WLRN is looking at the impact of children and teens killed by guns in South Florida through the voices of some of the people who are most affected.
You can find the entire series at wlrn.org/ownwords
Randall Robinson was a 17-year-old student at Miami Northwestern High School.
He was shot multiple times near his home in Little Haiti last year—one of more than 100 teenagers and children who’ve been killed by guns in Miami-Dade County over the last 3 years.
Neikole Hunt, Randall’s mom, says every day there are little reminders that her son is no longer here. It’s been nearly six months since she buried him. She talked with WLRN about trying to cope.
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An edited excerpt of the conversation with Hunt.
I feel lost because I lost a part of me.
You just live day by day. You thank God for waking you up this morning. Sometimes you don’t even know what to pray. You just say, “God help me.”
I don’t know how to cope. I do have my break-down days, but I have to say, "How can I ask my other children to be strong when I’m not strong?"
I had a thought one time, “Well, Neikole, did you fail as being a parent? As being a mother to Randall?”
And you know, I said to myself, “I did everything I could do.” But I couldn’t protect him from that day, that moment.
He was Martin Luther King in fifth grade and he had big dreams and aspirations. Both of us did.
After the funeral … the community speaks of all of these things, but the community is not going to be here forever. For about two weeks or a week, but [then] them people gone baby. You're going to have to learn how to dance to your own music. And sometimes, you can’t even dance. You can’t even move. You’re like, whoa.
He’s gone.
I see the next one, you look at it and say, “Wow. Somebody else is walking in my shoes.”
Why? I wouldn’t want anyone to feel that. To see someone else crying and going through that, a family screaming and hollering. They don’t know what to do. They’re lost like I am.
Who's going say that they’re going to be able to cope? That’s a pain that doesn’t go away.
Some people say, “Well time heals all wounds.”
It gets a little more easier to think about, but I don’t feel time healing nothing. Time don’t heal this wound here.