The grandfather of an 11-year-old boy fatally struck in the head by a stray bullet during a Fourth of July celebration in Washington, D.C., is calling out the Black Lives Matter movement for failing to care about “black-on-black crime.”
“We’re protesting for months, for weeks, saying, ‘Black lives matter. Black lives matter.’ Black lives matter, it seems like, only when a police officer shoots a black person,” said John Ayala, paternal grandfather to Davon McNeal. “What about all the black-on-black crime that’s happening in the community?”
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) tweeted about Davon’s murder:
Davon’s mother, Crystal McNeal, has worked to end the violence in the nation’s capital city, and now she’s rebuking the protesters and rioters who continue to ignore inner-city violence.
“These people, they don’t care,” she said, according to WTTG-TV. “These guys that’s out here shooting each other, they don’t care who’s outside, your mother, your father, your grandmother, your kids, babies, they don’t care. They shot my baby in his head. He got shot in his head! It hurts so bad.”
McNeal said her son fell victim to the shooting, which resulted from a nearby neighborhood dispute, at around 9:30 p.m., shortly after he had arrived at the house to get some food and pick up his phone charger.
As soon as the bullet struck Davon, McNeal remembers rushing over to hold him.
“When I was on the ground picking up my son,” she recalled, “my daughter and my son was right there. I’ve never seen my kids cry that hard. I shouldn’t have to bury my son at the age of 11.”
Tony Lawson, Davon’s maternal grandfather, said, “We got to stop killing each other. Stop it. Put the guns down.”
The McNeals aren’t the only ones to speak out against the violence.
Secoriya Williamson, father of 8-year-old Secoriea Turner, who was murdered when the vehicle she was in approached a group of armed men blocking a parking lot entrance. When Secoriea’s mother, Charmaine Turner, tried to turn around, the men began shooting.
“They killed my baby because she crossed the barrier and made a U-turn?” she said. “You killed a child! She didn’t do nothin’ to nobody.”
Williamson rebuked the Black Lives Matter movement, saying, “They say, ‘Black lives matter.’ You killed your own. You killed your own this time.”