Editors note: Today begins our look back at the Top 10 news stories of 2021, as voted on by The Vindicator newsroom staff.

YOUNGSTOWN — When a girl, 13, was shot in the leg as she slept in her bed at 2 a.m. March 31 on East Avondale Avenue, it prompted concern among the students and staff at nearby Taft Elementary School, as well as among city officials.

School officials and the children fought back, creating a video called “We Are Peace — We Are Taft.”

But a much worse act of violence struck early Aug. 18 when Persayus Davis-May, 10, was shot and killed in her home on Samuel Avenue, also on the South Side, apparently from bullets intended for adults who were outside of the home. Three of then were injured.

Between the two incidents was a “chaotic scene” near the Torch Club bar on Salt Springs Road on the West Side, where three people were killed in an early May 23 confrontation with guns.

Mikquan C. Stevens, 19, and Rayshaun L. Clay, 23, were both shot to death. Charles Boerio, 27, died in a vehicle crash down the street from the bar around the time of the 2:11 a.m. shootings as police found a “chaotic scene with people and their cars fleeing from the area,” police said.

Adding to the chaos was an incident downtown that began about 90 minutes earlier in which about 200 people watching a fight in the middle of Commerce Street were not being cooperative with police, who used pepper spray on some of them.

No arrests have been made in the Davis-May or Torch Club killings.

Ironically, the shooter of the 13-year-old girl was a teenage boy. Kasean R. Wilkerson, 16, was a Youngstown native whose family moved him to Niles to avoid the conflicts he was having in Youngstown. But Jana Cox, 25, of Warren allowed Wilkerson and co-defendant Xavier Hile, also 16 and also living in Niles, to use her car.

The three of them drove past the home on Avondale and Wilkerson committed a drive-by shooting to “even a score” over earlier conflicts, Wilkerson’s attorney said during Wilkerson’s juvenile court sentencing. Wilkerson and Hile were sentenced to being locked up in an Ohio juvenile facility until they are 21.

Cox, however, was found not guilty by Common Pleas Judge John Durkin of felonious assault and complicity to improperly discharging a firearm into a habitation and complicity to discharging a firearm near prohbited premisis. In the bench trial, Durkin convicted Cox of two felonies, third-degree obstructing justice and fourth-degree improperly handling a firearm in a motor vehicle. Cox was given three years probation.

DARKEST DAY

But the shooting that hit home the most was when Wilson Elementary fourth grader Persayus died. Mayor Jamael Tito Brown was brought to tears at a news conference at the police station.

“This is a dark day for our community, probably the darkest I’ve ever had as mayor of the city of Youngstown,” he said.

It was surreal seeing the young girl in a princess dress and tiara during her funeral and being carried from the church to the funeral home in the back of a carriage.

“It’s hard for me, you all,” her father, Tony Davis, said during her funeral at the Jaylex Event Center on Glenwood Avenue. “One of the things I tell my son is as a man you protect your family and provide for your family. I feel like I failed my family because she passed on my watch,” he said.

Brown said the girl’s death was apparently the result of a feud in which guns were used to retaliate at 2:27 a.m.

“This has to stop. We’re not solving anything,” the mayor said. “This has to be the darkest day for me when now our babies — our babies — are victims of adult feuds. Street justice has proven not to be an answer. Put down the guns. Put down the guns.”

The episode also was connected to the shooting death of Michael Callahan, 40, that occurred 1.3 miles south of the Davis killing. He was the driver of a pickup truck that crashed into a telephone pole at South and Palmer avenues. A male passenger, 42, in the truck also was shot and suffered non-life-threatening injuries.

CITY RESPONDS

In late April, a month after the March 31 Avondale Avenue shooting, Brown and other city officials announced the restart of an initiative to bring together local, state and federal agencies to target criminal activity, especially gun offenses. It was called Operation Steel Penguins.

Brown said that as a “father of four,” he was struck by the Taft Elementary plea for peace in their neighborhood.

“I think our job as adults is to make sure our babies and our children have a peaceful neighborhood, no matter what neighborhood, what school they go to,” he said.

In late July, the second of the two juveniles who committed the drive-by shooting involving on Avondale pleaded “true” in Mahoning County Juvenile Court to his role in the crime. They both were later ordered to be locked up until age 21.

The community stepped up in April in the weeks after the 13-year-old girl was shot.

The group United as One held a “Stop the Violence” rally at the Boys and Girls Club on Oak Hill Avenue on the South Side. Victims of crime presented their personal stories of losing a loved one to gun violence in Youngstown.

One was Ron Shadd, president of the Youngstown Board of Education, who talked about the fears he experienced after his father was killed.

“At 10 years old, I was the only child that I knew in my school whose father not only was dead but was dead of gun violence,” he said. “It was just traumatizing.”

His father’s 1986 murder was never solved. As a child he wondered, “Are they coming for me next? What did I do to cause this? Will I ever be safe?”

Also speaking at the event was Randy Nuby, who brought together a team of people to organize the Respect basketball league that had begun its games the previous weekend at the Youngstown YMCA for males 19 to 25.

The league provided basketball but also training in areas such as vocational skills and how to write a resume. It had 18 teams and involved 225 young men.

Nuby said he was moved to come out of retirement as a youth sports leader to get the league started several months earlier because of a spike in Youngstown violence. He said he heard the “whisper” of God urging him to do something.

MANPOWER

In early September, police Chief Carl Davis announced another violence reduction initiative that brought manpower into the city from the Ohio State Highway Patrol, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Adult Parole Authority, U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and Ohio Investigative Unit.

“We will conduct aggressive saturation patrols,” Davis said. “Officers will focus on areas determined by the Youngstown Police Department that have experienced elevated levels of crime related to narcotics, gun violence.”

Capt. Jason Simon, who later became chief of detectives, framed the new initiative by pointing out that the country is now fighting two pandemics — COVID-19 and crime.

The “second pandemic being faced by our city and nation is an increase in violent crime — homicides and a proliferation of firearms in the hands of those who have no business possessing them,” he said.

Police reports in the coming weeks and months indicated that Youngstown police officers working with state troopers had made numerous arrests in Youngstown that involved individuals possessing firearms illegally.

There were no homicides in the city in the weeks after the initiative began, but they resumed at the end of the month when the 25th homicide of the year was recorded. The city had 28 in 2020. Since late September, three more homicides have taken place.