threatening injuries.
Another man died after a shooting late Saturday night in south Durham, though details about that case are sparse.
Two days before, a 17-year-old was found on a residential street in east Durham, dying from a gunshot wound. The trailer where his body was found went up in flames Monday, CBS-17 reported.
Police also announced last week that they had charged three teenagers with murder in a shooting last month on the busy stretch of Hillsborough Road near I-85.
In Durham so far this year, 18 juveniles have been shot, police told The News & Observer on Friday. Four of them died.
O’Neal called on the community for help.
“You cannot expect your government to do it all,” she said. “It has to come from our neighbors and from the communities.”
Anyone with information about the shootings is asked to call police or CrimeStoppers at 919-683-1200. CrimeStoppers pays cash rewards for information leading to arrests in felony cases and callers never have to identify themselves.
This story was originally published April 18, 2023 at 11:46 AM.
