An “amazing” 13-year-old girl who wrote an award-winning essay about senseless gun violence was killed after a stray bullet was fired into her home.
Sandra Parks, from Milwaukee in Wisconsin, US, was struck in the chest on Monday and walked into a room saying “Mama, I’m shot”, her sister Tatiana Ingram told WISN 12 news. She died at the scene.
Two men have been charged in relation to the incident after they were found hiding in a house on a nearby street. AK-47-style guns were found in a kitchen bin and a bedroom.
Isaac Barnes, 26, faces murder and weapons charges.
He was reportedly seen by an ex-girlfriend that night wearing a mask and carrying an assault rifle, before telling her: “You lucky the kids are in the car, I was gonna fan you down,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported from court papers.
Untrell Oden, 27, was charged with two weapons offences.
It is not known whether the house was targeted and a motive is still being determined, police said.
Parks had penned an essay titled “Our Truth” in 2016 for a Martin Luther King Jr essay competition, in which she wrote: “Little children are victims of senseless gun violence”.
The piece earned her third-place in her school district.
A tearful Ingram said: “Sandra did not deserve this. Sandra was an amazing person. She was so bright. She was so beautiful and full of life.”
Her essay laid out her vision for her community and country in which purpose, faith and hope in one another would prevail.
“We need to rewrite our story so that faith and hope for a better tomorrow, is not only within us, but we believe it and we put into actions.
“We must not allow the lies of violence, racism, and prejudice to be our truth.”
- Sandra Parks
“We must not allow the lies of violence, racism, and prejudice to be our truth. The truth begins with us,” she later added in the heartfelt piece, which she read out on Wisconsin Public Radio last year.
Her mother, Bernice Parks, has established a crowdfunding page to cover funeral costs.
“She had hope for going to college to be a writer. She was just an innocent child,” Parks wrote on the page.
Within two days, more than $17,000 (£13,300) has been raised of a $20,000 target.