By Cecily Burt
Oakland Tribune
OAKLAND, Calif. — On a recent warm afternoon, Millie Burns gathered her crisis response and support team around a large conference table that shook whenever a BART train rumbled past Catholic Charities’ Oakland offices.
As was typical of such meetings, each team member gave a quick accounting of the circumstances surrounding the homicide cases she or he had taken on since the previous week.
But anyone watching quickly figures out that these are no ordinary meetings, and these are no ordinary people.
Whenever someone in Oakland is killed at the hands of another, Catholic Charities’ Crisis Response and Support Network leaps into action. A first-response team member calls on the family to offer support, guidance, hot food, and sound advice about expensive decisions no one wants to face, such as how much to spend on a casket, flowers or programs for a slayed son or daughter, father or mother.
The program only has a handful of trained first responders, and with Oakland’s spike in homicides in July and August, those folks are dropping in on distraught families nearly every day sometimes arriving at the crime scene while the body is still there.
And because the team members live in communities affected by so much violence, invariably one of them knows a person who died, or is a friend of a family, or a neighbor. Sometimes a family has lost more than one son or daughter, and the team has been at the house before. There are few degrees of separation in this job, and it takes a toll.
“I have a 39-year-old, black male shot in the 1000 block of MacArthur ... leaving a club to check on a friend in a van,” relayed Marilyn Washington Harris, the team leader for family support services who has three new cases to report this week. “The young man lives in Antioch ... he’s a family man ... three children, the youngest is (8); a girl and two boys. I’ve met with the family three times. ... The funeral is Friday.”
But Harris isn’t done.
“I got another one coming in; a 22-year-old black male on Seminary Avenue ... he’s a twin ... their birthday is this month; I know because they went to school with my baby girl,” Harris said.
“So how you doing’?” asked Burns, Catholic Charities’ deputy director of programs and outreach, concerned about Harris’ emotional state.
“I’m OK,” she replied, before relating the details of another case, a 17-year-old man killed in East Oakland who is the nephew of Pastor Raymond Lankford, founder of Healthy Oakland, a community organization that promotes nonviolence. “I’d like to go,” said Eric Butler, a facilitator for youth services. “I know that kid... I saw him almost every day.”
The crisis support network gets funding from Oakland’s Measure Y, but it operates on a shoestring budget and at Burns’ urging the team members have become adept at stretching pennies to make the dollars in their small emergency fund go farther.
Most of the responders are volunteers and the program needs many more to be able to rotate the calls and give others a break, Burns said.
Harris, whose 18-year-old son, Khadafy Washington, was shot and killed on the McClymonds High School campus eight years ago, had already formed her own family support and outreach network called the Khadafy Foundation to help others grieve and heal before joining forces with Catholic Charities.
She is supposed to take time off but usually doesn’t.
“I go until I can’t go no more,” she said. “I know when it’s time, when there’s pressure in my head, can’t sleep, the Bible makes no sense.”
She and Myesha Walker sit next to each other during the meetings, bickering good-naturedly over facts and figures in one case or another. Sometimes they’ll crack a joke. They are like sisters, or maybe mother and daughter.
“We have to fight,” Harris said. “We have to laugh to keep from crying.”
Harris has gotten about five homicide cases that have occurred in the same neighborhood in East Oakland.
But Walker grew up in the area and knows many of the victims, and during the meeting helps provide background and details she gleans from friends, neighbors and family.
The discussion regarding the sad case of Kennah Wilson, a young, pregnant woman who was shot and killed recently while standing with her baby’s father and a group of friends outside her apartment on a hot night, is finally too much for Walker, 32. The baby did not survive, and several other people were hit.
“One of the wounded people is not expected to live,” Walker said, overcome with emotion, although she quickly recovers. “He’s a good friend of mine.”
A separate team handles youth services, providing crisis intervention and working with the schools to conduct outreach and counseling circles there to help friends cope with their loss, and to catch them before their grief affects their grades and behavior. Sometimes, the cases are complicated, perhaps a child is on probation, or being threatened and needs help being relocated. Those can involve multiple team members as well as probation officers, juvenile justice, county social service and Oakland police, said Denise Curtis, clinical case manager for youth crisis intervention and support services.
The team works with families from the first moments until the funeral, and beyond, if necessary. They have access to a small emergency fund to help families with some expenses while they wait for reimbursement from the state crime victims’ fund and other sources to help with funeral costs. One team member specializes in helping Latino families, which can often involve expedited documentation and travel expenses if the deceased is to be transported out of the country for burial.
They can gently steer families away from companies that charge too much, and they’ve become experts at negotiating the prices of caskets, flowers and other necessities to complete the service. They know which morticians do the best reconstructive work, Burns said.
The victims aren’t judged, and they are never considered numbers. Burns calls her outreach workers “her heroes.”
“This is a ministry,” Burns said. “This is personal, it is close. There is no personal detachment.”
Bobby Hall can speak to that. His son Bobby Hall Jr., 25, was shot and killed July 19. He was sitting on the sofa visiting a friend when someone fired through the window, striking him in the head. Another son, Jesse, was killed 16 years ago at age 21. But this time the family is not coping alone.
“Eric introduced himself, gave us a card and told us what he wanted to do to help us,” Hall recalled. “He came inside and talked to us. "... Eric just tried to comfort us as much as he could, and he was there to help with any money and anything we needed. I called him last week because we didn’t do counseling yet but I think my grandkids need it. ... They were very close to Bobby.”
To help support Catholic Charities’ Crisis Response and Support Network program, or to inquire about becoming a volunteer member of the different response teams, call Colleen Miller at 510-768-3115 or visit www.cceb.org.