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Bullet kills girl, 9, playing in yard

By Nicholas Spangler, Elias Lopez and Kathleen McGrory
nspangler@MiamiHerald.com

Sherdavia Jenkins was playing in the dirt, digging a grave for her doll, Polly, on Saturday afternoon. Her little sister and her best friend didn't want to play that game, so they were talking on the stoop, a few feet behind her.

Then came at least two dozen bullets from a high-powered weapon. It was about 3 p.m.

Sherdavia, barely 9, was hit once in the neck. She tried to crawl into her home. Her mother ran out the open door, picked her up, carried her into the living room and called 911. Her baby died in her arms. The two other girls, who weren't harmed, became murder witnesses.

Police arrived and put up yellow tape around Northwest 13th Avenue, between 67th and 65th streets. The neighborhood is home to a housing project known to residents as the Pork 'n Beans Projects, to others as Liberty Square.

Police put cones around shell casings and talked to Sherdavia's screaming aunt, her grandmother, her cousins crying quietly around the corner.

Miami police spokesman Delrish Moss said detectives had few facts: One man shot at another man about 50 yards from the girls, and a stray bullet ended Sherdavia's life.

"We're still trying to determine a motive," Moss told neighborhood.

Then his voice got loud: "We've got two people [witnesses] down at headquarters talking to us. That place should be full. If this kid can't sit on the porch on a Saturday afternoon, then nobody can."

The deadly shooting at 1252 NW 65 Terr. comes at a time when the number of murders - especially among younger victims - has risen dramatically in Miami-Dade County. In the past 12 months alone, at least 18 people - ranging from age 2 to 18 - have been murdered throughout the county. Thirteen were black; five were Hispanic. Most came from neighborhoods in Northwest Miami-Dade.

Those numbers meant little to Sherdavia's family.

GIFTED STUDENT

Her grandmother, Shirley Williams, remembers a little girl who had the highest score on the math FCAT in her third-grade class at Lillie C. Evans Elementary School. By May, Sherdavia had collected 14 awards for good grades in Spanish, math and music. She was the family chess champion.

Family members said she was supposed to transfer to a school for gifted students at the beginning of the next school year.

The neighbors knew none of this. They remembered a little girl they called Shay who liked to draw pictures for her friends, who wore her hair in pigtails tied with bright, shiny bows. Very few of them knew her name, who her family was or where she had lived.

But everybody heard the shots.

"About 10, real fast," recalled Laverne Smith, 47, who mentioned that there had been another shooting just the night before and pointed to where one of the bullets had hit.

She's used to the sound of gunfire. "I just tell my kids to lay down on the floor, duck," she said.

Chiquita Walker, 35, grew up in these projects. "It's mainly at night, when they shoot," she said. "It was OK when I was growing up. Now - I'm ready to move, that's for sure."

Sherdavia's 14-year-old neighbor heard the shots that killed her. "BOOM, BOOM!" he said. "I thought it was fireworks, at first. But it was too powerful. My little brother was on the porch so I ran for him and brought him in. We got on the floor. It went on for maybe two minutes."

The boy, whose name is being withheld by The Miami Herald, said he didn't know what might have motivated the shooting. "I don't know and I don't want to know. We want to move anyway. This'll just make us move faster."

Sherdavia's best friend, a 10-year-old girl whose name also is being withheld, was sitting on the sidewalk, next to the police tape. They had been next-door neighbors.

"I came here a year ago," she said. "When I came, like a day after, she said 'hi.' We started talking about what is our favorite stuff. My favorite is spaghetti. I like math best; she likes art. We would play hide-and-seek, makeup and stuff like that. Sometimes we would play Connect Four."

On Saturday, the girls were sitting outside Sherdavia's apartment home.

"She was out on the grass, and I was talking with her little sister, and then there were gunshots and all this smoke. Then she was trying to go into her house but she fell. I saw her by the door. She fell by the door and blood was all over. She had one eye open and the other closed and she was trying to breathe," she said.

Sherdavia's friend said she didn't want to live in Pork 'n Beans anymore, mainly because of the shootings.

"They [are] always doing that. They did it last year, and they [are] doing it again. I want to move somewhere else, where they don't shoot and stuff. By where the white people live."

SHE COULDN'T CRY

She hadn't cried all day. "I was about to, before. I was trying, too, but I couldn't," she said.

But Sherdavia's aunt, Lija Williams, 30, hadn't stopped. She was crying so hard it made her choke.

Sherdavia's father, David Jenkins, 33, a father of five and a security guard, spoke to reporters at Miami police headquarters late Saturday night.

"Why? I only want to know why," he said. "Why would you shoot an innocent child and keep going? . . . I feel very hurt. Like somebody cut through my stomach and started tap-dancing. All I have left is pictures of my daughter."

Miami Herald staff writers Susannah Nesmith, David Ovalle and Laura Morales contributed to this story.