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Lawrence Muhammad didn t hear the gunfire outside his family s East Knoxville home that February evening. He didn t know what had happened until he found his son in a state of panic and asked, in a heart-stopping moment: Where s your sister?
Muhammad went outside and found 15-year-old Janaria there, shot and bleeding badly at the bottom of the steps behind their house. He tried to keep her alive, but he couldn t save his daughter.
Janaria was pronounced dead at the hospital Feb. 16, the third of five teenagers to lose their lives to gun violence in Knoxville this year.
Nearly three months later, Janaria Muhammad s killing remains unsolved. So, too, does the March 9 shooting of 15-year-old Jamarion Gillette, who was found late that night by a passerby on the road leading to the University of Tennessee Medical Center. He died overnight from a still-unexplained gunshot wound.
The first in-person Knoxville City Council meeting in over a year was interrupted Tuesday night when the family of Anthony Thompson Jr., a 17-year-old killed by a police officer at
In Knoxville, a Black high school contends with a massive rise in teen shootings
Constance Every and a student of Austin-East Magnet High School protest the police shooting of Anthony J. Thompson Jr.
(Jenny Jarvie / Los Angeles Times)
May 2, 2021 3 AM PT
KNOXVILLE, Tenn.
The Black community that surrounds Austin-East Magnet High School was still mourning its dead four students gunned down this year when the news broke.
Another shooting, this one inside the school.
With Austin-East in lockdown and police with rifles patrolling the halls, it was hours before officials announced that a fifth student had been fatally shot.
For many, this killing was the hardest to take: The shooter was a police officer, and he was Black.
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“We’re all looking for justice in this situation,” Regina Perkins, the white mother of Thompson’s 17-year-old girlfriend Alexus Page, told Knox News. “I never meant for anything to happen to him.” Advertisement Hide
Perkins received a call from her daughter Monday morning at school asking if she could go home early. When she arrived home, Perkins said her daughter was missing hair and had marks on her face. For months, Thompson and Page’s relationship reportedly involved incidents of physical fights and suspensions from school.
“At the time, I felt like both of the kids needed a break,” Perkins said. “They needed some counseling. They were both dealing with issues mentally that they could have used some help in those areas.”