Three teen tragedies in Santa Fe
Alot of things were in play at the scene of a fatal incident on Saturday, Aug. 1, at a house in the Chupadero area north of Santa Fe.
There were dozens of young people, some of them apparently not invited, gathered in a remote area on a summer night. It’s reasonable to assume there were intoxicants around.
It was 3:30 a.m. Former Lobos basketball player J.R. Giddens, in an interview with The New Mexican, would say later, “Nothing great happens that late at night.”
There was some kind of argument or fight, maybe a punch or two thrown, maybe just shoving, witnesses say.
And at least one person had a gun. If not for that fact, most likely everybody walks away OK. Or maybe someone gets bruised and battered. No one dies.
But a gun was used, and it killed Fedonta “J.B.” White, the recently graduated Santa Fe Demons basketball standout who was headed via scholarship to the University of New Mexico to play in The Pit, where Giddens once starred.
The death of “June Bug,” nationally ranked as a top 100 hoops recruit, has shocked Santa Fe. The 6-foot, 8-inch 18-year-old was probably the city’s most recognizable celebrity; the rest of Lobo Nation couldn’t wait to see him in action on the court. The alleged shooter now facing charges in White’s death is a 16-year-old boy.
In mid-July, another up-andcoming teenager — Capital High senior Ivan Armando Perez Chumacero, 17, who was passionate about pursuing a career in music — was shot to death in a fight outside a Santa Fe apartment complex. Police charged another 17-year-old with his murder.
Perhaps it’s no longer stunning that 16- and 17-year-old kids are armed and dangerous, but it should be. New Mexico is like the rest of the United States, with more guns around than anyone knows what to do with. The Small Arms Survey, conducted by a Swiss research group, says our country had 120.5 guns in civilian ownership for every 100 residents in 2017 and that Americans that year accounted for 45% of the estimated 857 million civilian-held firearms on the planet. Some of those weapons are bound to find their way into the hands of kids in Santa Fe.
It will be important to find out how the shooters in these two cases obtained their guns — from home, or somewhere else. It was other Santa Fe teenagers who in 2019 tried to persuade the state Legislature to impose stiffer penalties for negligent storage of firearms that results in a child gaining access to weapons. The effort failed.
To be sure, guns are not always part of the mix when there’s senseless violence. In June, Aiko Perez, 17, another local high school graduate who was headed to Santa Fe Community College, was stabbed to death by a friend, age 18, who called the police and reported they’d both been using LSD, and that he stabbed Perez for some reason when Perez “freaked out.”
That’s three teenage homicides within the Santa Fe community in the course of a few weeks, three tragedies of lives cut way too short, a string of fatal violence that the city can’t ignore.
The stabbing, so far, seems like a horrible mistake. But the two teenager-on-teenager shootings are stark examples of what can happen when guns are around, in the wrong place at the wrong time, adding deadly dimensions to what could be mere brawls or fisticuffs.
Some are blaming the shooting on bad parenting or on pandemic health restrictions that have left teens bored and with too much time on their hands.
But the plague of gun violence, the easy availability of guns, even to children and minors, and resentment of even the most basic, common-sense gun control measures will probably outlast COVID-19. And that’s tragically unfortunate.