The Washington Informer

(Left to right) Courtney Evans (sister), Deborah Evans-Bailey (mother), the late Kendra Mercedes Smith, and Zaelyn Amore Watson (daughter). Courtesy Photo

Another Mother Joins the Effort to Save Our Youth after Loss of Child

The nights are still mostly sleepless for Deborah Evans-Bailey.

By Bruce Branch
WI Contributing Writer
Friday, May 6, 2005; Page 20

She still remembers hearing the gunshots outside her front door from her bedroom. She remembers getting that fateful phone call from a neighbor who told her “my baby had been shot” and running up a hill with her brother to a car where her beloved oldest child, Kendra Mercedes Smith, affectionately known as Muffy, lay dying.

She remembers the long ride to the Washington Hospital Center where she died the next day. She remembers the funeral at Ebenezer AME Church in Fort Washington that brought a letter of condolence from President George Bush.

But most of all these days Evans remembers that the police have yet to find her killer. “I remain totally frustrated,” Evans said echoing the sentiments of hundreds of family members of other homicide victims. “Right now I don’t have a lot of faith in [the police].”

Evans said she is reminded daily that not only is a killer still on the loose, but that she is another mother who has lost a child—a special and gifted child—in another act of senseless violence in a city where homicide has become a daily, almost expected occurrence.

“For whatever reason, I’ve been inducted into a club that I didn’t want to be in with her murder,” Evans said. “[Kendra] paid a lifetime membership with her murder. Now I’m in the club that I didn’t want to be in that I didn’t sign up for, and her life was the membership fee.”

Smith died on September 7, 2004, after being shot by an unknown assailant in front of her mother’s house in the 4300 block of D Street, SE, literally blocks away from Sixth District Police headquarters. A neighborhood acquaintance was with her at the time.

“Detective Stanley Farmer [who is assigned to the case] keeps telling me that nobody in the neighborhood is talking,” Evans said. “I feel betrayed by my neighbors and those who are in the immediate community. They know. Somebody knows”

Evans said the man who was in the car with Smith is “conveniently locked up now and police won’t tell her why.” She believes that Smith was in the car ministering to him in the passenger seat when she was shot. Evans doesn’t understand why he didn’t inform her or why he drove blocks away to a relative’s house on Burbank Street instead of rushing her to the hospital.

“The bullet wasn’t meant for Kendra,” Evans said. “Tony [the acquaintance] told me that. He told me he didn’t see anything and he didn’t hear anything. I don’t understand it.”

Tony wasn’t the kind of guy that Kendra would have been involved with, Evans said. “She had no intentions of staying in the car with him. The only thing she had on her was her cell phone. She wasn’t planning on spending any quality time with Tony at all,” Evans said. “Everybody knows that Tony was hot [a police informant] and he told me himself that he lived a certain lifestyle. Now he has disappeared. It’s disappointing. You don’t know who you can trust.”

It was an unlikely end to Smith’s life. Evans said she would never have predicted that such a bright light would be snuffed out with such a dark act.

“She wasn’t one to get in the streets,” Evans said. “She was about community. She was about giving back. She worked with the NAACP, NOW and the National Council of Negro Women. While she was in Philadelphia, she worked for Councilmember Blondell Reynolds-Williams. The guy in the car was just somebody in the neighborhood. I don’t know if she was ministering to him to get him to go to church.”

Evans said the emotional devastation from Smith’s death was exacerbated by the fact she was married just four months earlier. “I went from an emotional high to total devastation,” Evans said. “It has caused me a lot of pain because Kendra was my first. The emptiness that I have can never be fulfilled.”

Evans is fighting back like so many other parents who have been affected by violence through the establishment of the Kendra Smith Lifeline Movement. It is a nonprofit organization that Evans hopes will bring healing to family members of homicide victims while doing its part to bring the community together to stop the violence. She is hoping to work with other nonprofit groups dedicated to the same cause.

“It’s important that I manage my own foundation to do the work that I believe I am called to do,” Evans said. “As a community, everybody should link up together. We all have the same cause and that’s to stop the senseless violence in our community. We need to look at the home structure and in some kind of way have the parents to go back to basics and be responsible for what our children are doing.”

Evans said she will always believe the loss of Kendra was senseless, but because it happened to her, everything should be done to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

“Kendra was everywhere,” Evans said. “She was a busy bee. She did far more than I knew what she did. I had a good girl.”

Zaelyn Amore Watson, Smith’s 18-month-old daughter, is among the many whose life has been forever changed by this tragedy. For more information about the legacy and loss of Kendra Mercedes Smith, please visit http://kendra-smith.memory-of.com/about.aspx.