Paris Dye teared up, thinking back on how many Sundays she has spent consoling grieving mothers at Liberty Towers Church, a Christian ministry in an industrial section north of downtown Sacramento.
Dye is programs director at the church, a role that involves reaching out to families and helping them integrate into the congregation. Not infrequently, that means sitting with women who have lost children, sometimes related to violence or drugs, more often to illness or complications at birth.
She can still feel the cries of Donna Green, whose teenaged son Jacob was gunned down four years ago in Foothill Farms, just blocks from the church. He was shot in the stomach on the night of his 18th birthday after he got into a fight with another young man in the neighborhood.
“The worst scream I ever heard was his mother,” said Dye, who raised three boys of her own in the Foothill Farms neighborhood. “When they closed the coffin on that kid, it was the most painful cry. I can’t shake it. I don’t ever want to hear it again.”
Early death is a fact of life in Sacramento County’s poorest, most isolated neighborhoods. It snares teenagers driving home with friends from high school football games. It takes newborns sharing a bed with parents and siblings. It silences heartbeats in stillborn babies who never see light. And with greater frequency than any other racial group, it takes African American children.
Between 2010 and 2015, African American children died at well above the rates of any other racial or ethnic group in Sacramento County: Nearly one-quarter of the 873 children under age 18 who died in the county during that six-year time frame were black, even as black youths made up just 11 percent of the population in that age group.
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