Safety
On Friday, over 60 Havenscourt neighborhood residents gathered at Carter Gilmore Park in East Oakland to attend “Friday Summer Nights at the Park,” a weekly series of family-friendly fun nights hosted by Messengers 4 Change, a coalition of Oakland organizations and residents working together to decrease violence. At the same time, a similar party was happening further east at Willie Wilkins Park in the Elmhurst neighborhood. The goal of these Friday night events is to decrease street violence by turning strangers into neighbors.
On Thursday Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch and San Francisco 49ers quarterback Josh Johnson gave a $500 scholarship to Oakland gunshot victim Gerald Williams, a former Castlemont High School student who will be studying business management at San Diego State University this fall. Nearly 200 people attended the ceremony held to recognize Williams’ achievement of what organizers said was a milestone in his academic career, which had been disrupted by the shooting incident. The award ceremony was held during…
At the screening in Chinatown Wednesday night of the four documentaries made by 12 young men in the Warriors for Peace pilot project, the excitement of having produced and appearing in publicly distributed content seemed to fascinate the 70 or so young people who gathered for the premiere. Many showed a familiarity with the stories told, and moments of silence punctuated a few intense scenes.
On Wednesday, participants in the new Warriors for Peace program will present their video productions and narratives at a showcase to be held in Oakland, marking the end of 32 weeks of hands-on training in the production of short video narratives and interviewing skills that have enabled young men of color from the Bay Area to tell stories based on their life experiences.
Jorge Salinas woke up shortly after 2 am Thursday to what sounded like something exploding. He then looked outside and down Mandela Parkway from his house on 3rd Street, toward the West Oakland BART station where he saw a huge fire which he estimated to be at least four stories tall.
The second-to-last Oakland Unified School District board meeting before the summer recess began Wednesday night with members of the teachers’ union demanding a new contract on the steps outside the district’s office, and ended with those same teachers becoming angry, tired and frustrated at having to wait six hours to present their proposal to the board.
As of 9:30 am, BART is still reporting a total shutdown of service between Oakland and San Franciso due to an early morning building fire that broke out at a senior housing center near the station which caused track damage. The agency states that it hopes to have single track service running between the two cities by the afternoon, and in the meantime urged passengers to take other forms of transit to work including ferry, casual carpool or bus service….
What would you do right now to prepare a children’s hospital or pediatric ward for an earthquake? This was the question posed by conference organizers to the health professionals and emergency center managers who attended the California Neonatal/Pediatric Disaster Coalition Conference in downtown Oakland last week to review strategies to improve emergency preparedness procedures for neonatal and pediatric patients.
Loved ones and acquaintances attended an event in honor of the late Brandy Martell on Friday in Oakland. Martell, a 37-year-old transgender woman, was killed in downtown Oakland on April 30. Witnesses said she sitting in her car parked at the corner of Franklin and 13th Streets when an unknown suspect shot her repeatedly through the partially open window. While members of the public have raised concerns that this was a hate crime, the Oakland Police Department is still investigating the case.