A community on edge

When my son Greg volunteered with homeless children as a teenager, friends in our green suburb asked if he feared visiting neighborhoods where they instinctively lock their car doors.

Greg explained that the 7-to-11-year-olds he volunteered with lived in those neighborhoods every night, so why would a 15-year-old six-footer be afraid. He reasoned that any neighborhood where you see women and young children out at night is relatively safe.

A decade later, Wilmington, Delaware, has morphed into a city where violence is commonplace and far fewer women and children venture out at night.

In this city of roughly 72,000, shootings averaged two a week last year.

This year, a young man was killed on a city playground during daylight hours.

A man was fatally shot in his wheelchair – a wheelchair he has used since he was paralyzed in a previous shootout.

While most parents encourage their children to bring their friends home, Sabrina Best warned her teenage son not to let his friends congregate outside their Wilmington home. She was anxious that something like what occurred on June 14 might happen. As the single mother was in her bedroom around 9:30 p.m., young men opened fire on teens sitting on her porch. When it was over, an injured girl was collapsed on Best's porch and a boy was bleeding on her living room floor. A chalk X on her sidewalk marked detective's best guess of where the shooters stood.

For three years before Greg could drive, I ferried him between homeless shelters and abandoned apartments where families squatted off-the-grid. I became familiar with Wilmington's poorest neighborhoods and friendly with the families temporarily trapped within them.

Less than three miles from my flower-bedecked front porch, people are being shot with shocking regularity, but my neighbors still walk their dogs and push their babies in upscale strollers unaffected by the violence.

I'd like to use my almost 40 years of experience as a reporter and editor to tell stories that will change the status quo.

I left the full-time newsroom to do what other health writers often write about – to become a full-time caregiver for a paralyzed parent, who became progressively enfeebled before her death eight years later. I was unable to reenter the full-time journalism market as the economy tightened.

I became interested in health-writing wile freelancing for Prevention and Better Health and Living magazines, writing articles on care-giving and children's health for websites, and writing a fun-to-do article on germs for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The stories I'll research for the fellowship are ones I've longed to write, but my status as a freelancer previously made it impossible to research and write on a serious subject that required serious time. I'm grateful that the financial and mentoring support from the fellowship will change that.

My reporting will be a collaborative effort, reaching out to as many community members as possible by linking with a high school newspaper, a minority-owned city publication and my sponsoring media site, Delaware First Media, a new nonprofit, nonpartisan digital multimedia news service that aims to support civil discourse and informed decision-making.