Fla. vic urges fight vs. guns
GASPS ECHOED through a rapt crowd Saturday as 16-year-old Aalayah Eastmond recalled slipping beneath the lifeless body of one of her classmates to avoid the bullets.
The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School junior shared the horror and heartbreak she endured with the breathless assembly at the National Action Network’s weekly rally in Harlem.
“I thought it was a paintball gun,” Aalayah said of Nikolas Cruz’s AR-15. “I saw my classmate slumped over .... That’s when I realized it was real.”
The teen survived the terror nearly two months ago by doing the unthinkable.
“I was the student that had to cover herself with one of her dead classmates to survive,” she said.
The shooting in Parkland, Fla., left 17 dead and sparked a movement focused on changing gun laws across the country.
Aalayah hopes to bring attention to the larger issue of gun violence that plagues African-American and Hispanic communities.
“I’m not only here to talk about school shootings,” she said.
Fifteen years ago, “I actually lost my uncle to gun violence in Brooklyn,” she said. “So for it to happen to me, in my face, that just shows that change has to happen now.”
Aalayah noted that she and other black survivors of the Feb. 14 shooting haven’t received as much media attention as students like David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez.
“You see the same students being recycled on the news,” she said. “We’re working towards our voices out there more.” Eastmond joined with high school students from across New York who have formed an antigun-violence group called “Youth Over Guns.”
Together, they are planning a youth march against urban gun violence in the Big Apple on June 2.
The Rev. Al Sharpton commended Eastmond for her courage in speaking out. “If she, with all that trauma, can stand up and fight then you ought to stand up with her,” he told the crowd at his National Action Network. “This young lady surviving in that school. Rather than her going away, saying, ‘I got away,’ she’s committed herself to fighting for gun reform and making value out of her life.”
The march — echoing a massive rally held in Washington last month — will kick off New York State’s “Gun Violence Awareness Month,” the only such program in the nation dedicated to the topic.
Ramon Contreras, a student at Kipp NYC College Prep in the Bronx, said he and other students were inspired by the Parkland survivors to create “Youth Over Guns” after watching the teens turn their grief into activism.
“Everybody just wanted to do something,” he said.
Contreras, 17, has personally dealt with the grief of losing a friend to gun violence.
“I was lost. He was someone I said, ‘hey,’ to every day in the hallway,” he said. “It’s just something. You can be talking to somebody every day and the next day he won’t be there.”