Teenagers in gangs, jails and alternative schools cry for help long before they are initiated, locked up or reassigned, said one girl who turned her life around after trying all three.
Dee Dee Byrd, 18, hopes to spread that message to adults who have tried for weeks to understand and stop teen violence in Rock Hill.
On Monday, Byrd and three other teenagers will speak about teen violence as panel members to other Rock Hill youth, then open the floor for discussion over a wireless microphone.
It's the first meeting of the city's new Break the Silence Teen Summit, an event that organizers hope will bring teens from the streets and the school system to sit together and talk about their roles in the community.
Adults are invited, Byrd said, but their role is to listen.
Two murders last month stirred meetings and rallies in the city — rooms and streets full of adults who prodded at answers to preventing the crimes that killed Tyrone King and Tommy Barber, both 18 and both fatally shot by their peers.
But adults were missing the target, Byrd said, because they were missing input from people her age. If they listen this time, she said, they'll learn that teenagers try daily to show when something is wrong.
At 14, Byrd joined a gang because, like many girls her age, she was looking for love, friends and a family, she said. By 15, she was in jail on charges of assault and battery with intent to kill after police said she cut a girl with a knife during a fight.
“That's when I realized it wasn't the life I wanted to live,” she said about her gang affiliations.
Byrd went back to school and back to church, and now she plans to go to college, a dream but never a reality when she was involved with a gang.
She plans to tell her story Monday on the panel, which is comprosed of a student leader, a church youth group member, a teenager enrolled in the city's Gang-Out program and another teenager in the Department of Juvenile Justice.
Moderating the panel will be Anthony Gomez, a 19-year-old student at the University of South Carolina who lived near Rock Hill's Boyd Hill and Sunset Park neighborhoods for most of his life — “prime locations,” he said, for gang initiations and violent crimes.
Unlike many of his friends, Gomez didn't touch gangs and never was involved in crime growing up.
“I've had all the opportunities,” he said, “but I know what it does to people and to their families.”
Gomez will make the hour-drive to Rock Hill on Monday because he feels a responsibility to the place where he was raised, close to gang activity, but never a part of it.
“How can you find a solution,” he said, “if you don't ask the people it's affecting?”
The teen summit, proposed to be a weekly meeting at the Emmett Scott Center auditorium on Crawford Road in Rock Hill, was one of many ideas that came from the pair of community meetings held after last month's shootings.
Marvin Rogers, a Flint Street resident, organized Monday's event with the city's Weed and Seed committee.
He said the summit is different from other programs because it invites A/B Honor Roll students and church youth group leaders to level with gang members, ex-gang members and other troubled youth, hopefully to find common ground and start working toward a safer Rock Hill.
Rogers, like Byrd, said adults will do the least talking.
“We don't speak their language,” said Rogers, 34. “We can't penetrate their world if we don't know what world they're living in.”
He expects around 100 youth and teens to attend Monday's summit.
Christy Mullins 803-329-4062
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