Jenee Gragston dropped to the ground and held on to the grass as if it could save her life. She yelled to her family members to get down. She later told me that she didn’t know where the bullets were coming from, but she knew they were close. When the firing stopped, the cries began. She could hear her 4-year-old nephew howling: “Get it off me! Get it off me!” She wasn’t close enough to see what had happened, but it looked like he had blood on his chest. A teenage boy was lying near the child. The teenager “never screamed or anything,” she said. “I can still see all of it.”
It was a Saturday afternoon, mid-August in Lexington, Kentucky. Hundreds of people had gathered in Charles Young Park to celebrate what’s called East End Day—a combination of family reunions, live music, and lots of food. I grew up going to festivals in that park, though I lived on the west side of town, in the Charlotte Court housing projects.
Kentucky isn’t the most dangerous place in America, but it’s up there, with the 14th-highest rate of gun deaths. Twelve years ago, my uncle was murdered in Lexington. Three years ago, my sister’s husband was shot and killed there. I worry about my brother, who still lives there. He had gotten himself off the streets for a while, but is now back living in the city. Lexington had recently seen a hard-won drop in gun deaths—last year was the fourth straight year of declines in gun violence among young people. This spring and summer set a record of 190 straight days without a homicide. Then came the East End Day shooting, which killed that teenager, 16-year-old Di’Zhon Robertson, and wounded four others—including the 4-year-old, who was shot in the leg. The next weekend, another person was killed. The weekend after that, four separate shootings left two more dead.
Gragston was selling Polish sausages in the park. She’d paid more than $300 for the grill, $300 for the sausages, more than $1,000 in fees, $75 for the booth. Business was good; some people returned for seconds. Her husband, her kids, and other family members had come to help her set up her tent. Her 4-year-old nephew was handing customers sodas and water bottles. On the basketball court nearby, Devine Carama was talking with a group of young people. Carama is the director of ONE Lexington, a city-funded program that tries to prevent gun violence by mentoring at-risk boys. He, too, threw himself down when he heard gunfire. “I almost got shot that day,” he told me. Two people near him were hit—a man and his girlfriend. Carama and others tried to bandage the man’s leg; he told me he could see a glimmer of bullet or bone through the blood.
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A day later, 18-year-old Jametrius Griffin turned himself in and was charged with murder. According to court testimony, Griffin’s younger brother had gotten into an argument; punches were thrown, and the younger brother fell or was pushed. When Griffin saw that, he yanked out a gun and started firing.
For the past three years, Robertson had participated in ONE Lexington’s summer youth program, which offers workshops on building emotional and social skills, as well as college-campus visits. “He wasn’t a street kid,” Carama said. Griffin’s younger brother was in ONE Lexington, too—in its school mentoring program. The organization had also helped Griffin get a job at UPS. The group’s work seemed to be making a difference. And then a fight left one young man dead, one wounded, and one in prison.
In many ways, Lexington feels like a small town, where everyone knows everyone. I went to middle school with Griffin’s lawyer, Daniel Whitley, who has a big reputation locally for representing people accused of murder—and for winning their cases. The week after the shooting, I spoke with Whitley and with Griffin’s mother, Jay-Me Baxter, on a video call.
“A bunch of bullshit” was how Baxter described the park shooting, “because everybody’s friends and everybody’s family.” She said her youngest son told her he had been bullied by Di’Zhon Robertson and others. The day after the shooting, she made the same argument in a video she posted on Facebook that outraged many in the community. She suggested that her older son had had no choice and said she didn’t care “who makes it home as long as mine do.” (I tried to reach Robertson’s mother through family members to see if she would talk with me about what happened to her son; her sister replied that the family didn’t want to relive it. But friends and family members described the teenager as quiet, observant, and “very respectful.”)
“I’m like, Shit, I know Di’Zhon’s mama,’” Baxter told me—the other mother was close friends with her own sister. Baxter said she had had a conversation with her about the beef between the boys, and assumed the issue had been settled. Griffin loved football, and he had started college at Kentucky State University. “But you know them kids,” she said. “They be doing stuff in silence.” Her son must have been simmering with fury.
