His singing makes you feel the presence of holiness.

"They can be whoever they are, they can feel however they are, and she’s just gonna be with them."

And so, like in the beginning, at the end, the son is swaddled and alone with his mother.

As Oakland politicians were set to crow about a 34% drop in homicides from 2023 to 2024, violence surges at the year's turning...

No trial, no hearing, there is no due process for the dead.

It is a story that also speaks to the love that refuses to be silenced by violence.

...loving son brother mother sister aunty athlete musician classmate snappy dresser fun-loving uncle father friend or fan...

If she remembers anything, perhaps she remembers not being alone at that moment of despair.

This is live-preserving work, it is the work of helping traumatized, devastated people begin to be reborn...

KWP crisis responders are interrupters of hate, savers of the lives of the living; they prevent retaliation. They deliver love.

So did she rise, after stark loss, economic struggle, civic neglect, disillusionment, obscurity, isolation, out of darkness, out of Oakland.

They don’t care who their daddy has been running around with, they don’t care if daddy don’t have a job, that he ain’t had a bath...

“They said that when they went to raid their house, they would have shrines, they would have that that dreadlock, hanging on their wall."

Ashley rested her hand on Jennifer’s head and leaned on the casket for the first and only picture of the two of them together.

I’m not a foolish woman. I know he was on loan from God for a short period of time. It’s never going to be long enough.

To a dark deserted back country of the mind...

He'd seen her on the news, talking about her lost son, about what the city needed to do for its wounded and traumatized families...

Even that night that K didn’t come home -- that early August night in 2000 -- when you hear his sister describe it, you realize how...

Back when Khadafy Washington was killed, at age 18, in August of 2000, the violent killing of a black man in Oakland seems often to have...