KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Dacia Walker, 39, watched her son die outside their Kansas City, Kansas, home on the evening of Saturday, Aug. 5.
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"I said, 'Take a deep breath, I need you to breathe, just breathe,'" Walker said. "And he took a deep breath, and he closed his eyes. When I walked to the sidewalk, there was my baby lying there on the ground.”
Philip, 18, lost his life after jumping in front of a bullet to save a child, according to Walker.
“Days I don't eat, days I don't sleep, it is so hard for me at 5 o'clock every day,” she said.
Over two months later, Walker is still working to bury her son.
To support families like the Walkers, KC Common Good recently launched Play Your Part, a campaign to encourage the community to work together.
“With the homicides we've seen this year, so often we look at the number, but behind every number is a family and a community that is hurting,” said Darren Faulkner, KC Common Goodprogram director. "This type of violence in our community further breeds mistrust with the system with each other and further damages the fabric of what we call community.”
Play Your Part campaign materials include a list of 10 ways to reduce violence, which features contact information for organizations that aid with education, intervention, mediation, etc.
“It’s a basic lack of not having everything I need, whether that’s housing, whether that’s food on the table, whether that's the ability to go to school," Faulkner said. "It causes people to have tempers ... [that feeling of,] 'Just one more thing happened to me today and I will snap.'"
By living the initiative's motto — change takes all of us — Faulkner and Walker believe there's potential to save more lives.
“Everyone can do something — however great, however small,” Faulkner said.
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