West Palm police join residents in peace walk
Event is meant to enlist citizens to report any crimes they witness.
Officers and residents walked the neighborhood south of Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard that has been rocked by gunfire incidents.
WEST PALM BEACH — A woman threw herself on the floor of her Sapodilla Avenue apartment Oct. 20 as bomb-like blasts echoed outside. Two nights later, she again took cover from gunfire, that time behind a concrete pole a few hundred feet from her home.
The woman, a lifelong West Palm resident who likes to sit in a lawn chair along Sapodilla, won’t reveal her name.
But she will share her story. On Friday morning, city police walked her neighborhood south of Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard, which has been rocked by gun violence, in the department’s latest peace walk. Their message was direct: If you saw something, say something.
Police want witnesses’ stories, not their names, Police Chief Sarah Mooney stressed, and officers handed out slips of paper with Crime Stoppers of Palm Beach County’s contact information, so that tips can be submitted anonymously.
“We know that people know more than what they’re sharing with us,” Mooney said. She said she isn’t focused how information weaves its way to detectives — just that it does, “so we have something to work with.”
Mooney walked with dozens of officers, city leaders and residents in a mile loop past the scenes of five of the city’s eight recent shootings. They started by the corner of Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard and Sapodilla Avenue, feet from where Marquell Green, 23, was shot dead Oct. 20.
Nine more people, including the brother of the woman who hid Sunday night behind a pole by Green’s memorial, were injured in gunfire this week. All are expected
to survive.
Mooney won’t go as far as to say the shootings are related, but five in the same neighborhood over a week suggests at least a loose connection.
Yet no one has been arrested in any of those shootings.
Sharon Dunbar knows the frustration of witnesses’ silence. That painful quiet has engulfed her since her 17-year-old son’s murder in August 2014. Se’sawn Dunbar was shot dead at a Mangonia Park apartment with two other teens. More than three years later, no one has been arrested.
Dunbar, who lives in Riviera Beach, pushed her 8-month-old grandniece Friday morning through West Palm Beach’s streets on one of several such walks she has
done since her son’s death.
She brought the little one because “it’s never too early,” Dunbar said.
Officers passed out Crime Stoppers fliers to about a dozen preschoolers — too young to know how to read them — as the kids played outside at the YWCA Child Care Center on Ninth Street.
“That’s who we’ve got to reach,” said Sandy Matkivich, a West Palm Beach resident who helped hand out police-badge stickers to the eager children. “When you get them in their young 20s, it’s too late. They’re already in the game.”
That “game” is motivated by fear — a fear of retaliation, the fear of being considered a snitch, marchers said.
“At the end of the day, if you let fear run what you’re doing, that’s no way to live and it’s no way to let us make an impact,” Mooney said. “We can’t alleviate that fear if we don’t have the ability to remove the people who are creating that for you.”
Matkivich worries the violence will spread if witnesses continue not to cooperate. She’s terrified more people will be killed.
The 74-year-old passed two men on the walk and handed each slips of paper with Crime Stoppers information written on them. They’d been handed more fliers just seconds before, but one of the men still stopped to thank her.
“God bless,” he said. “God bless you, too,” Matkivich replied. “Stay safe, young man.”