Time for Chicago to address the real problem with the shootings. Gun control is not the answer
Via The Daily Mail
To her mother, Gakirah Barnes was a funny and sweet charter graduate who loved music and was ‘was liked by everyone’.
But to the gangs of Chicago’s notorious South Side, she was a ‘young killa’ who went by the names ‘Tyquanassassin’ and ‘Tookaville’kirah’, rumored to have committed her first murder at the age of 14.
Some claim she was involved in up to 20 gangland deaths.
But on Friday April 11, at 17-years-old, Barnes was gunned down as she walked to have lunch at a friend’s house in Woodlawn about 3.30pm, shot a reported nine times in the chest, neck and jaw.
Some 45 other people were shot on the same weekend in the city that has come to be called ‘Chiraq’ – a brutal nickname used to describe today’s Chicago in terms of its danger and crime – six of which were children.
But Barnes has since become something of a mythical figure online, immortalized in YouTube memorials and rap videos as ‘Lil Snoop’, a reference to the fictional ‘Snoop’ character from TV series The Wire – a cold-blooded killer from the harsh streets of Baltimore.
Barnes’ father was shot to death on Easter Sunday in 1997, when she was less than 12-months old.
‘She just wanted to protect everybody,’ her mother, Shontell Brown, explained in a lengthy feature on Gakirah Barnes in The Daily Beast.
As Barnes entered her teens, she fell in with a group of young men in her South Side neighborhood of Woodlawn who called themselves the St. Lawrence Boys or the Fly Boy Gang.
Following the death of 15-year-old Shondale ‘Tooka’ Gregory, who was shot to death as he waited for a bus in January 2011, the Fly Boys became the ‘Tooka gang’ and the surrounding area ‘Tookaville’.
Barnes changed her Facebook name to ‘Tookaville’ kirah’.
Eight months later, a 20-year-old opposing gang member named Odee Perry was shot and killed.
Barnes was almost immediately linked to the death, with online postings labeling her the ‘hitta’.
She was 14-years-old at the time.
While Barnes was never named a police suspect, one street figure Tweeted: ‘lol so odee was killed by a girl smh [shaking my head]’.
The opposing gang memorialized Odee by christening its home turf as ‘O Block’.
A major turning point for Barnes was the killing of 13-year-old Tyquan Tyler, whose mother had moved him from Chicago to western Illinois to get him away from the city’s violence.