New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu didn't realize it, but he told Little Rock a story Friday that the city already knows all too well.
It was the story of 5-year-old Briana Allen, who while celebrating her cousin's 10th birthday on her grandmother's porch six years ago was struck by a bullet when teenagers shot up the house with an AK-47 rifle. The bullet pierced her femoral artery, causing her to bleed out and die.
"They missed their target -- her father. The bullet ripped through Briana's gut. All her father could do was hold little Briana in his hands. Blood was pooling underneath her. The Times-Picayune got a picture of it, and you can't take that picture out of your mind," Landrieu said.
Briana's uncle was gunned down and killed a year earlier. Her father, Burnell Allen, was arrested three months after her killing in the shooting death of a man. In 2015, Burnell Allen was sentenced to life in prison on drug charges. Three others in the Allen family were sentenced in that case.
Authorities said Burnell was the leader of the Allen Gang. The teenagers who killed Briana were in an opposing gang.
But this wasn't only a story about Briana that Landrieu told the crowd at the Little Rock Community Safety Summit at Heifer International on Friday. It was also a story about Ka'nard Allen, the boy who was celebrating his birthday the day of her death.
Ka'nard was grazed by a bullet in the shooting. Five months later his father was fatally stabbed by his stepmother. And almost a year later he was grazed by another bullet at a Mother's Day parade where 18 others were shot.
"So twice in a year, before the age of [11], he came within an inch of getting his head blown off, and he lost an incalculable number of family members," Landrieu said.
May 29, 2012 -- the day Briana was slain -- was the worst day of Landrieu's professional career, he said.
The web of gang crimes that often involve victims of one offense being suspects in another, where innocent children grow up and die surrounded by violence, isn't a foreign story to Little Rock.
It's particularly familiar for the family of Ramiya Reed, the 2-year-old toddler who -- while sitting in her mother's lap in a vehicle -- was shot and killed Nov. 22, 2016, reportedly by members of the Monroe Street Gang, a group at odds with the gang the toddler's family was said to be in, the Murder Mafia Gang.
The toddler was wearing a polka-dot Hello Kitty jacket when she was killed by a bullet in the backseat of the Camry.
Ramiya's teenage cousins were shot at the night before while driving the same Camry. One of them reportedly had shot at the homes of family members of then 17-year-old Larry Jackson and 21-year-old Deshaun Malik Rushing, who were later arrested in Ramiya's killing.
The day after Ramiya's death, one of her cousins was grazed by a bullet at a shootout outside a fish and chicken restaurant. Months before her death, another relative was shot in the buttocks.
Ramiya's father, Brandon Eugene Reed, 32, was indicted last year on federal gun charges.
These gun violence injuries and deaths may not be streamed on national news broadcasts like the all-too-common mass shootings are, but they are just as real to the family laying a child to rest and to the communities plagued by the violence, Landrieu said in his keynote speech Friday.
His audience was made up of Little Rock advocates who work with at-risk youths in the city. After his speech, Landrieu joined Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola in a question-and-answer discussion about violence in communities.
So, what's the answer? When will children stop getting gunned down in American towns?
Landrieu and Stodola both had some ideas of changes at the federal and local government levels that could help, but each said that, more simply, the solution starts with the average citizen.
Stodola said every person must start spending more quality time with children to teach them important values.
Landrieu said interventions are needed early in youths' lives.
"All of us doing a little bit all at the same time, that will change the way the country acts," Landrieu said.
"No justice, no peace. ... We have to decide to be a country of peace. If Little Rock's not at peace, the country's not at peace," he said.
"That's the next challenge. The question is, which one of you is going to rise up and accept it?"
Information for this article was contributed by Ryan Tarinelli and John Lynch of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Metro on 04/07/2018