The Boston Globe tells a sobering story today of the aftermath of a random bout of gun violence. 5-year-old Kai Leigh Harriott was paralyzed three years ago by random gunfire, and in the story, she faces down her shooter, and does the most courageous thing anyone, especially someone so young, can do.
The little girl said the word porch and then began sobbing loudly. After her mother comforted her, 5-year-old Kai Leigh Harriott looked up from her blue wheelchair in the hushed courtroom yesterday and faced the man who fired the stray gunshot that paralyzed her nearly three years ago.
”What you done to me was wrong,” the dimpled girl with purple and yellow plastic ties in her braids said softly. ”But I still forgive him.”
On a summer night in 2003, Anthony Warren of Hyde Park fired three gunshots into the air outside a three-decker in Dorchester to scare two women who lived on the first floor after an argument. One bullet severed the spine of Kai, then 3, who was sitting outside on her family’s third-story porch with a sister, singing ”Down by the Bay” from the ”Barney” television show.
Yesterday, in emotionally wrenching victim-impact statements that left many spectators in tears, Kai and four members of her family told a Suffolk Superior Court judge that the shooting had changed their lives forever, but had also shown them the value of forgiveness.
”We’re not victims here; we’re victors,” said Kai’s mother, Tonya David, addressing the court.
The gun lobby thinks those who fight against gun violence are afraid of guns, but nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that those who count on guns for their safety and well being are the ones who are really afraid. Kai, at five years of age, has been through more than anyone should go through in a lifetime, and yet she’s more self assured and powerful than the man who shot her.
Moments later, Warren, 29, a convicted felon who pleaded guilty yesterday to avoid a trial, approached Kai and her family and, in barely audible tones, apologized.
David recalled his words later. ”I’m sorry for what I’ve done to you and your family,” she said Warren told her. ”I was known in the street for all the wrong reasons, and now I want to be known for the right reasons.”
David shook his handcuffed right hand and embraced him.
Superior Court Judge Margot Botsford called the statements the most moving she had heard in 17 years on the bench.
She’s darned right about that. Gun violence is a terrible, horrible thing. The ruined life of just one girl isn’t worth a cent versus the faulty public policies of the NRA or the kicks gun guys get from “shooting their semis” at the range. Kai’s story is heartbreaking, but what happened to her is preventable. It’s up to us to prevent it, by passing laws that keep guns out of the hands of people like Warren in the first place.
Still, her strength, as her mother notes, is more than admirable. It’s incredible and powerful.
Their mother said Kai, who is in kindergarten at the Josiah Quincy School in Chinatown, has never complained about being in a wheelchair. She likes to go down a slide with her 12-year-old brother, Kani David, at a playground near their new home in Roxbury. She paints and plays video games.
But Tonya David cannot forget what her daughter has lost.
”Kai was not born unhealthy or in a wheelchair,” she told the court. ”I can still remember the pitter-patter of her little feet.”
David, who has since moved, knew that her old neighborhood had crime, she said, but she never dreamed that her children could have been in danger on the third floor of the three-decker. It was a ”serene” oasis, David said, from which she could see Quincy Bay and downtown Boston.
After Kai and her family rejoined the spectators in the courtroom, Warren walked over and apologized, saying that he, too, has a young daughter and she is precious, like Kai.
Then Tonya David asked court officers if she could shake his hand. They said she could. She did. And then she hugged him.
Too sentimental? What the heck, it’s Friday, we could use a good story like this. Kai’s strength is just one more reason we all need to keep working to end the violence that only guns can enable.