I knew Baxter’s family growing up—she’s a year older than me, and they, too, lived in the Charlotte Court housing projects. She didn’t remember me, but she knew my brother. Her mother was white, and had nine children. Baxter, the third-oldest, is half Black, like her younger siblings. But the oldest two are white. Her mother used to cry, Baxter told me, because “the white kids didn’t ever live with us.” In our majority-Black neighborhood, a white mother with mixed-race kids stood out. Baxter remembers people throwing rocks through their windows and a lot of name-calling—“white bitch.” Her family was poorer than many others, but people in the neighborhood assumed that she was privileged, and tormented her for it. “That white mama, man,” she said. “You know what I’m saying?”
That kind of bullying is part of the pain of being impoverished. You feel so low, you desperately want to make someone else feel lower.
Baxter is a single mother, and Griffin is the oldest of her five children. Like my own mother, she lost custody of her kids because of drugs—she signed over her parental rights to her mom. She told me the story as if she was discussing a character in a book: “Jay-Me got in trouble. Jay-Me started using drugs, cocaine specifically.” Like my mother, Baxter was a victim of sexual abuse. She grew up watching her mother “get beat by men. I done been touched by men, and I never told my mama until a couple months before she died.”
It took Baxter seven years to stop using drugs and get her kids back. Those kids needed her, yet she kept choosing drugs over them, she said, as her voice cracked and tears hit her cheeks. “That hurts, because I can’t believe I did that.” I’ve heard those same words from my own mother and watched her cry for the same reason.
[From the October 2023 issue: Jenisha from Kentucky]
Before Baxter signed over her rights, she said, she asked her mother to promise that what she’d experienced as a little girl wouldn’t happen to her kids. She wanted to break the cycle of violence, poverty, and dysfunction that is the inheritance of so many children. “I’m not a gun mama,” Baxter told me, but she believes in “stepping in the street” to fight. “I’ve been fighting all my life,” she said.
Backgrounds like these are so common in Whitley’s line of work that he seemed to tune out our conversation. At one point on the video call, we heard the sound of snoring. Baxter joked about it: “Listen to him. My lawyer tiiiiiired.” We continued talking for a few more minutes and never heard from him again. “Night night, Daniel,” she said before we hung up. He called me back later, apologized for not saying goodbye, and said he hadn’t been asleep.
Despite the pity I felt for Baxter and her family, I felt more for those shot by her son, and their families.
Di’Zhon Robertson’s uncle Tyrone Johnson officiated his funeral, and told me that the church was full of people “struggling with their emotions.” I was told by attendees that the teenager’s grieving mother had to be pulled off the coffin. Damon Williams Jr., a 14-year-old wounded in the shooting, was hit in the thigh. He had been planning on joining his middle school’s football team this season. Lakeisha Martin was shot in the stomach and the sternum. East End Day, her older brother Isaiah Barron told me, “is a day for our community that we look forward to every year.” Martin was in the hospital for 21 days and will be unable to work for months.
The day of the shooting, Jenee Gragston rushed to the hospital as her nephew went into surgery. She told me the police said she should leave her tent, and could return later to retrieve everything. But when her husband went back to the park, almost everything was gone. The cooler with the meat. The grill, the propane tank, even her prescription eyeglasses. Other tents had been robbed as well. Gragston told me that she was grateful her nephew was okay, but that she would never go to one of the park festivals again.
Lexington is trying hard to reduce this kind of gun violence. Mayor Linda Gorton told me the city has handed out free gun locks and offered to buy back guns from residents, among other interventions. Through ONE Lexington, it offers groceries, hotel stays, and educational funds to people affected by gun violence. The city relocated a family whose house had been shot up, Gorton said. Still, she conceded, “there are times when we cannot control every human being’s behavior.”
It doesn’t help that Kentucky has such lax gun laws. Just this year, state legislators dropped the age required to carry a concealed firearm from 21 to 18. When I was growing up in Lexington, gun violence was even worse. Whenever you have a community of young men who feel powerless and disrespected, who have been raised to protect themselves and their families from perceived threats, and who believe words can’t save them but a gun might, then death will follow. The story of what happened in Lexington this summer is particularly tragic because so many had worked so long and so carefully to make a difference. But a gun changes everything in a moment.
Carama, of ONE Lexington, told me he has more friends who are dead than alive. He, too, said that “a lot of it is out of our control,” and that there’s only so much someone from outside a young person’s family can do. You can monitor a kid all you like, but if he has a gun, “you got a split second to react.” Ultimately, he said, “you can’t prevent everything. It’s just not possible.”
In Jay-Me Baxter’s account, she tried, in her way, to intervene. “The mamas grew up together,” she told me. “This could’ve been prevented.” But it wasn’t.
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