EVERY year on the same day, the first Saturday in May, Penny Dees takes a two-mile walk through the neighborhood where she has spent most of her 50 years, but where her daughter, Quiana, lived for just 12. She never walks alone.
She starts at the middle school where she works as an assistant cook, the same school where Quiana was once a seventh grader. She marches past the nearby house that Quiana slipped out of on her way to a party; continues down Washington Avenue, where the party was; and then stops outside a church near where Quiana was found at 2:44 a.m. on May 2, 1992, bleeding from what turned out to be a fatal gunshot wound to the head.
“Somebody knows what happened that night, and I’m going to keep it going until they speak up,” said Ms. Dees, who is accompanied each year by as many as 150 other marchers — family, friends, former teachers of Quiana’s, and people who didn’t know her, but who knew somebody else who died a violent death too young. After a prayer at the church, the marchers turn and head back through the West Side to the city’s municipal complex. “That’s my hope — then I could stop.”
a 13 year old running away from home means that there is something very wrong going on and whopping her ass wouldn't solve any of that.
