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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

9-Year-Old Girl|Killed in Ferguson

FERGUSON, Mo. (CN) - A 9-year-old girl was shot to death while doing her homework Tuesday night, just blocks from where Michael Brown was killed last year.

Jamyla Bolden was fatally wounded at around 9:30 p.m. Tuesday. Her mother, 34, was shot in the leg.

"I kept holding and holding her," Jamyla's grandmother told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "I still have her blood on my hands. She was still breathing. I was telling her to just breathe."

Police have no motive in the shooting. Ferguson Police Chief Andrew Anderson said he will "do everything possible to find the person responsible."

A spokeswoman for Jamyla's school, Riverview Gardens, called her "very sweet, kind and soft-spoken."

"We just can't make sense of this," school spokeswoman Melanie Powell-Robinson told the Post-Dispatch.

The shooting was on the 9200 block of Ellison Drive, which connects to Canfield Drive, where Brown was shot. Brown's shooting sparked months of often violent protests against racism and excessive police force and raised the scrutiny nationwide on police killings.

A house next door to Jamyla's has a "We Must Stop Killing Each Other" sign on its front lawn.

On Wednesday in St. Louis, angry protestors burned vacant houses, a car and the American flag in response to another police shooting of a black man. Police say the man pointed a stolen gun at them while the attempted to serve a warrant.

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