After an 11-day stretch in which 10 children were victimized by gun violence in Milwaukee, a collection of community members, law enforcement and elected officials gathered Friday to again urge parents to keep better eyes on their kids.
“There’s no excuse for kids to say they don’t have a place to go because every child is welcome here,” she said, emphasizing that they serve meals every day, provide free driver’s education classes and clubs for all interests. “We have the capacity and the will and the desire and drive to serve more children.”
“Bring them somewhere, because where they are is not working. Where you have left them, where they have decided to go, where they choose to go, is not working.”
Three days earlier, Sherman Park was the site of a large fight between two groups of young people after the club closed. It escalated into a shooting that injured a 16-year-old boy, officials and community members said.
But it was just one incident among almost a dozen in the previous 11 days. Since July 17 in Milwaukee, eight children were injured in shootings — including three age 5 or younger, according to police.
Two others were killed in shootings: 9-year-old Harwinder Singh, a student at Milwaukee College Prep, according to the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office, and 16-year-old Raul Rios, who loved music, dancing, singing, skateboarding and video games, his sister wrote on aGoFundMe page.
It continues yet another year of elevated child victimization at the hands of guns in Milwaukee. Fifteen have died by homicide this year, most by firearms, according to police.
No more than 10 children died by homicide in Milwaukee from 2016 through 2019. But in each of the three full years since, 20 or more have been killed, according to the Homicide Review Commission.
Children under 18 make up 16% of homicide and nonfatal shooting victims this year, compared to 7% in 2019, according to Constance Kostelac, the commission's director. There wasn't a similar increase among those ages 19 to 24.
It comes as gun violence has become the leading cause of death for children in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Other times, stolen or straw-purchased guns are sold, traded or passed around on the street, coming into the hands of teens battling poverty and trauma who use firearms to settle disputes with one another.
“Parents, guardians, people who want to carry that responsibility of firearms — be responsible,” Police Chief Jeffrey Norman said. “We give out gun locks. There are all types of gun safety programs out there. People are shooting each other because of the negligence.”
Despite the resources available right in Sherman Park, the area has had more calls for service in July than in any 30-day period over the last 2½ years, said Milwaukee County Sheriff Denita Ball, whose agency patrols county parks. Several of those calls were for shootings.
“It takes all of us, but it first takes the parents to step up and ask, ‘What are my kids doing? Who are they with?’ and just getting involved in their life,” she said.
The issues persist because many instances of violence occur after sundown, when the Boys & Girls Clubs location within Sherman Park has already closed, according to Vaun Mayes, a community activist.
His volunteer-based group, Community Task Force MKE, is frequently in the park during those after hours to give kids basketballs and footballs to play with, or music to dance to.
Mayes praised law enforcement for partnering with groups like his on coordinating safety measures. But ultimately, volunteers looking after a park is an unsustainable model, he said.
“Different things like that are barriers to being consistent,” he said.
I disagree. I don't think that doctors are "sometimes wrong." I know that they are often wrong, and care only about their careers. I recently went through a mountain of crap to have a test performed, only to have the doctor who ordered the test tell me that such tests "aren't very accurate." WTF?
Doctors often lie. If you question one of their lies, they act like they are gods and you have no right over your own body. When I speak openly and honestly with a doctor, he/she usually recoils in horror and dumps me as a patient. I take that as a good sign. I've had three different primary care doctors in the last year.
Aurora "Health" Care recently threatened to send my bill to collections. It was for $6.28. Luckily, I paid the bill before it bankrupted Aurora.
This is from a 1933 Betty Boop cartoon that tells a condensed and somewhat twisted version of Snow White. In the middle of the cartoon we have Cab Calloway singing St. James Infirmary Blues. This video starts with him and his orchestra, a rare live action scene that's actually from another cartoon of this era, Minnie the Moocher, a song which Calloway is most famous for. He sings that song as a Walrus and it's in a different key than what we see the orchestra performing at the beginning of that cartoon. As it turns out the footage and music that start Minnie the Moocher is clearly the same recording as the song we have here, St. James Infirmary Blues, and later in the edit I join these two pieces of audio together. He starts singing the tune as Koko the Clown, then gets morphed into a ghost. Wonderful animation that capture his annunciation and dance moves, with other wild visuals. Towards the end we see how the animators turned his live action movements into cartoon form. Included scenes from 1980 film The Blues Brothers, where Cab Calloway again performs Minnie the Moocher, which was my initial introduction to this singer and performer.
