Within about a hundred yards of where two people died from gunshots in the past few months - as recently as March 13 - kids ride bicycles in the parking lot of the Workman Village apartments.
The sun comes out, the weather warms, and into the light strolls royalty.
This 62-year-old queen is disabled, bent from crippling arthritis. She can't work for money because of her frail body.
She lives in public housing in a neighborhood where two young black men died from bullets about 100 yards from her front door.
Yet each day, seven days a week, for hours at a time, Cynthia Jinks picks up trash.
She uses one of those tongs-like grabbers on a long pole. She puts the trash in a white, 5-gallon bucket hung on the crook of her left arm. The left arm has the feel of steel cable.
"I start in the apartments where I live, where children live," Jinks said. "This neighborhood is not what people may think. Real people live here. They love their families. They love their kids.
"That guy the police caught in College Downs, he was just 18. But we can't have that, people running around with guns, the shootings. I have a grandson, 18."
The College Downs neighborhood is a few miles away from Workman Village, in southern Rock Hill - where on any nice afternoon you can find kids playing on swings in the neighborhood park. Using a slide. Running, giggling.
About a hundred yards away from that College Downs park last week, police found a fugitive they say was responsible for three Rock Hill shootings, hiding in an attic, a shotgun nearby.
Neighbor kids were playing nearby. About that same time, a school bus was dropping off our futures - within eyesight and earshot.
Within gunshot.
Thankfully, that day, not a shot was fired.
Real life
That is the real life for these neighborhoods, almost all black, that have seen nothing but bad news emanate from their streets lately.
There is no denying that people who live there know what has happened - and they do not like it.
At College Downs, longtime neighborhood association president Rosa Jones said what ladies have said forever when she heard that a fugitive was found within a football field's length of her front porch: "Oh my goodness! I am shocked."
Yet Jones, who has given so many years of her life to her neighborhood, reiterated what the police already said about Rock Hill's "most wanted," Antwan Agurs, the man police found in that attic at 1968 Gilmore Road in College Downs on Tuesday.
"He didn't live here," Jones said. "He wasn't from here, and we haven't had that kind of problem around here."
However, four men - including one who lived at 1968 Gilmore Road - were charged with hindering police after telling officers Agurs was not in the house.
But that is not the rest of College Downs on an afternoon just like the one when the cops swooped in.
It is small single-family homes.
It is dreams of people such as Charlene Watts, who has a daughter at South Pointe High School and wants to start a housing business to replace empty homes with renters.
It is a self-employed trucker driving his rig home from a week on the road.
It is men and women who come home in the late afternoon with work on their hands.
And on Workman Street, where life goes on amid the killings, police are not deaf to gunshots either.
Both killings on Workman Street are across from a park, and across from the apartments.
'Grandma Cynthia'
Extra police have been in the neighborhood since the most recent killing at 361 Workman St., and some of those officers even talked with kids in that apartment complex parking lot in the sunshine Thursday after school.
Their goal is to let kids know that the police are there to protect them from what happened just down the street. These cops brought nothing but smiles and handshakes.
One tiny kid asked what that was on a policeman's belt.
"A gun!" shouted out another kid.
"What's that in the front?" asked another kid.
"Bullets," said the kid who knew what the gun was.
Reality on Workman Street.
