hashim

Violence Prevention Advocate
Shot: May 7 1990
Brooklyn New York

Another case of some black kid getting shot

Hashim: "I remember feeling I was on top of the world. I was fifteen, I had new friends who ranged anywhere from eighteen to twenty-two. It was my first time selling drugs. I used to do things to show I wasn't your average kid; I wanted people to respect who I was.

"This night four of my new friends go across the street, I'm standing there with another friend. Out of nowhere he yells, `Yo!' Look out!' I knew somebody had a gun. I started to run. My instincts said, see what you're running from; I turned around, I saw the silhouette of the gun, a Tech 9, a sub machine gun. I looked down, my pants made this funny move, something hard hit me in my back and I fell. The noise the gun fire made was deafening; it was so close to me, and this gun holds thirty-six bullets. I thought the guy was going to walk up and kill me. When I opened my eyes I was out on the street by myself calling, `Yo! Yo! I got shot!' My new friends were gone. I threw the drugs; I knew how the police were going to treat me if they saw drugs, they weren't going to rush me to the hospital, they were just going to look at this as another case of some black kid getting shot, label it, and the treatment I was going to get in the hospital. I remember feeling really afraid because I couldn't understand why I couldn't walk or move. I'm saying, `Please God, don't let me die.' The fear I had went away; it was as if the world blinked. I can still recall that feeling today.

Something in me was being pulled from the bottom

"The ambulance finally gets there, they put oxygen on my face. I remember feeling so good because I had that fresh air, and just wanting to go to sleep. Something in me was being pulled from the bottom; voices were getting further away. All of a sudden I could hear my mother in the front of the ambulance, she kept yelling, `I told you to take out the garbage, I told you to wash the dishes, I told you to take those movies back,' and just fussing at me. I'm saying, `Mom, be quiet, I'm trying to go to sleep.' And once I said that the ambulance workers were saying, `We got him! We got his BP!' "The kid that shot me, he was sixteen, I didn't know him, he was sent by somebody else who didn't want us selling drugs where he sold drugs. He gave this kid a sub machine gun, and he gave him money and said, 'I want you to take care of them.'

What's cool and what's not

"This type of thing has been happening so often throughout the inner cities, for fifteen years now, and it's just now and within the last five years that more people are starting to see a problem in America, and it's not just with young African Americans, but now the problem is spreading across the country. When young people understand the decisions they're making and how it's going to affect them, we'll be able to make more of an impact. What I'm doing now, talking to young people about what happened to me, I think that's going to benefit a lot of kids. It's not cool to kill somebody. It's not cool to be in jail. A lot of time young people get it distorted about what's cool and what's not."