This homicide hurts all of us
Before she was killed, Kiara Tatum was on a path to help others
Kiara Tatum’s grandmother, Thelma Ellis, said her grandchild wanted to be a nurse so that she could help people.
Had another epidemic not claimed her on New Year’s Day – that epidemic being gun violence – the 18-year-old LeMoyne-Owen College student could have indeed helped a lot of sick people.
Especially people who are fast reaching her grandmother’s age.
That’s because the U.S. is on the verge of a major nurse shortage. By 2025, the shortfall is expected to be “more than twice as large as any nurse shortage experienced since the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid in the mid-1960s,” according to a 2009 paper published in the journal Health Affairs.
That shortage will be driven by aging baby boomers.
Right now, the U.S. has more people older than 65 than at any other time in history, and by 2030 – the year when Kiara would have been 32 and likely in the prime of her career – the nation’s elderly
population is expected to have increased by 75 percent to 69 million.
What that means is that demand for health care will increase.
And what that would have meant for Kiara is that she would have had a lot of opportunity to put her skills – and her compassionate heart – to work.
But before Kiara could grow up to thwart that impending health crisis, another one, gun violence, killed her. DeVante Robinson, 22, and Jaylen Clayton, 17, have been charged with fatally shooting her. At her wake Saturday at Olivet Fellowship Baptist Church, a procession of friends and family members mourned aloud. Some were unable to gaze on her for long before collapsing into the arms of others around them.
One young man sunk into the front pew near Kiara's coffin, so wracked with sobs that another friend came up front to comfort him.
They mourned a woman who, instead of becoming another nurse in her family, became the first homicide victim of the year in Memphis – and a victim of what the Centers for Disease Control lists as one of the top five causes of death for people younger than 65.
Most of those homicides are because of firearms, and last summer, the American Medical Association called gun violence a health crisis and called on Congress to relax a law that stifles the CDC from doing comprehensive research on the problem; a law that makes it so that if any research on guns appears to support the idea of gun control, the center could risk losing funding. But the law remains. So as Kiara lay peacefully enveloped in pale pink and white, with a simple, silver cross adorning a white garment that should have, in the ensuing years, been the stuff of her nursing uniform, it was hard not to think about the insidiousness of gun violence and the political and pathological things that fuel it.
It was hard not to think about how the epidemic of violence continues to claim people like Kiara; a girl who would have used her life to ease people through other illnesses and infirmities.
“Our parents put the impetus on us to be nurses,” Keihla Satterwhite, 18, told me. “We were both going to LeMoyne to become nurses…she said she was doing it because she liked to help people.
“Losing her means we lost a sister. It means we lost a real good friend. It means we lost a sweet and intelligent person.”
Said Lisa Watkins, 21: “She was just a good person. She was nice to everyone. For this to happen to her, it was just devastating.”
So as the tears flowed for Kiara, whose funeral is Sunday, the tears also flowed for a future with one less nurse and one less potential fulfilled.
Yet tears should also flow over the fact that as people prepare to survive old age, the people who will be needed to help with that, people like Kiara, continue to struggle to survive the illnesses of young age.
With gun violence being a major one.