Kinston/Jones Free Press (kfp)
Several shirts revealed a theme on Wednesday, and Kinston Mayor Dontario Hardy repeated it five or six times: It shouldn t hurt to be a child.
Hardy, along with Lenoir County health directors and officials, kicked off Child Abuse Prevention Month in Pearson Park Wednesday, April 7, to bring awareness to the 21 children who died due to child abuse or neglect in North Carolina in 2019.
One of the 21 Ja Kobe Applewhite died that year in Lenoir County. He was 21 months old. I wanted to echo throughout our town that it shouldn t hurt to be a child, Hardy said. It is definitely something that I am concerned about, and I want to make folks aware that it s OK to report incidents that happen with children.