A few days after 15-year old Da'Mesha Sharp was stabbed to death at the corner of Darley and E 140th St., a couple hundred people came to an evening vigil. Some held candles in Styrofoam cups, while others dropped off teddy bears and wrote rest in peace on pieces of cardboard.
Two weeks later, the street is quiet, but the makeshift memorial remains.
Michelle Shannon: All this, everybody put out here.
Michelle Shannon shakes her head as she stands over the shrine. Her daughter knew Da'Mesha.
Michelle Shannon: They even put the pompoms because they knew she was a cheerleader. She had just made it at Glenville that Friday but she didn't even know she was accepted.
Shannon has lived half a block over for nearly 10 years.
Michelle Shannon: The first summer, they had a shootout right in front of my house. I told everyone I'm going to move from here..
Across from her house is an elementary school-the same one Da'Mesha attended. The tree-lined block is quiet on this day, but for residents like Shannon, a certain level of chaos has been the norm here.
Michelle Shannon: It's just like when my daughter got ran over. My oldest child right up here on 140th. I was coming home from work, ready to get the kids, go have pizza, and everyone stopped me on the corner and tell me my daughter got run over. So it's a scary thing being a mother. Yeah.
Shannon says that was the result of a feud over a boy. Luckily, her daughter survived.
The details of the feud between Da'Mesha Sharp and Lesleye Holliman are still unclear. Da'Mesha had moved away just a few weeks ago, but had come back to the neighborhood that Friday to pick up mail at her former home. She was waiting for a bus with her friends when, according to eyewitnesses, the three generations of women in the Holliman family pulled up in a Suburban SUV. A fight ensued. The youngest, Lesleye, had a knife. The mother and grandmother kept bystanders at bay with pepper spray and a stun gun.
Ashley Cottingham: Really, I don't think anyone know what the fight was really about.
Sixteen year-old Ashley Cottingham lives just three houses down from the corner. She and her sister April, say Da'Mesha was one of their best friends. April was with Da'Mesha when the fight started. She says the feud was over nothing important. Jealousy may have been a cause.
April Cottingham: People are probably like jealous because, you know, one person look better than them, just hatred, you know.
At Da'Mesha's funeral Tuesday, hundreds turned out to pay their respects. One of them was Kevin Bell of Peace in the Hood. He says what makes this case different is how the adults made the situation worse.
Kevin Bell: It's not just the young people now, ya know, the homicides are popping up. We're not going to point fingers at a root cause, but we know what the cause is: lack of communication, it's a lot of issues. Single parent homes, grandparents raising these children, the school system, it's everything. Everybody's got to play a part in solving this.
City Councilman Roosevelt Coats says police have visited the Holliman family for years and he long feared they could cause bigger problems.
Roosevelt Coats: I don't know what it is but you have a bully in almost every community.
Coats says that just adds to the strife in this North Collinwood neighborhood right off I-90. Drugs, gangs, homelessness, and foreclosures all contribute to violence and degradation. Coats has represented the district for 20 years, and he knows change comes slowly.
Roosevelt Coats: I'm seeing potentials of disaster on every corner, but I'm also optimistic enough to believe that we as a community can turn that around.
Coats is talking across the street from where Da'Mesha was stabbed. As if to illustrate his uphill battle, there's a police car with lights flashing just a block away.
DB: I don't want to generalize based on what we see here, but I see someone being arrested, is this sort of the kind of thing you'd see right off the highway, convenience store?
Roosevelt Coats: Well, you know, it's really a sight for my sore eyes to see this because that location is very problematic with drug sales. Now, is that corner the cause of what happened last week? I don't think so, but certainly it's a contributing factor.
As for Michelle Shannon, the neighbor down the street, she says she worries even more now about her children getting safely to school. She's again thinking of moving-maybe even out of Cleveland. Dan Bobkoff, 90.3.
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