Trina Shealy: "I'm constantly praying."
On her way to prep and clean Payne Whitney Gym for the Yale hockey team, 55-year-old Trina Shealy prayed for more recreational opportunites for young New Haveners — not just for Ivy Leaguers.
“My son’s been shot three or four times,” the mother of two said.
“Get some buildings, get something for these kids to do,” she pleaded while standing beside the nine-story massive athletic facility of swimming pools, basketball courts, running tracks, polo practice rooms and fencing facilities.
Shealy woke up as usual at 3:30 a.m. for a 5 a.m. shift getting the gymnasium ready for Yale students and university affiliates. She took a moment Thursday morning to talk on the “Word on the Street” segment of WNHH FM’s “LoveBabz LoveTalk” program.
The word on the street, Shealy said, is “stop the violence.”
“The shooting, the killing, parents burying their kids — it needs to stop. Enough is enough.”
Shealy said she keeps busy by working long hours, caring for her kids and grandchildren, protecting her family against Covid-19, playing spades and singing at church. She said she worries that younger individuals are involving themselves in criminal activity because they don’t have enough to do. Once people get a record, she noted, it’s even harder to find a job to sustain or occupy themselves.
“There’s not enough activities, not enough for the kids to do … What about the kids that are out here and got nothing?”
Shealy, who lives on Winchester Avenue, has lived in the city for the last 40 years, She said that there used to be more community in New Haven.
“We didn’t have to worry about leaving our bikes” on the side of the street, she said. Shealy was raised with neighbors who were always “watching out for each other.” Her father was a preacher of faith at a Baptist church.
Shealy declined to speak about the shootings her son had been involved in, but shared that her other child is currently a licensed practical nurse in school studying to become a registered nurse.
“I love ‘em both,” she said, adding that she now has two grandkids as well.
Hopefully the city will invest in stronger support systems for “the next generation,” whether that’s public computer classes, as she suggested, or better reentry programming.
In the meantime, Shealy said, she will “pray for our kids, our young Black kids.”
“That’s all we can do in New Haven, all over — the war’s going on, all we can do is just pray,” she said.
“I’m constantly praying.”
Watch the full interview below.
When I was growing up in the city in the 1970’s and early1980’s there was two ice skating rinks, the one in the East Rock neighborhood and one in Edgewood Park. There was the Q House, the Boys and Girl’s Club, the YMCA and the YWCA- which had pools, gymnasiums, gymnastics lessons, dance lessons, a pool hall, summer camps, martial arts lessons, swim lessons, and lots of other inexpensive activities, amenities and lessons for children, teens, adults and seniors. We could play on the playgrounds or school grounds or ride our bikes or walk in the parks, or play on the tennis, handball, basketball courts without fear of being shot or encountering drug paraphernalia, or used condoms, or being harassed by drug dealers, gang members or sex worker customers. We used to be able to walk past lots of street level shops and corner stores, restaurants, bars, neighborhood grocery stores, pharmacies, fully employed factories with lots of customers and employees walking along to and from them putting eyes on the streets.
We used to have movie theaters in almost every neighborhood in the city.
We used to have free concerts on the Green almost every weekend in the summer, lots of festivals, lots of parades, free movies on the Green, block parties, neighborhood big trash pickup weeks so lots of people rescued and reused discarded items, tag sales, religious organization rummage sales, library discard book sales, church suppers and festivals. Yale used to allow the public to go to the Law School and Med School film showings, and to many cultural, arts, events and festivities that were open to the public. When my parents were growing in the 1940’s and 1950’s there were lots of school dances, youth socials, church and synagogue dances, trips and suppers to engage the community. There was Savin Rock amusement park, the Coliseum, the Arena, boxing matches, Macy’s, Malley’s and the Mall, Bookstores, newsstands, carnivals, etc. We need to restore some of these to the city.