Original cartoon "Betty Boop in Snow White"
Created by Max Fleischer
Directed by Dave Fleischer
Animated by Roland C. Crandall
"I just want my son back. Get my son home. Get my son home and pray, pray that he comes back," said Claudine M. Gates as she stood on the porch of her home.
Others who were with Gates declined to give their names, but spoke warmly of the soldier, U.S. Army Pvt. 2nd Class Travis King.
"We've observed the process of doing this right now. That's all she wants," said an older man who accompanied Gates.
"He's a good, young man. He's a good, young man," the older man said. "Nobody ever expected this out of him. He's a good young man who's always been a solid family man."
King bolted into North Korea while on a public tour of the Demilitarized Zone on Tuesday, a day after he was supposed to travel to a base in the U.S. He was released from a South Korean prison on July 10 after serving two months for assault and was scheduled to return to Fort Bliss, Texas, where he could have faced additional military discipline and discharge.
In Racine, a man who identified himself as King's brother said, "We respect, we understand the gravity of this situation. It's a very massive and unfortunate thing."
He asked for privacy and said the family would defer to the U.S. military.
"We'll be more talkative maybe at some point, but we just want to see where it goes from here," he said.
"There's nothing that we're going to say that's going to change anybody's opinion they already have on my brother," he said.
"If he makes it out, he can speak for himself," he added.
What is the White House saying about Travis King's detention in North Korea?
North Korea stayed silent Wednesday about the detention of King.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the U.S. government was working with its North Korean counterparts to “resolve this incident.”
The American-led U.N. Command said Tuesday that the U.S. soldier was believed to be in North Korean custody.
Who is U.S. Army Pvt. Travis King?
King, a 23-year-old cavalry scout with the 1st Armored Division, was supposed to leave Monday for Texas. He was escorted as far as customs but left the airport before boarding his plane.
It wasn’t clear how he spent the hours until joining the tour in the border village of Panmunjom and running across the border Tuesday afternoon. The Army released his name and limited information after King’s family was notified. A number of U.S. officials provided additional details on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
One woman who was on the tour with King said she initially thought his dash was some kind of stunt – and that she and others in the group couldn’t believe what happened.
King’s stint in prison was not the first time he faced legal trouble in South Korea.
In February, a court fined him 5 million won ($3,950) after he was convicted of assaulting an unidentified person and damaging a police vehicle in Seoul last October, according to a transcript of the verdict obtained by The Associated Press.
The ruling said King had also been accused of punching a 23-year-old man at a Seoul nightclub, though the court dismissed that charge because the victim didn’t want King to be punished.
King’s maternal grandfather, Carl Gates, said his grandson joined the Army roughly three years ago because he “wanted to do better for himself.” He was drawn to service because he has a brother who is a police officer and a cousin in the Navy, Gates said.
Gates said he hoped his grandson, a 2020 graduate of Park High School in Racine, could be brought home to get help.
“I think right now he might have a problem or something. I can’t see him doing that intentionally if he was in his right mind,” Gates said.
Have other Americans been held captive before in North Korea?
King is the first known American held in North Korea in nearly five years. Each detention has set off complicated diplomatic wrangling, and this one comes at a time of elevated animosity. On Wednesday, North Korea test-fired two ballistic missiles into the sea in an apparent protest of the deployment of a U.S. nuclear-armed submarine in South Korea for the first time in decades.
“It’s likely that North Korea will use the soldier for propaganda purposes in the short term and then as a bargaining chip,” said Yang Moo-jin, president of the University of North Korean Studies in South Korea.
It’s rare for Americans or South Koreans to defect to North Korea, but more than 30,000 North Koreans have fled to South Korea to escape political oppression and economic difficulties since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.
Tae Yongho, a former minister at the North Korean Embassy in London, said North Korea is likely pleased to have “an opportunity to get the U.S. to lose its face” because King’s crossing happened on the same day the U.S. submarine arrived in South Korea.
