Gunmen still being sought in Richmond church shooting
Monday, February 15th, 2010 | 
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Posted by John under: Hated for His Name's Sake
Take off your hood in a House of God.
Many thought it Sunday afternoon, when three men in dark sweatshirts strode into a packed New Gethsemane Church of God in Christ in Richmond. They wandered the aisles, apparently looking for someone.
“Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake.”
—Matthew 24:9
When they found them, shots rang out.
“People were mostly cooperative. But most of them were facing forward,” Detective Sgt. Lee Hendricsen said, one day after the gunmen sent a 14-year-old boy and a 19-year-old man to the hospital with bullet wounds.
The attack followed last week’s shooting death of a pregnant woman in the street in front of her family’s home; a likely extension of hostilities between neighborhoods that flared anew with the shooting death of a man in a San Francisco night club two weeks ago, police said.
The victim, 19-year-old Lawon Hall, had ties to a south Richmond group often in the mix with neighborhood street crime, police say. But whether his death relates to other recent shootings in Richmond remains a puzzle for detectives.
Sunday’s shooting, inside a church at the corner of 21st Street and Roosevelt Avenue during midday service, remains a mystery to police and community alike.
“It has always been that, whatever is happening in the street, you don’t take it within the walls of a church,” said the Rev. Andre Shumake, an anti-violence activist not affiliated with New Gethsemane. “It sends a message: There is no safe place in Richmond.”
Detectives gathered scant leads from worshipers in the hours following the shooting, collecting a handful of names to check. The victims will likely survive their injuries, Hendricsen said.
Police now have a generalized idea about motive; while a central Richmond church, many attendees live in North Richmond. Gang factions in those neighborhoods traditionally trade gunfire, typically in response to previous shootings.
Some of the 100 or so attendees finished their service after the shooting, forcing police to wait to interview some potential witnesses.
“The young people are hurting, man,” Shumake said. “We are failing the young people, because we have nothing in place that really speaks to their pain.”
Faith leaders across the city planned to meet and discuss next steps Monday afternoon.
Time will tell whether a sense of safety survives at New Gethsemane.
Sunday’s church shooting, following last week’s murder of a pregnant woman, leaves religious leaders shaking their heads. Unspoken rules and social convention once kept the gunfire out of churches, and street criminals would often show deference to the very old and very young.
But recent shootings suggest a change.
Sharanda Thomas, 23, was six months pregnant when she died Feb. 10. She had just gotten into a car to pick up her young son at a local elementary school to celebrate his birthday.
A group of men in a sport-utility vehicle pulled up. They got out and fired many rounds into her car, killing her on the spot and seriously injuring her boyfriend. Her family stayed on Seventh Street, near a border between the Iron Triangle neighborhood and North Richmond.
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Steph says Comment posted on February 17th, 2010
I know nothing of this church or of the Rev Shumake, but it might help him to read David Wilkerson’s, The Cross and the Switchblade… There is One Who has an Endless Supply from which we can draw ‘to put in place of their pain.’ I read it again recently after having read it nearly 30 years ago and cannot believe how much is in that ‘little’ book or how much I missed in it back when I was 15.