Tashante McCoy was celebrating her grandson’s fifth birthday in Stockton, California, on Saturday, when she learned that masked men had opened fire at another child’s birthday party on the other side of town.
Armed men had walked into the banquet hall where at least 100 people had gathered to celebrate a toddler’s birthday, a friend of McCoy’s who was at the event would later tell her. At least one man opened fire just as partygoers were preparing to cut the cake.
Two eight-year-olds, Rose Reotutar Guerrero and Maya Lupian, 14-year-old Amari Peterson and 21-year-old Susano Archuleto were killed. More than a dozen people were injured, including fellow community organizer Jasmine Dellafosse.
For McCoy and many others like her who have long worked in community organizing and gun violence prevention, the shooting brought up urgent questions about gun violence in the Central valley city of about 320,000. And it has reinvigorated frustrations with how authorities, and the media, examine tragedies like these.
Authorities have not yet released any details of the investigation or information about the suspects, but early reports and statements from city officials suggest the shooting was tied to a dispute between rivals in the city, whose conflict escalated into gunfire that leaves a lifetime of trauma for the party’s surviving attenders.
McCoy – who survived being shot as a teenager after a party in Stockton, lost a brother to gun violence in 2012, and now works for Crime Survivors Speak, a national non-profit that supports people harmed by crime – sees the attack as part of a worrying shift in street culture that urgently needs addressing.
At the same time, she fears that the incident will be simply written off as gang violence that should be handled by police and prosecutors, versus one that is complex and requires intervention beyond law enforcement to include schools, mental health providers and non-profits that work with the city’s most underserved people.
When mass shootings are tied to street violence, or if the perpetrators do not align with the profile of a mass shooter that Americans most recognize, victims and their communities can be met with scrutiny, rather than the empathy offered to victims of shootings in suburban schools and malls committed by lone-wolf shooters radicalized to violence in the dark corners of the internet, she adds.
Authorities should devote the same resources to investigating, and preventing, shootings like these as they do for high-profile mass shootings, McCoy argued. “Because it’s the same scenario: children being hurt.”
McCoy says she’s seen street culture shift away from the rules of organized gangs and unspoken norms like no shooting in front of women and children.
Now, she says, the attention people get from dissing their dead opponents and taunting their adversaries in music and videos posted online has become a new driver of real-world violence – with no one and no place off limits.
“For some dumb reason, people have glorified this weird ‘diss the dead’ rap culture,” she said. “In order for us to get somewhere with this we have to address the elephant in the room: this acceptance of clout-chasing culture and how it’s infiltrated the gang space.”
Leia Schenk, a Sacramento-based crime victim and community advocate, said: “As wrong and crazy as gangster life seems, there are boundaries, and there is a way it’s supposed to go – and this isn’t it. It’s just reckless. Now beef on social media turns into a gunfight. And that has unfortunately become the norm. What’s most alarming is that the beef and street violence has gotten to where we don’t even protect children.”
Complex shootings such as the one in Stockton were seldom analyzed with the same vigor and care as the drivers of other high-profile mass shootings, McCoy and Schenk argued.
Schenk is working with the families of three of the people killed in a 2022 mass shooting in downtown Sacramento, where feuding factions fired at each other in a sea of people, killing six people and injuring 12. She attends every court date, warns families if graphic videos or testimony is on the docket, and organized funerals while families grieved. She recalls seeing an outpouring of condolences from local elected officials and accompanying vows to get justice for the dead and injured. But that petered out after the faces of the victims and suspect were released, she recalls.
“All these officials came out with outrage and condolences and once they started to see the gang ties they all went away and they left these families hanging,” she said.
Dismissing shootings such as the one on K Street in Sacramento and the recent one in Stockton lets lawmakers off the hook for keeping youth development programs funded and ensuring that people who are caught with guns are not just prosecuted but rehabilitated before they re-enter their neighborhoods, Schenk adds.
“It limits the resources that these very communities need but aren’t receiving. It shows their lives don’t matter. That somehow they’re the cause of their situation. But we’re not talking about the systemic factors and why any of this exists,” she said.
“And then there’s no liability for public officials, because it’s a ‘gang shooting’. So they don’t have to be liable, they don’t have to care.”
Instead of dismissing this shooting and similar ones as an unavoidable tragedy in cities that have long struggled with violence and crime, Americans needed to do away with the notion of “typical mass shootings” entirely, said Cymone Reyes, a Stockton native who runs Central Valley Gender Health and Wellness, a non-profit for the area’s LGBTQIA+ residents of color. Instead, local officials, city agencies and non-profits need to coalesce and focus on reaching the teenagers and young adults who are caught in cycles of conflict and violence.
“There’s no typical shooting, and using that term is offensive because it minimizes the effect. Saying that this is typical only normalizes it. It desensitizes us,” she said of shootings driven by internet radicalization and community violence alike.
This shooting also brought memories of shooting past.
In 1989, when Reyes was a freshman at Stockton’s Edison high school, five children were killed and 31 others – all but one of them children – injured at Cleveland elementary school. Reyes remembers going to a dental appointment near the school and seeing helicopters and swarms of police and paramedics. Three decades later, she would lose one of her nephews to gun violence in Stockton.
The constant drumbeat of violent injury and death has led to a collective trauma that Reyes has seen gone unaddressed for decades. “I think the community as a whole is grieving. It brings me back to Cleveland. Everywhere I go, I sense the heaviness. This community has experienced tragedy after tragedy and yet we’re not doing anything to help curb that.”
