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My latest column for the Kansas City Star
The Bookshelf
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If you have read my crime novels, you know that one of my characters is a killer of children. While the names have been changed, I have experienced the duty to report on murders and assaults. Most recently, I wrote about the anniversary of a case in The Kansas City Star:
A decapitated body in the woods near 59th and Kensington. A few days later, a head found in the same area. It was April 2001, and Kansas City was stunned — frightened — by what happened to the little girl we first knew only as “Precious Doe.”
Last week, on the 25th anniversary of her murder, people gathered in the park across from where her body was found to say her name: Erica Green. She would have been 29 years old.
I went, too — not just as a reporter taking notes, but as someone who remembers what it felt like in the newsroom back then, and what it still feels like now. The prayers. The “amens.” Activist Alvin Brooks looking at the kids on the playground behind him and reminding all of us: “they’re ours.” Protecting children can’t be a private duty. It has to be communal.
And for me, it opened up something else I’ve carried for years — the way certain stories stay with you, the way they can follow you from city to city, case to case, family to family.
Read the full column here:
https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/yvette-walker/article315802677.html?giftCode=65d6e7f45ec2cc14047dbaf46946145eb9c6574887de59ee2b3217d2ab57b5c0
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Yvette Walker is a journalist, educator, and the founder of Positively Joy Ministries. Her ministry supports this publication, a podcast, publishing her many books and opportunities to share the message of joy as a speaker.
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