12-Year-Old Detroit Shooting Victim Describes Ordeal: EMS Never Came
DETROIT (Talk Radio 1270) Michael Green II wasn't sure what was going on when men in a black car raced up noisily near the basketball court where he was playing.
But he knew it wasn't good.
So the 12-year-old got off the court and walked to the sidewalk. The next thing he knew, pain exploded and his arm was squirting blood. Green said he walked back home and "I fell down on the porch, then I started losing vision."
He'd been shot -- another random act of violence in Detroit with an innocent kid in the crossfire.
Green and his mother Lashaunda Green told their story Thursday on the Charlie Langton 1270 Talk Radio morning show, where they talked about violence in Detroit. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, who's agitating to get justice for Trayvon Martin, the Florida teen shot to death while walking casually in a neighborhood. His shooter has not been charged with a crime, though Martin was unarmed, carrying an iced tea and Skittles and talking to his girlfriend on his cell phone.
"What started the case? A kid expelled from school with nowhere to go," Jackson said of Martin, who had been suspended for having an empty Baggie in school that tested positive for marijuana. "Does that mean an in-house suspension...Or do you throw the child away?
"I'm pained, pained by the fact that so blatant a fact of injustice has come."
In Detroit, Green explained that the shooting incident started when he asked his mother to take a break from some difficult homework and play basketball down the street.
"Like five minutes later a black car was coming," he told Langton, adding, "I turned my back, then they started shooting."
His mother Lashaunda Green said she heard the shots, 10 or so, that took her son down at 5:30 p.m. March 13 on Linwood Street.
"I heard the gunshots ... I said 'Oh my God, that's not fireworks, that's a gun," the mother said.
The black car from which the shooters had emerged rear-ended the family's parked car on the street and kept going. The
shooters have not been identified or caught.
"Everything was moving so fast and so slow at the same time," the mother said. "He was holding his arm and blood was
coming out. I thought 'You can't be shot, if you were shot you wouldn't still be standing here.'"
"My aunt called EMS," the mother added.
Did they come? Langton asked.
"No, they didn't," she said.
The family drove young Green to the hospital themselves. The shooting and subsequent two arm surgeries have left the pre-teen unable to play his beloved basketball. He's also fearful in a way he wasn't before.
"I feel like anything can happen, anybody can get shot and killed at any time," he told Langton.
What's the solution? His mother said, "It starts at the home first, we need to get more police out on the streets...It makes me feel nervous, scared, upset, angry ... It's like you constantly have to watch over your back."
Jackson said, "We as a nation have become much too violent. We lost less than 6,000 soldiers in Iraq, 30,000 are killed here by gunfire, and we're still revving up the tank... Plants close, jobs leave, guns and drugs come in. We don't manufacture guns in Detroit, where are they coming from?
"Don't act as if this is peculiar to Detroit, this is a national culture of violence. Many of the people who do the killing walk away free."
Green had a simpler answer: The seventh grader at Henry Ford Academy said, "I should have just done my homework."
