D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams met yesterday with a group of Ballou Senior High School students, promising to work with them to develop more programs and facilities to help keep teenagers off the crime-plagued streets of Southeast Washington.
But in the wake of the fatal shooting early Sunday of a Ballou junior, Williams (D), D.C. Council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) and school officials also stressed the importance of personal responsibility and pleaded with students and their parents to obey the city's midnight curfew on weekends for children under 17.
"Government has a role, but there's also a role for personal responsibility," Williams said.
"A 16-, 15-year-old child should not be out there at 2 o'clock in the morning," added Ballou Principal Daniel Hudson. "That's not the school. That's Mom and Dad."
Williams and other officials were reacting to the death of Lavelle Kendall Jones, 16, who was shot once in the head shortly after 2 a.m. Sunday as he was driving home with two cousins from a nightclub. Jones, a well-liked youth who aspired to be a journalist, was killed 15 months after Ballou football player James Richardson, 17, was shot to death outside the school cafeteria.
While Williams, Barry, Hudson and several other men held forth at a microphone set up on the sidewalk in front of Ballou, the slain boy's mother, Adriene Jones, arrived with a clutch of relatives, hoping to clean out her son's locker.
Jones, 34, said she was angry that her family hadn't been invited to take part in the meeting, particularly because the mayor, the principal and other public officials seemed to be blaming the family for failing to keep Jones home at night.
"Parents play a role in it, but my child was a good child. I never went to court for him. I never had to get him from the jail. . . . Why should I deprive him of things he wanted to do?" Adriene Jones said. "If the mayor can quickly get a baseball team together, he should be able to do something for these youths out here."
Ballou senior Anthony Smith, 18, who was in front of the school yesterday morning, talked about his friend and the adults who had arrived to help.
Jones "was a good friend of everyone" who "never did nothing wrong," Smith said. "He had dreams, he had goals he wanted to follow, but stuff happens in this world. It's put a lot of stress on some of us."
Smith thanked Barry, who also showed up at the school Monday, saying, "We needed somebody to talk to." Although Smith was not among the group of students chosen to take part in yesterday's meeting, he said he was thankful for Williams's attention.
"It's a good thing, because we need more stuff in this community," Smith said. "We've lost so many."
Others were less impressed with Williams's decision to meet privately with about two dozen student leaders, truants and troublemakers selected by an anti-violence advocacy group, Peaceoholics. Thomas Byrd, vice president of Ballou's Parent Teacher Student Association, said he was "flabbergasted" to learn that his organization would not be allowed to participate.
In the past, Byrd said, Williams "has promised things he hasn't followed up on. I wanted to hear what he had to say so we could hold him accountable."
But the mayor was booed when he went to a meeting at Ballou after Richardson's death in February last year. Yesterday, Williams said he had no interest in holding another public meeting packed with hostile parents and neighborhood residents.
"I was frustrated with the general meeting a year ago," Williams said. "Everyone just came and yelled at the mayor" instead of searching for an effective response to the violence.
Barry, Peaceoholics leader Ronald Moten and other participants said yesterday's meeting was far more productive. Senior class president Sharece Crawford, 17, one of four student leaders who participated in the 80-minute session, said she was particularly pleased that Williams promised to come back next month to talk to the students further.
"My understanding is he will return to our school and have a follow-up meeting," Crawford said. "So I'm really looking forward to that."
