Detroit prom send off turns chaotic when shots ring out near MLK High School
A Detroit high school's prom sendoff turned terrifying for students after shots rang out on the city's west side.
Approximately 20 rounds were fired near MLK Senior High at a time when students were taking pictures.
Detroit police are now searching for a person-of-interest who was caught on security footage.
DETROIT (FOX 2) - High school students gussied up in their dresses and suits were celebrating their prom at a Detroit high school when shots rang out.
Police are now looking for the man accused of firing approximately 20 rounds on Detroit's east side.
What we know
An individual fired approximately 20 rounds near a Detroit high school early Thursday evening. No one was injured, but dozens of students getting ready for their senior prom were sent fleeing.
It happened in the 3200 block of E. Lafayette, near Martin Luther King High School around 8:30 p.m.
Police are searching for a Black male who was wearing a white zip-up, identifying him as a person-of-interest.
Local perspective
Davon Hall was among those near the school when shots rang out. He said the scene was "hectic, scary" and chaotic with kids running in different directions.
Kids flying out of here in all type of cars, traffic everywhere. Police just sitting there," he said. "It was a secure area but it turned crazy like a movie real quick."
Hall was taking photos and videos of the students decked out in suits and dresses, readying up for prom, when the shots rang out.
"I recorded just instantly and I start seeing the kids running around and following them. I was trying to be as aware as I could," he said.
He was left dejected by the picture the tarrying scene painted for the area.
"We are not like this. King high school has been elevated and has been bringing nothing but good news to the community. This is something that is so depressing," said Hall.
Dig deeper
Maurice Hardwick, who goes by Pastor Mo and frequently commentates on community violence and the impact it has on young people, echoed Hall's sentiment.
"When bullets fly people die. We can't have a shooting around a school, around a prom, around a graduation - anything like that," Hardwick said. "You didn't deserve to be scared like that, you didn't deserve to have bullets ring out on your one night of celebration like that."
Hardwick works with Living Peace Movement. He said more mentorship is needed to stamp out the kind of gun violence that rang out Thursday evening.
"Celebrate and keep on achieving and use this as a tool to say 'I'm not going to be involved in violence,'" he said.
What you can do
Police are searching for the individual and want anyone who was in the area at the time to give them a call. They may also ring Crime Stoppers at 1-800 Speak Up.
The Source
Interviews with witnesses and video of the scene was used while reporting this story.
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Boston Globe
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The state's Office of the Child Advocate, established by the Legislature to ensure children receive appropriate services, reviewed truancy court data Advertisement Among those calling for reform is state Senator Robyn Kennedy, a Worcester Democrat, who filed legislation this year to change the current law. The proposal includes measures such as barring children under age 12 from being involved with Child Requiring Assistance petitions, plus expanding the role of the state's existing network of family resource centers, including a requirement schools refer families to one of those centers before filing a petition with a court. 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A Compton family endured two killings in just eight months. Why justice is so elusive
Jessica Carter is tired of being resilient. After her brother, Richard Ware, 48, was stabbed to death outside a Los Feliz homeless shelter last month, it fell to her to hold their extended family together. Just eight months prior, another relative — her 36-year-old nephew, Jesse Darjean — was gunned down around the block from his childhood home in Compton. His slaying remains unsolved. Across L.A. County and around the country, murder rates are falling to lows not seen since the late 1960s. Yet clearance rates — a measure of how often police solve cases — have remained relatively steady. In other words: Even with fewer homicides to investigate, authorities have been unable to bring more murderers to justice. Police data show killings of Black and Latino people are still less likely to be solved than those of white or Asian victims. Carter's hometown of Compton is still crawling out from under its reputation as a national epicenter for gang violence. But for all of its continued struggles, violent crime — especially killings — has plummeted. When the gang wars peaked in 1991, there were 87 homicides. Last year, there were 18, including Darjean's fatal shooting on Oct. 24. The way Carter sees it, the killers who took her brother and nephew are both getting away with it — but for different reasons. In Darjean's shooting, there are no known suspects, witnesses or motive. But the man who stabbed Ware is known to authorities. The L.A. County district attorney's office declined to file charges against him, finding evidence of self-defense, according to a memo released to The Times. Ware's sister and other relatives dispute the D.A.'s decision, claiming authorities have failed to fully investigate. 