COLUMBUS, Ohio — It was the deadliest Memorial Day week in the city of Columbus in 15 years. Six people were killed from May 29 to June 4, 2022, including a teenager on the lawn of the Ohio Statehouse. All involved guns.
“I'm trying to figure out why because I just don't understand. Why did he need to shoot him and kill him?” said Erica Coit, the mother of 16-year-old Broderick Harper who was gunned down outside the Statehouse on Memorial Day.
Harper was with a group of three other people riding scooters in the area when he was fatally shot. A 17-year-old boy was arrested and charged with murder nearly a year after Harper’s death.
“I want to know that from him. I would like to know that from his side, why? Why did he do it?” Coit said.
She was just one mom, out of many, who was mourning a loved one that fell victim to gun violence that week.
The violent act on the lawn of the Ohio Statehouse was among the more than 1,000 shootings across the United States that week in 2022. TEGNA investigators across the country spent the last several months looking at gun violence from May 29 to June 4, 2022.
At least 450 people died and 900 more were wounded during that seven-day stretch, according to data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive and analyzed by TEGNA investigators. Those numbers do not include suicides.
The sheer volume of gun violence each week can make people feel that each shooting — and the heartbreak that comes with it — gets drowned out by the shooting that comes next.
The investigations by TEGNA stations across the country aim to highlight the human toll of the stunning statistics and reveal how outcomes could, and should, be different.
Columbus detectives are leading the investigation into five of the six homicides that occurred in the city that week — but the arrests don’t outweigh the heavy toll on families.
On May 31, Joshua Moyer, a 39-year-old father of seven, was leaving for work when he found a man rummaging through his wife’s car in the driveway of his home on the southwest side. Moyer confronted the man and attempted to detain him until police arrived. A struggle ensued and court records say 31-year-old Derek Hotelling shot and killed Moyer with a gun he stole from a nearby car.
“Gun safety is very close to our hearts,” said Malissa Thomas St. Clair.
Thomas St. Clair is the founder of the group Mothers of Murdered Columbus Children. Many of the mothers in the group lost their children to gun violence and wanted to turn their grief into solutions.
“You can't fix it in a big picture. I think we need to isolate and start chunking this, maybe by ZIP codes,” she said.
Thomas St. Clair contends that groups like hers should work with other nonprofit organizations and focus on small areas or age groups. The solution should include seizing guns in the area or educating kids on what their lives will look like if they use guns illegally.
She adds while Columbus police are solving more homicides, it is time for the other branches of the justice system to do their part.
“When I am supporting this mother, not only in the pain of losing a child, then seeing a sentencing that really doesn't meet the crimes, it becomes now, what conversations do we have to have?” Thomas St. Clair said.
Columbus Police Deputy Chief Smith Weir oversees the major crimes unit in the division. Out of the homicides police investigated in all of 2022, 124 of 140 victims suffered from gunshot wounds.
“I do think there is something to be said that there are more people we are encountering that have illegal crime guns on them,” he said.
Last year, Columbus police recovered more than 3,300 firearms in 2022, which he said was the most ever collected in the city. Mayor Andrew Ginther said that police have recovered 1,000 guns since the beginning of April and are on pace to surpass last year’s numbers.
Weir says there are a couple of ways to diminish gun violence, which include interrupting the cycle of violence.
“From the investigative standpoint, how do we solve this crime and how do we solve it quickly,” he said. “What we want to do, whether it is a homicide or non-fatal shooting whether it is a stabbing, is find the person responsible quickly and get them off the street hopefully before any retaliatory violence occurs.”
CrimeTracker 10 also talked to Columbus Police Chief Elaine Bryant, who is urging every gun owner to make sure their guns are locked up because many of the guns being used in crimes have been stolen from cars.