Teenager Dead After Shooting

5:16 p.m. EDT October 26, 2006
LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Louisville Metro police are investigating the shooting death of a teenager late Wednesday night. According to police, a person ran into the emergency room at Jewish Hospital and told officials a man in a car outside had been shot.

The victim was identified at Darryl Head, 17, who was a student at Doss High School according to coroner's office officials.

Police said they believe the shooting occurred in near Victory Park in Louisville's west end around 9:30 p.m.

Head was treated at Jewish Hospital, and later transported to University Hospital's trauma unit where he died at 7:05 a.m. Thursday of a single gunshot wound to the head , according to a coroner's report.

Police spokeswoman Alicia Smiley said Head was in a car with four other people, and was apparently shot in the head while the car was sitting at an intersection.

Smiley added the people in the car were not suspects in the incident.

At Doss High School, grief counselors were brought in to help friends and students deal with Head's death, and some students said concentrating on schoolwork was tough Thursday.

"Some people had to leave," Angel Humm said. "Some people just sit in the hallway. They just sit there and mourn. They feel like they can't go on no more."

The shooting is under investigation, and police ask that anyone with information call the LMPD tip line at 502-574-LMPD.

Family, Friends Speak About Slain Teenager

5:26 p.m. EDT October 27, 2006
LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Family and friends of a 17-year-old who was shot and killed late Wednesday night spoke for the first time Friday about his death, saying the teenager was working to turn his life around. Darryl Head was shot in the head near Victory Park in Louisville west end while sitting in a car with friends.

He died Thursday morning at University Hospital. Head was a student at Doss High School.

"I'm not going to forget him, because he wouldn't forget me," Head's brother Keevan Head said.

According to his family, Head had been involved in the Operation Hope program at the Parkland Boys and Girls Club.

The program is geared toward getting area youths off the streets and moving toward a productive life.

We could see a change with him, program director Eddie Woods said. He didn't have far to go. He was a good kid.

Woods said that Head became active in the group and spoke about one day working at United Parcel Service.

He wasn't going to be one of those people who was going to go through life and no one would know he was, Woods said. He was going to leave footprints and touch people's lives.

Police have few leads in the case, and ask anyone with information to call the Louisville Metro Police tip line at 502-574-LMPD.

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Courier-Journal---October 28, 2006

Darryl "Boo" Head, 17, died Thursday October 26, 2006. He was a student at Doss High School. Survivors: parents, Darryl and Elisha Head; siblings, Keevan and Brittany Head; grandfather, Ronald Tyson; and a host of relatives and friends.
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WHAS11.com---October 30, 2006

A 17 year old who was shot and killed last week will be laid to rest Monday.

Darryl Head was shot and killed while riding in a car with friends. Police speculate head was a member of the Bad News Gang, but his family denies that, saying he was a good kid.

Sunday night they gathered at a vigil and pleaded for an end to the violence.

"I gave my son 90 percent, anything I didn't want the streets to do more for my son than I could. I told my son they could never do more for you than I could," said Head's mother, Elishia Morris.

"My mother always told me, days short when you don't listen to your mom," said Delisa Morris, Head's aunt. "He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Darryl Head's funeral is being held at the G.C. Williams Funeral Home.
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Courier-Journal---October 31, 2006

The Hot Spot

Another teenager, Darryl Head, 17, was shot and killed last week in the notorious Victory Park neighborhood of Louisville's West End, marking the fourth teen homicide in less than a week and a half. According to the Courier-Journal, nearly one-third of Louisville's forty-six homicides this year have been under age 21. Even more heartbreaking was that Head was trying to avoid the traps of "the streets". The Doss High School student belonged to Dr. Eddie Woods' intervention program called Operation Hope and according to WAVE 3 news, was one of 29 boys in the Parkland Boys and Girl's Club's Passport to Manhood program.

Cases like Darryl Head shouldn't discourage community programs targeting at-risk youth such as Youth Alive, Choices or River City Drum Corp. Indeed this recent shooting should underscore the need for better funding, more volunteers and wider community support for all the untold lives they do save. However, Head's murder does highlight a growing confrontation that commendable programs cannot address. Not even the best pupil in the best program is safe unless we ignite a bold resistance with the values and practices of "the streets".

Professor William Oliver, who teaches Criminal Justice at Indiana University, writes that "the streets" are an alternative or supplemental social institution not unlike the family or church. That makes "the streets" a "network of public and semipublic social settings...in which primarily lower and work-classing black males tend to congregate." They include, but are not limited to street corners, after-hours joints, nightclubs, barbershops, convenience stores, public parks and recreational facilities. It is there where many of Darryl Head's peers seek respect, social recognition, cultivate beliefs and form an identity.

Unlike Bill Cosby's clumsy hate speech, Dr. Oliver is prudent enough to note that not all members of the lower and working-class embrace "the streets" or practice street-related values. If we lump all poor people or all young people with the voracious few who hold communities hostage, we do more harm than good. That's not letting bad behavior off the hook because as Oliver writes, a duality exists in creating and maintaining these ghetto institutions in the first place. According to Oliver "the streets" is both a "creation of the American social structure" and a product of "functional and dysfunctional" individual behavior. Cosbyism's spitefulness is just the more popular brand.

The polar opposite is a more disturbing and a lesser known hug-a-thug sentimentality. That position argues that the hoodlums are the real victims who just require more understanding until they reach what my black nationalist friends call a "knowledge of self". "My father abandoned me, my mother was addicted to drugs and I grew up in the ghetto" are pretexts for pardoning menaces to already debilitated urban communities. That is confusing to some, if not infuriating to most. It's confusing because it omits the hard working and law abiding people who oppose those social ills while living with those same life circumstances. It's infuriating because no community advocate should ever shield heinous killers or poison peddlers who victimize the same people these apologists say they care about.

The genesis of what killed Darryl Head may have started elsewhere but it was packaged it in what "the streets" stand for. Fewer are willing to say that "the street" life is not worth justifying, keeping or protecting. Instead their wishful thinking is that all the hustlers, pimps, dope dealers and thugs will leave their apolitical, reactionary and predatory agenda willingly. Surely a good majority say they want to and plenty are willing to help them. Give them a chance to at least prove it. But not all will and unless we are willing to confront that world in its ugliest cleavages , even the best program is putting band-aids over bullet wounds.
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