'The system failed him,' Carter said. In the absence of arrests and charges, Carter and her family have simmered with rage, grief and frustration. With digital footprints, DNA testing and more resources than ever available to police, how is it that the people who took their loved ones are still walking free? In Darjean's case, the investigation is led by the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, which has patrolled Compton since 2000, when the city disbanded its own Police Department. Leads appear to be scarce. His body was found in the back seat of his car, which had been riddled with bullets. A father of three, he had just gotten home late at night from one of his jobs as a security guard. To Sherrina Lewis, his mother, it seemed the world was quick to forget and move on. News outlets largely ignored the shooting. Social media sensationalized it. She couldn't resist reading some of the comments online, speculating about whether her son was killed by someone he knew or because of his race or a gang affiliation. But, Darjean was no gangster, she says. 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When she confronted one of Darjean's close childhood friends about what happened, he swore he didn't know anything. She didn't believe him. 'He just broke down crying. I can tell it was eating him up,' Lewis said. The L.A. County Sheriff's Department did not respond to multiple inquires about Darjean's case. On some level, Lewis understands the hesitancy. Fear of gang retaliation and distrust of law enforcement still hangs over the west Compton neighborhood. After raising her six children there, in 2006 she sold their family home of 50 years and moved to Palmdale because she didn't want her 'kids to become accustomed to death.' For her, she said, the final straw was the discovery of a body 'propped up' on her neighbor's fence. Like generations of Black women before her, Lewis is faced with enormous pressure to carry their family's burden. Possessing a superhuman-like will to overcome adversity is celebrated by society with terms such as 'Black Girl Magic' and 'Strong Black Woman,' said Keisha Bentley-Edwards, an associate professor of medicine at Duke University. But such unrealistic expectations not only strip Black women of their innocence from an early age, but also contribute to higher pregnancy-related death rates and other bad health outcomes, she said. 'A lot of times people expect Black women to take care of it,' Bentley-Edwards said in an interview. Instead of romanticizing the struggle, she said, there should be 'tangible support like housing or employment' and other resources. But experts say safety nets are at risk, particularly after the Trump administration in April terminated roughly $811 million in public safety grants for L.A. and other major cities. As a result, federal funds for victim services programs, which offer counseling and other resources, have been slashed. Lewis never thought she'd be in a position to need such help. 'The funny thing is, we're from Compton born and raised, but we were not a statistic until my son was murdered,' she said. 'My kids had a two-parent household. We both had jobs. We weren't doing welfare: I worked every day.' Months of waiting on an arrest in Darjean's death led Carter, his aunt, into a 'dark place.' She ended up taking a spiritual retreat into the mountains of Nigeria. She was still working through the feelings of anger and guilt when she learned her brother, Ware, had been fatally stabbed on July 5. She described the days and weeks that followed as a teary blur. Coming from a family of nurses taught her how to push aside her own grief and forge on, but she was left wondering how much more she could endure. Ware, who went by Duke, was his family's unofficial historian, setting out to map out their sprawling Portuguese and Creole roots and scouring the internet for long-lost relatives. He used to brag all the time about his daughter, who had graduated from nursing school and moved back to the L.A. area to work at a pediatric intensive care unit on the Westside. He used to joke that for all of his shortcomings as a father, he had at least gotten one thing right. In recent months, though, Ware's life had started to spiral. His diabetes had gotten worse, and a back injury left him unable to continue in his job as a long-haul truck driver. Relatives worried he was hiding a drug addiction from them. He had adopted a bull mastiff puppy named Nala. She used to follow him everywhere, usually trotting a few steps behind without a leash. Even when he was having trouble making ends meet, he always 'spoiled her,' his family said. For a few months, he lived