One week before the attack on the Covenant School in Nashville, a separate school shooting in Arlington, Texas left a Black teenager dead, but the fatal incident didn't make national news.
10 minutes after dropping off her son, Roshone Jacob said she received the call that her 16-year-old, Ja'Shawn Poirier, was shot on the steps outside of Lamar High School, per Buzzfeed News.
Police said a 15-year-old peer attacked a group of students with a long gun. Poirier was shot and died at a hospital, and a second student suffered a graze wound in the fourth shooting at a high school campus this year.
“My son didn't deserve this at all," Jacob told WFAA. "He didn't bother nobody."
In 2023 alone, eight students have been shot and killed in K-12 schools, according to data from the K-12 School Shooting Database. Five of those eight students were Black boys in high school. All of the victims attended "under-resourced schools in low-income neighborhoods," per Buzzfeed.
Unlike the Nashville school shooting, none of these boys have become hashtags or had their candlelight vigils attended by the first lady of the United States. Members of Congress weren't pressed to come up with answers on how to prevent future instances of gun violence in schools.
In the past 10 years, two out of three shootings in the U.S. where the racial composition was identifiable occurred in majority-minority schools, per research by the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.
“Far too often we’re not outraged enough as a nation about the fact that school shootings disproportionately impact Black and brown kids,” said Angela Ferrell-Zabala, senior vice president of movement building at Everytown for Gun Safety. “These are schools that are more likely to be chronically underfunded, where children are less likely to receive the support and resources they need to not only succeed in the classroom but to also cope with the trauma of gun violence that’s impacting their communities.”
Poirier's family described the 16-year-old as a "friendly, quiet kid" in a GoFundMe started to help Jacob cope with the death of her son.
“He was a nice, sweet, kind boy,” Jacob told WFAA.
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