Tae, now a South Korean lawmaker, said North Korea was unlikely to return King easily because he is a soldier from a nation technically at war with North Korea, and he voluntarily went to the North.
Panmunjom, located inside the 248-kilometer-long (154-mile-long) Demilitarized Zone, has been jointly overseen by the U.N. Command and North Korea since the close of the Korean War.
In recent years, some American civilians have been arrested in North Korea on allegations of espionage, subversion and other anti-state acts, but were released after the U.S. sent high-profile missions to secure their freedom.
In May 2018, North Korea released three American detainees who returned to the United States on a plane with then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during a short period of warm relations. Later in 2018, North Korea said it expelled American Bruce Byron Lowrance. Since his deportation, there have been no reports of other Americans detained in North Korea before Tuesday.
Those releases stood in striking contrast to the fate of Otto Warmbier, an American university student who died in 2017, days after he was released by North Korea in a coma following 17 months in captivity.
A U.S. soldier who is being detained in North Korea has a Wisconsin connection.
According to a report from ABC News, Army Pvt. Travis King's mother resides in Racine and she said Tuesday that the Army said her son crossed over into North Korea in recent days.
King, 23, was a cavalry scout with the 1st Armored Division who had just served a 47-day sentence nearly two months in a South Korean prison for assault, after he allegedly kicked a South Korean squad car, damaging it. He was released on July 10 and was being sent home Monday to Fort Bliss, Texas, where he could have faced additional military discipline and discharge from the service.
He was escorted as far as customs but left the airport before boarding his plane. It wasn’t clear how he spent the hours until joining the Panmunjom tour and running across the border Tuesday afternoon.
King was last seen entering a van and being whisked away by officials from North Korea, U.S. officials said.
The soldier was on a tour of the storied border village of village of Panmunjom, inside the heavily fortified 154-mile-long DMZ, when the crossing happened, U.S. officials said Tuesday.
Army Col. Isaac Taylor said Tuesday that a U.S. service member "willfully and without authorization" crossed into North Korea. King's mother, Claudine Gates, told ABC News she couldn't see King intentionally entering North Korean territory.
"I’m so proud of him. I just want him to come home, come back to America," Gates said. King joined the Army in January 2021.
United Nations Command said the American was in North Korean custody and it was working to "resolve the incident."
North Korea has not acknowledged the incident or commented at all. The U.S. State Department referred all inquiries to the Defense Department.
The border between North and South Korea is one of the most heavily fortified in the world. It runs for about 150 miles and divides the Korean Peninsula roughly in half along the "38th parallel" − the cease-fire line of demarcation between the two nations that has existed since the end of the Korean War in 1953.
The incident comes as tensions between North Korea and the U.S. and its allies in the region have surged over North Korea’s continued launch of ballistic missiles. Last week, North Korea launched what was suspected to be a ballistic missile and also threatened to shoot down U.S. surveillance planes.
Previous Americans who have been detained in North Korea have not been treated well. College student Otto Warmbier, for example, was released in a vegetative state in 2017 after spending 17 months in captivity. He died a short while later. His parents said he had been tortured and suffered brain damage.
Three Americans detained in North Korea were freed in 2018 when Donald Trump was president.
USA Today and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
I recently underwent an angioplasty to repair blood vessels in a leg. This procedure was conducted at Aurora's hospital in Kenosha, where I have faced many challenges from their incompetent care. In preparing for the procedure, I was instructed to ingest nothing after midnight the night begore. This included medications. I have extremely high blood pressure and take three medications for it, two of them three times a day. By the time that the angioplasty was completed, I had missed two doses of my medication. Then came the news that the hospital wouldn't release me because my blood pressure was too high, even though they had instructed me to stop taking my medications. And they wouldn't give me any medications because they "couldn't find" my doctor.
This is the second time that I have encountered such insanity at the same "hospital" (actually a profit center for Aurora). They deny me the blood pressure medication that I have taken for thirty years, then complain that my blood pressure is too high. Wtf?
Just like last time, I informed the staff that I was leaving at the appointed time, with or without their consent. And I did. Be aware that your healthcare is overseen by the same type of swine administrators that run any other corrupt business. Their primary concern is profit. Actual healthcare is further down on their list; much, much further down.
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