Detroit officials grapple with a dozen child homicides

DETROIT -- Regina Trammell loved to sing rhythm and blues and gospel tunes with her 10-year-old son DeAntoine while driving him to school. But the radio is silent now.

DeAntoine became the 12th child age 16 or younger to be slain in Detroit so far this year -- the ninth by gunfire. A man fired two shots through a wall into his bedroom June 3, hitting him in the back.

"When I sing certain songs I just think about him," Trammell said. "My other children sing with me, but it won't be like him."

The string of slayings this year runs counter to the trend in Detroit over the past decade and or so.

Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has called on community leaders to find solutions to the violence. "I won't sleep until we find a way to curb some of the violence in the city," he said.

So far this year, Detroit has a child homicide rate of 4.3 per 100,000 children 16 and under, surpassing that of several other big cities.

Los Angeles, a city nearly four times as large as Detroit, has had 25 children killed this year and a rate of 2.7 per 100,000. Philadelphia has a rate of 1.4, Chicago 1.5, San Diego 1.1 and Dallas 0.7.

"At such a rate, should we be bracing for a long and perhaps deadly summer?" asked Cardinal Adam Maida of the city's Roman Catholic diocese. "I pray not."

'The sky is not falling'

The number of child homicide victims in Detroit last year was not immediately available. But in all of 2000, there were 16 child slayings, compared with 36 in 1994 and 60 in 1987, according to statistics compiled for the Justice Department by James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston.

"It might be a case of Chicken Little," Fox said. "The sky is not falling. It may be just a little tweak."

Overall, Detroit has had 171 homicides since Jan. 1, about the same pace as last year, when there were 395 slayings.

This year, two of the slain children allegedly were killed by their mothers; a third died in a suspicious fire. Some of the young victims were sleeping in their beds or playing in their rooms when they were caught in the crossfire.