Jessica Ivey Jenkins cradled her sleeping 6-month-old daughter, Samantha, as she and her husband, Sameule Jenkins, talked softly about their 7-year-old son, Legend.
“He’d come home, get his coloring pencils, crayons, scissors, glue,” Mr. Jenkins said. “Swords, masks; he was very creative.”
“He was the sweetest,” Mrs. Jenkins said. “All the staff members at the school talk about how much of a joy he was.”
In the late afternoon of May 27, Brandon, 10, the oldest of the family’s seven children, and Legend, the second oldest, asked if they could walk to the neighborhood Food Lion supermarket and Subway sandwich shop, less than 10 minutes from the low-rise apartment complex in which the family had lived in Gastonia, N.C., for six years. The couple were reluctant.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The New York Times (paywall)
______________________
Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here. Nicole is the author of Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car, available now.
Photo by gorodenkoff/Getty Images