Sandra Parks, a Milwaukee girl who wrote an award-winning essay two years ago about shootings in her hometown and around the nation, was killed this week when a stray bullet came through her bedroom window from outside and hit her.
She was 13 years old.
"She took it like a soldier," her sister, Tatiana Ingram, told CNN affiliate WISN. "She just walked in the room and said, 'Mama, I'm shot.' The bullet wasn't even for her."
Two years ago, when Parks was a sixth-grader, she won a third-place award for an essay she wrote about gun violence.
"Little children are victims of senseless gun violence . . . I sit back and I have to escape from what I see and hear every day," she wrote. "When I do; I come to the same conclusion . . . we are in a state of chaos."
It is not clear if the girl's house had been targeted, Milwaukee officials said.
"Sandra Parks . . . went into her bedroom; she never came out alive," Mayor Tom Barrett said at a news conference. "Tragically, her death was caused by someone who just decided they were going to shoot bullets into her house, and she's dead."
Bernice Parks, her mother, said her daughter often spoke out against violence and that she was "not violent. My baby did not like violence."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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