Group kicks off new campaign to help violent crime survivors heal
Crime and violence continue to impact many families across California. While major cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco are seen at the forefront of crime rates, San Joaquin County is not left behind.
Stockton police data available for this year to date shows that there have been 1,696 violent crimes in the Stockton Police Department Crime Comparison report released in May.
Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice is a national organization of crime survivors working together to heal and to help each other — a community of survivors who have come together to support one another when no one else was there for them.
On July 25, CSSJ gathered together at The Catalyst in Stockton to address violence in San Joaquin County. The organization announced a new grant program, “We Are Survivors.” This grant will assist survivors of crime and violence, with money directly handed to them for support and services needed to heal from trauma.
“With our narrative, we’re healing, we’re showing folks that you can get activated by creating safe spaces, by going down and talking to your local leaders and elected officials about the importance of supporting victims, because it all in the end is tied back to how we reduce crime,” said Tashante McCoy, chapter development manager for CSSJ.
CSSJ will be dispersing $100,000 to eight different organizations serving the Central Valley, the Bay Area and Los Angeles. An appeal to local leaders across California is part of the campaign, asking them to match CSSJ’s investment to provide direct and immediate access to resources for survivors to be able to heal from their traumas.
Kelly’s Angels Foundation of Stockton is one of them. The nonprofit was a response to founder and Executive Director Jamie Guerrero’s personal tragedy when he lost his 34-year-old sister Kelly Melissa Guerrero on March 17, 2013, when she was murdered by her boyfriend.
Guerrero started the nonprofit in October 2015 and has since been providing tutoring, mentoring, therapy and extracurricular activities to children impacted by homicide.
“The stuff that we do is like the person she was. A giving person, a helpful person, a good friend, a listening person,” Guerrero said. “I just want to be able to let people know that survivor-led organizations like ours are very helpful. And we can do a lot more if we were able to get funding. So, hopefully the message gets to our system’s leaders. And they hear the message and they make it kind of easier for us to help give funds so we can help our community, because they’re reaching out to us.”
The organization launched the new campaign with a short documentary; “We Are Survivors,” full of personal life experiences of crime and violence survivors.
One story from the documentary is that of McCoy: She lost her brother Terri Lynn McCoy, 31, in 2012 in a grisly 51-hour period in which nine people died violently in Stockton; and her cousin Antwane Burrise, 39, in 2020, when he was fatally shot by Stockton police.
McCoy wants the community to remember Terri as who he was, “well-respected and well-loved in the community.”
Her brother’s murder made her who she is now and what she fights for, she says.
“I think one of the things that stood out to me the most, once we got into it and what inspired me, is just the repetitive cycles of trauma,” she says, “and how like the system contributes to the trauma, because they are not connected to the victim experience in a way where they understand that they’re actually traumatizing us, and the correlation between repetitive cycles of crime, and the fact that the system doesn’t serve, like it’s all connected.”