Anthony Thompson Jr. was the fifth Austin-East Magnet High School student to die from gun violence this year.
CNN
(CNN) The Rev. Calvin Skinner has given hundreds of sermons, but he says this past Sunday’s felt more urgent than ever.
“The city of Knoxville has hit its boiling point,” he told CNN. “The case of Anthony Thompson Jr. really solidifies this feeling that enough is enough.”
Thompson, 17, was fatally shot by police when officers said they tried to disarm him inside a bathroom at Austin-East Magnet High School on April 12. He was the fifth Black student from that school to die due to gun violence this year.
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Lawrence Muhammad didn t hear the gunfire outside his family s East Knoxville home that February evening. He didn t know what had happened until he found his son in a state of panic and asked, in a heart-stopping moment: Where s your sister?
Muhammad went outside and found 15-year-old Janaria there, shot and bleeding badly at the bottom of the steps behind their house. He tried to keep her alive, but he couldn t save his daughter.
Janaria was pronounced dead at the hospital Feb. 16, the third of five teenagers to lose their lives to gun violence in Knoxville this year.
Nearly three months later, Janaria Muhammad s killing remains unsolved. So, too, does the March 9 shooting of 15-year-old Jamarion Gillette, who was found late that night by a passerby on the road leading to the University of Tennessee Medical Center. He died overnight from a still-unexplained gunshot wound.
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Almost three months since the death of Stanley Freeman Jr., an Austin-East Magnet High School student who was gunned down in his car after classes ended, his family has an unambiguous message for school and city officials following the fatal shooting of Anthony Thompson Jr. by a police officer. Anthony wasn t the first student to be killed at Austin-East. Stanley was. He was shot while leaving the parking lot at school, said his grandmother Darlene Ngom. It is also their problem.
Several of Freeman s family members say his death at the hands of two teenage assailants, say police, who also think they mistook him for someone else should have been a wake-up call to those in charge of keeping kids safe.
“Wait. Wait. Wait.”
But in a flash, a police officer had shot and killed 17-year-old Anthony Thompson Jr. during a short struggle after authorities say a handgun Thompson was carrying went off and struck a trash can. As Thompson lay on the school bathroom floor with officers on top of him, another student who also had been shoved to the ground and handcuffed screamed, “What are you all doing?”
The April 12 fatal shooting took place at Austin-East High School, an arts magnet school nestled inside a quiet Knoxville neighborhood near the zoo. A funeral home sits directly across the street. Painted prominently on the road separating the two buildings are the words “Black Lives Matter.”