out of a van one of his sisters bought for him. He then landed at a shelter, a hangar-style structure on the edge of Griffith Park. He and Nala were kicked out after a short time, but he still frequented the area, and it's where L.A. County authorities said the fight that ended in his killing began. Prosecutors said in a memo that surveillance video showed Ware and his dog chasing another man into a parking lot across the street from the shelter. The two men, the D.A.'s memo said, had been involved in an ongoing dispute, possibly over a woman. According to the memo, the man said he'd been carrying a knife because of a previous altercation in which Ware ordered his dog to attack. On the day of the stabbing, the man said, Ware had shown up with Nala at the shelter, looking for a confrontation. After the fight, responding officers found Ware suffering from a deep wound to his chest, Nala with several lacerations and the suspect hiding in a nearby porta-potty. His clothes had been torn off, and he was bleeding profusely from several severe dog bites, the memo said. 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'Highballed': How disproportionate property taxes are forcing some Americans out of their homes
Bonita Anderson's favorite part of living in Baltimore is having family nearby. A family matriarch with five children and eight grandchildren, Anderson worked hard to buy a place in the city for her family to call home in 2009. "It was an accomplishment for me," she said. "That's where we used to gather to bring the family together." Last week, what was once Anderson's cherished home was listed for sale at nearly $540,000 -- more than five times what she paid for it. But Anderson won't see any of the proceeds. After more than a decade of making payments toward her $100,000 mortgage, Anderson was diagnosed with cancer in 2020. Amid mounting medical bills and property taxes, the lifelong Baltimore resident says she had to choose between fighting for her life and fighting for her home. While undergoing treatment, Anderson fell behind on her property taxes by about $5,000. In 2022, she lost her house at a Baltimore City tax sale. "I sat down and thought, 'Oh my god, I'm 70 years old and I'm homeless,'" Anderson told ABC News Senior Political Correspondent Rachel Scott. The City of Baltimore had put a lien on Anderson's tax debt and auctioned it off to the highest bidder -- a company that specializes in tax lien purchases -- for just $69,500. "If you can't afford to pay your property taxes and you keep missing your payments, government is going to auction your property off for back taxes," said Lawrence Levy, executive dean at the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University. Court records show Anderson tried to make good and redeem her home, paying the city $18,900 by the end of 2022 -- more than triple her outstanding taxes. But instead of putting these payments toward her back taxes, the city applied the money to taxes that had accrued under the new owner. Anderson was unknowingly paying the investor's tax bills instead of her own, allowing the company to foreclose on her home in 2023. "I was just baffled," she said. 'Filled with distortions' Anderson's home was just one of nearly 44,000 Baltimore properties that were listed at municipal tax sales from 2019 through 2023. It was also among the 92% of those properties located in majority-nonwhite neighborhoods -- which account for 70% of parcels citywide. An analysis of ATTOM and U.S. Census Bureau data by ABC Owned Television Stations showed one likely reason for this disparity: disproportionate property taxes. Property taxes are based on a government assessment of each home's value. But researchers say property values are highly subjective, and these estimates don't always align with market prices. Data shows discrepancies in assessments -- and therefore tax bills -- affect some communities more than others. ABC's analysis found that across the country, homeowners in predominantly Black and Brown areas tend to pay higher taxes than those in mostly white neighborhoods for a house worth the same amount on the open market. "When property tax systems are filled with distortions the people punished tend to be the poorest homeowners," Levy said. "In suburbia, where you have a high level of segregation, the people who are being taxed unfairly based on not accurately capturing the value of the home are people of color." For some of these homeowners who are "highballed" on their assessments, missed bills lead to tax sales, leaving them with nothing. From the time Anderson bought her home until she lost it, the property's assessment more than tripled -- but the home's booming value ultimately went to its new owner. "I don't know what's worse, losing the house or being diagnosed with cancer," Anderson said. "It hurts still." Until recently, Levy noted, tax sales most often took place in cities. As urban neighborhoods gentrified and property values shifted rapidly, longtime residents couldn't always keep up with rising bills. "We're now starting to see more