INDIANAPOLIS — Saving young people from violence — that was the goal of a community conversation Tuesday morning in Indianapolis.
About 100 people worked to brainstorm solutions through prevention, intervention and follow-up.
On the heels of another heartbreaking weekend of gun violence in Indianapolis, when the number of dead dominated the news, faith, business and community leaders gathered to get real about finding a fix.
"It is a dagger. Over and over and over again," Martin University President Dr. Sean Huddleson said about the violence. "It's hard to even begin to feel like what hope feels like when you have so much despair around you."
"It's affecting someone's family, some mother, some dad," said Kevin Harrison, president of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance of Indianapolis (IMA). "It's my hope we can bring some sort of solution to it by us all coming together in this room."
"We need to step up and step out," said Byron Alston, IMA's street director.
The "Saving Our Youth" summit provided a place to strategize to keep more kids alive.
"It's entirely preventable. We are seeing way too many people have access to firearms," Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears said. "The thing that's so disheartening to us is the vast majority of disputes in these cases involving young people are over ridiculous arguments that turn into violence. No conflict resolution."
"When you don't know how to handle the responsibility for a thing that strong and a thing that heavy, chaos ensues," said Pastor Jeffery Thomas II, of The Bridge Indy. "It proves it with 150 murders already."
"So our conversation we need to have with the young men in school is, 'Hey, everything you do, there's a consequence,'" Alston said.
Community advocates say we've got to connect kids with people and programs who aren't being reached right now because someone is talking to them — and it's not someone good.
Alston knows both sides of the struggle.
"When we were in the gang, that's who we'd go get. We go get little Johnny that you aren't paying attention to," Alston said.
"They need to see what survival looks like," Thomas said to the attendees. "They need to see what survival looks like, and survival looks like you."
The fight for solutions was also very personal. Several parents shared stories of losing their children to gun violence.
And they shared some sobering statistics.
Since 2020, through August of each year, the number of young people killed by homicide is rising.
Ten children were killed from January to August of 2020, six in that time frame in 2021 and 12 in 2022. So far this year, 34 young people have died by homicide.
Pastors say preventing future deaths requires all of us to get involved, surrounding teens making bad decisions by people making good ones.
"It's not OK just for me to be safe in my home, safe in my neighborhood, when my brother isn't safe in his," Thomas said. "It takes a village to raise a community, so that means we need everybody."