Young, Innocent . . . and In the Line of Fire

Five-year-old Darneica Slocum’s smile lights up the room when she skips through the door.

The kindergartener brightly tells her parents that she’s really been worried about telling them she lost her sweater at school. And then, when they start to frown, she announces happily, “But I found it.”

Darneica is intelligent, articulate, cheerful and full of energy.

She’s a perfectly normal little girl.

Except that Darneica, unlike most 5-year-olds, has bullet scars on her side and back.

It happened last June 18 at a family picnic in Knowland Park. It was a large gathering, with 30 to 40 people having a good time that Saturday until about 2 p.m., when one of the teen-agers got in a fist fight with a non-family member.

‘I Just Had a Feeling’

Darneica’s mother, Sonja Williams, decided it was time to leave.

“The way things are going in Oakland,” she said, “the way that the shooting is going on and people getting killed, I just had a feeling that it wasn’t (over) after the fight.”

Williams started picking up blankets. She and Darneica were near the park swings and a statue of a dragon. Babies were playing nearby.

When Williams heard the rapid firing, she thought that it was firecrackers. Then someone yelled, “Hit the ground,” and a cousin dove on Darneica to protect her. When the barrage of 20 to 25 shots stopped, Williams scooped up her daughter and rushed toward the car.

‘Momma, Momma’

“I didn’t feel it when it (the bullet) went in,” Darneica said. “Only when my Momma picked me up . . . and I said, ‘Momma, Momma, my back hurts me.’ And then she got down on her knees and lifted my shirt and said, ‘They shot my baby.’ ”

A witness told police that he saw a young man carrying an Uzi assault pistol get out of a car on a street next to the park that afternoon, walk to the edge of the road and begin spraying the field below with gunfire.

Besides Darneica, a 14-year-old girl was hit and is now receiving physical therapy for her wounded arm.

Mindless Attack

The two girls are representative of the rapidly increasing number of victims who have been shot with assault weapons in cities up and down the state. Many of these victims are utterly innocent of anything but being in the line of fire during a mindless attack. Unlike many victims of assault weapons, both these girls lived.

But they are not without scars--physical and emotional ones.

Darneica, despite her sunny disposition, suffers from nightmares and sees a psychiatrist about her fears.

Are you still afraid? she is asked.

“I think I will never ever go back to that park,” she said.