13-Year-Old Girl Who Wrote Essay on Gun Violence Killed by Stray Bullet

Two years after writing an award-winning essay about gun violence and crime in Milwaukee, 13-year-old Sandra Parks was killed by a stray bullet that went into her bedroom. On Monday (Nov. 19), someone fired a gun at her home, with a single bullet fatally hitting her. "My sister took it like a soldier: She just walked in the room and said, 'Mama, I'm shot,'" her sister, Tatiana Ingram, told WISN.

Speaking with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Sandra's mother Bernice Parks said that she "was everything this world is not. My baby did not like violence. She was my angel from the time she was in my womb to the time she came." Her sister added, “She was only hit one time, in her chest. The bullet wasn’t even for her."

Sandra's essay, which came third in her school district's 2016 Martin Luther King Jr. essay contest, spoke out against gun violence while calling for more empathy. "We are the future leaders but if we don't have an education, we will accomplish nothing," the essay read. "Sometimes I sit back and have to escape from what I see and hear every day,” she wrote. “When I do; I come to the same conclusion… We are in a state of chaos.”

Over the past two years alone, Milwaukee public schools have lots 12 students to gun violence. Sandra is the seventh to be the victim of homicide since January this year. “It’s part of the insanity we see in Milwaukee,” Mayor Tom Barrett explained earlier this week as per New York Times. “I look at where we are now as a city and it breaks my heart to stand here. As a dad, it breaks my heart.”

Sandra's mother Bernice has set up a GoFundMe page for help with memorial services.