When community activist Shirley Banks saw the bullet hole in her son’s neck, she hoped she wouldn’t lose a third child to street violence.
“I’m telling you, I was holding my breath,” Banks said from her Division Street front porch Monday. “I was hoping it wouldn’t turn out the same.”
Hours earlier, her 21-year-old son David had come home with blood all over him and a bullet lodged in his neck.
Banks, who organizes the Soul-o-ettes drill team and is helping plan the future of the Rockview projects, knows what it’s like to have a child shot. Her daughters Regina and Rachelle were each shot to death in the early ’90s for, in mom’s words, “being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” at the ages of 20 and 21. (She cited their deaths in speaking out against renewal of the Taurus Cafe’s liquor license.)
David, it turned out, would live.
That provided Banks some comfort Monday as she reflected on raising a family and combating youth violence in New Haven.
Banks (pictured) was awake around 6 a.m. Monday when she said David reentered their apartment of the house on Division Street in Newhallville. David’s 21. He has severe asthma and is in the care of the state Department of Mental Retardation, which has placed him at a group home in North Haven. David had been on a leave for the past week at home with his mom. He said he had gone out to the store.
At first, Banks didn’t notice the blood.
“Ma, I got shot,” David said.
“David, stop playin’!” Banks said.
“They asked me if I had a cell phone,” David continued. “When I said no, they shot me.”
At that point, Banks recalled, “I turned around. I saw the hole in his neck. There was blood all over his shirt. He was all calm.”
She wasn’t calm. She called an ambulance. Paramedics showed up and took David to Yale-New Haven Hospital. Banks followed, hoping against hope that she wouldn’t lose another child to gunshots.
Banks originally had five children. Their fathers — there were two of them — both died. Banks, who’s 59 and works as a lunch aide at Katherine Brennan School, has raised the children on her own. Until a few years ago the family lived at the Rockview projects; Banks was the tenant council president. The projects were torn down in the hopes that a new development will be built along the lines of Monterey Place and Quinnipiac Terrace.
Banks remains the council president and serves on the committee planning the new project; she hopes to move back. She also continues to coach the area’s Soul-o-ettes drill team for kids 7 – 18 years old. The team qualified for a national competition in Florida this summer. After an Independent article about its fund-raising efforts, the Board of Ed pledged money to enable the team to take the trip, according to Banks. That’s partly why David was home this past week; he was going to accompany the team. However, Banks said, a communications mix-up prevented her from getting the check. Now she’s raising money to take the team on a less-expensive trip to Toledo, Ohio, for another competition. (Contributions, made out to Soul-o-ettes, can be sent care of Banks to 240 Division St., New Haven CT 06511.)
Despite her busy schedule and all the kids she helps, Banks said, not a day goes by without her thinking of her murdered daughters.
“If I didn’t have these other [three children] to raise, I think I would have gone crazy,” she said. “You would have had to lock me in a rubber room.
“I took it one day at a time. It never goes away. It gets easier to deal with, but it never gets any better. I think about what they would do if they were here, what they would look like, how many kids they would have if they were married.”
Later Monday morning, the hospital released David. The bullet tore muscle, but didn’t cause any critical damage, according to Banks. David is to return next week to the trauma center as doctors decide whether or not it makes sense to remove the bullet.
Meanwhile, David has returned to the group home, in North Haven. And police are trying to piece together how he got shot. Tying together the story may prove tricky, as Det. Michael Quinn was finding out. (He’s pictured at the top of the story interviewing Banks.)
David’s story apparently changed from telling to telling, and he had trouble remembering details. He has trouble communicating. He told his mom that he’d been at a 24-hour store at Dixwell and Bassett (pictured) when the shooting took place. Banks said her son liked to go there to get junk food. However, he apparently told cops he may have been at a 24-hour Hess station on Dixwell Avenue just over the Hamden line. A worker at the Hess station reported seeing David, with blood already on his shirt, between 3 and 4:30 a.m.
The police received no reports of gunshots. They did find a .22 caliber rifle on Bassett Street. The gun was in inoperable condition.
Furthermore, the Dixwell Deli doesn’t open until 8 a.m., according to Antwone Ford, who was behind the counter Monday. He said he hadn’t heard about any shooting.
Shirley Banks said it’s been a tough time for her. She buried her mother in February.
Her mother did make it to 100.
Something doesn't quite add up in this story. It may be that Dixwell is just such an incredibly violent neighborhood that you can lose three family members in separate incidents in which they are abolutely innocent bystanders.
On the other hand it does make you wonder if the bereaved mother (I do feel for her) had children who were hanging out with dangerous friends. I know that when I was growing up, I had to switch who I hung out with; otherwise I would have been around a lot of drugs, dealing, and risky stuff. One of my friends ended up in jail, mostly for being in the wrong place and time. But she was there at that place because she liked the edge, hanging with the bad boys.
So I wonder if this woman (Banks) had to strugge to keep her children away from certain friends and bad influences, and maybe she couldn't protect all of them from everything, from every choice they made as young people.