Miss Liz never should have died the way she did. Commend Circle of Brotherhood for caring | Editorial

We given a lot of our attention in recent days to migrants spite-shipped to Martha’s Vineyard, spaghetti models and the surging Dolphins.

But we cannot let pass in silence the death of Miss Liz — nor the people in Miami who are working so hard to ensure that no one else is shot to death as 85-year-old Elizabeth Level was as she stood outside her home in Liberty City, holding on to her walker.

Just about every neighborhood used to have a Miss Liz. Some still do. Kind and caring, welcoming and engaging. Sometimes she was the scold on the block. Herald reporter Charles Rabin wrote, aptly, that she was the “community den mother.” She and others like her are what the “village” is all about.

Level was killed on Sept. 9. Was she the target? Level had demanded that a police camera be positioned on her street. Her home had been targeted by gunfire before. Video shows a bullet hitting a car next to Level. Then two men run past her and seem to return fire. At least one bullet strikes Miss Liz.

There have been no arrests yet.

Level’s stunning death is the type of tragic violence that Miami’s Circle of Brotherhood is working to prevent. In fact, the group of dedicated community members is working so hard that it recently won a $100,000 grant from Everytown for Gun Safety, a national force for the cause of eliminating gun violence. The national competition for the funding was fierce.

“We supported 15 organizations with new grants,” Michael-Sean Spence, senior director of Community Safety Initiatives at Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund and creator of the Everytown Community Safety Fund, told the Herald Editorial Board. “We work to identify cities with a persistent gun violence issue, existing community-based intervention organizations on the front line and efforts being deployed with a focus on youth, cognitive therapy and place-based strategies.”

Circle of Brotherhood, founded in 2012, checked every box and can scale up programming. “There’s something magical going on in our own back yard,” executive director Brother Lyle Muhammad told the Editorial Board.

“We have boots on the ground called The Peacemakers,” he said, intervening before warring gang members pick up guns. “We will focus our efforts and help and support to sustain us in building an infrastructure to do this work the way it needs to be done, without having to worry about funding.”

Remember the Hunger Nine? Nine men in a makeshift tent in Liberty Square staged a protracted hunger strike in 2019 to draw attention to violence in their urban communities, to say that crime in Black neighborhoods should never be seen as normal. That was the Circle of Brotherhood.

The hunger strikers drew the attention of a group of students and parents from Parkland. It was about a year after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

“They came down from Parkland to show support for the Hunger Nine,” Muhammad told the Board. “We’ve been in partnership ever since.”

And as media and policy focus is drawn like a magnet to spectacular crimes in unlikely environments — in this case, the white suburbs of Broward County — Muhammad said, “They knew the attention was not being paid to urban crime. “

We commend the Circle of Brotherhood and their ardent, open-hearted supporters in recognizing that no one’s loss to gun violence is more important than anyone else’s.

Losing someone like Miss Liz reminds us how much gun violence takes from all of us.

This story was originally published September 27, 2022 at 11:22 AM.