of that in suburban areas, particularly in the poorer suburban areas as we're seeing demographic change," Levy said. In Garden City, a predominantly white suburb on New York's Long Island with a median home value of around $1 million, a typical residential tax bill is around $10,000 to $15,000, property data shows. Down the road in Hempstead, where 88% of residents are Black or Latino, homes tend to be worth less than half that. But the typical tax bill is similar, meaning Hempstead homeowners pay proportionally more in taxes relative to the value of their homes. John Rao, senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, says U.S. homeowners in communities of color face a "double whammy." They often receive "lowballed" appraisals when trying to purchase or refinance their homes, Rao explained, "but when it comes to paying their taxes, once they've owned the home ... often their assessments are proportionally higher than what they should be." 'Stripping generational wealth' In suburban Delaware County, Pennsylvania, 91-year-old Gloria Gaynor, who suffers from dementia, lost her home of 25 years because of $3,500 in taxes she didn't pay during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gaynor's daughter, Jackie Davis, told ABC station WPVI-TV that her mother stayed home during the pandemic. She skipped her annual trip to the tax office after hearing that tax collectors had paused enforcement as COVID-19 spread through the Philadelphia suburbs. When the government restarted collection efforts and the county tax office reopened, Gaynor went in and made a payment, intending to cover her previous year's taxes, according to her attorney, Alexander Barth. Instead, the money was applied to Gaynor's 2021 and 2022 taxes and not her outstanding balance from 2020, "leaving what is essentially a donut in her tax payment history," Barth explained. A real estate investor bought Gaynor's home from Delaware County for $14,000, the cost of her overdue taxes plus interest and fees. Gaynor had paid off most of her mortgage on the house, which is now worth an estimated $247,000. But she did not make any money from the sale. "This is stripping generational wealth from the have-nots and allowing the haves to have it," Barth said. Gaynor's family went to court in an attempt to get back her home, but two courts upheld the sale. The Delaware County Tax Claim Bureau told ABC's Philadelphia station that while it "sympathizes with the emotional toll" on Gaynor, the county government acted within Pennsylvania law and issued multiple notices ahead of the sale. If Gaynor had lived just a few miles away inside Philadelphia's city limits, officials there would have taken extra steps to try to keep her in her home. Since property taxes are handled differently in different communities, some local governments like Philadelphia have layers of protection for vulnerable homeowners, such as requiring in-person notifications before a tax sale or offering payment plans to redeem a home afterward. "Although local governments should do everything they can to keep people in their homes, whether it's an owner or a renter, at some point they have an obligation to all the other taxpayers, the businesses, the families that are paying their fair share to make sure that these taxes are collected," Levy said. From the living room to the courtroom Just over 90 miles down the road from Gaynor, Anderson spends her days looking back on the memories she built in the home that was once the centerpiece of her family. Now living with her daughter in a Baltimore suburb, Anderson has taken her case to court, joining a lawsuit claiming that the City of Baltimore broke federal law by selling her former home to a private company for pennies on the dollar. The City of Baltimore, which did not respond to ABC News' requests for comment, has defended its actions in court, saying it notified Anderson as required and did not profit from the sale. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that local governments could not profit from tax sales, finding that homeowners have a constitutional right to any payments beyond the taxes and penalties they owe. Over the last two years, many states across the country have changed their laws in light of the court's decision. But some experts say the federal government also has a role to play. "The federal answer to lower local property taxes is more funding for local services," Levy said. "They need more help from Congress and the White House." As the Trump administration has slashed the federal budget, local governments will have to make up the difference to provide the same services. According to experts, municipalities will likely rely more on property taxes, which in turn, could mean more situations like Anderson's, where homeowners in majority-nonwhite neighborhoods too often pay more than their fair share. When asked by ABC News what happened to her dream of passing down her home to the next generation of her family, Anderson said, "it died." "It still makes me emotional," Anderson said. "It's just hard. Very hard."
