‘I’ve Never Heard of a Church Stopping Gun Violence’ A conversation with Eliayni Torres and Helen Ri

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‘I’ve Never Heard of a Church Stopping Gun Violence’ A conversation with Eliayni Torres and Helen Rieke

Eliayni Torres is a sophomore at St. Catharine Academy in the Bronx, NY. She lost a friend to gang-related gun violence last year and largely speaks to that experience in the interview below. She spoke with us alongside her guidance counselor, Helen Rieke.

How have you been directly affected by gun violence? ELIAYNI: I didn’t know how to feel at one point. It was just like too much going on at the moment. It was so rare and I remember, I was in ELA class and everybody is posting it around and I just thought, “Oh that’s not true. I’m not going to believe it.” Thursday I come into school and I find out that it’s true. So automatically, I broke down. My eyes were really baggy. I was very pale. And I remember Ms. Rieke coming into my first period class asking for me and I just remember breaking down. And I was glad she was there because I could express my feelings with her and I can continue expressing them with her. And it was just too much at the moment. I didn’t really know how to react to it. It was very weird. I never broke down in class. That was not my type of movement. So me actually breaking down in class made me feel safe. I could speak to somebody. She might not relate to it but I could speak to somebody instead of holding it in and keeping so much anger to myself.

HELEN: And this was in your neighborhood? ELIAYNI: Yeah, up the block from my house. You could literally hear the gunshots as well. It was four or five gun shots and I heard it from afar. It was crazy. I didn’t think it was going to be one of my friends. Everybody was posting it on the Citizen app so everybody was reporting it. And the app was telling us that a 14-year-old had passed away but nobody had seen his face. It was November 30 of 2022. When it hit a year, I was very sad, but I was also like, “okay I have to move on in life as well.” I can’t always keep holding on to something and I just have to better myself from that. He made me realize who to trust and who not to trust and when to go outside and when not to go outside and just to always be safe.

Can you share what happened and tell us about him? ELIAYNI: So his name was Prince Shabbaz and he was 14 years old. His brother was gang affiliated. I would say that. And his little brother really wouldn’t be in the mix of that. His brother would always play video games. He was a loving person. I could personally say that my friend was never a bad person, he never wanted to harm nobody. He was coming out of a building with his older brother and another gang person tried to shoot at his older brother and ended up shooting Prince. So it happened in a moment and all of his other friends saw him pass away. So it was tragic because his friends were seeing him bleed out. That was very scary. So it affected me a lot because this was a person that I would talk to daily. And not only did it affect me a lot, it affected his family a lot because he was the youngest. Imagine losing your youngest child. It was just so rare so his family did not understand what was going on. Everybody was lost at the time. A M AT T E R O F S P I R I T

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