ciara

Four-year-old at Time of Shooting
Shot: February 1997
Dallas Texas

Why is blood rolling down your face?

Ciara: "My Dad and I were sitting on the couch watching T.V. We heard guns shooting. My dad went to wake-up my mom and my brothers and sisters. When I heard the shots I thought they sounded dangerous; they were close by. I touched my face and I saw blood on my hand. I didn't even know I was shot; I never felt it. It hit me right on the head. My mom was crying. She said, 'Why is blood rolling down your face?' I thought I wouldn't live. First my parents saw if the gun shooting was stopped and then they took me to the van. When I got into the van I was still bleeding, so I think it was a lot of blood. They told the people working in the hospital that I got shot and they took me to a room and cleaned off my face, they tried to stop the blood. It went in the top part of my head under the skin; it didn't go into my brain. I wanted to be with my mom and dad so I wouldn't be alone. You shouldn't mess with guns, you might not know what it does and you might not know how it works and you might pull the trigger."

They shot driving by shooting randomly

Lisa (Mother of Ciara) : "They shot about five houses on this block, driving by, shooting randomly. We believe it was two carloads of teenage gang members shooting from one side of the block to the other. My husband had Ciara at his side when the shots started. Ciara said, 'What is that?' He said, 'I don't know, wait!' and she just took off from him, she was trying to get to the front door, she wanted to see what all the noise was. As she was running to the living room, two or three bullets came in, one caught her on the side of the head. It did not penetrate. It did leave a small fragment and like any head wound it bled tremendously. She didn't even know till we saw blood everywhere. Then the two of us were screaming, and trying to get kids up. By that time they were not shooting anymore. My mother-in-law lives next door, bullets went into her house but she wasn't hurt. We took Ciara to the hospital. It was just overnight, the next day she was riding her bike. Had she been standing half an inch in a different spot, or running a tad faster, it would have been a tragedy. You had to pull her hair back to see the bullet fragment. One day I was washing her hair and it fell out.

It's like they're passing around a pack of cigarettes.

'The police said three days before Ciara was shot a fourteen-year-old boy was killed in West Allis. The boy who did that shooting was supposed to live on the corner of our block. The drive-by shooting was gang retaliation. With gang members, they're trading off guns, one gives a gun to the next guy, and it's like they're passing around a pack of cigarettes. It's real macho; you're living in Texas where everybody has a gun. I think the government has a price on our heads; each one of our heads is alright to give up, as long as the lobbyists pay, the legislators can keep passing whatever they have to so the manufacturers can keep selling their guns."