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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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In an effort to erase community hesitancy in reporting violent crimes, Knoxville has joined a program that puts up a barrier between tipsters and police.
City leaders on Wednesday announced the creation of the East Tennessee Valley Crime Stoppers Program. It s a tool to help investigators as so many of the city s murders go unsolved, including the deaths of two teens this year.
The national program allows anyone to provide anonymous information about criminal activity and pays them in cash if the information leads to an arrest.
That emphasis on anonymity was the selling point, Police Chief Eve Thomas said, and she listed it as the reason why community members who were scared to give information to police should feel comfortable using it.
“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.”