STOCKTON, Calif. — In a violent weekend, Stockton saw three separate shooting incidents in three days. Five people in total were shot, two of them were killed.
"I've been around it, I've seen kids get shot. It takes its toll," said William Lattimore, a Stockton resident who's worked as a youth violence prevention activist for 40 years.
Jh'amani Edmond, 16, was shot and killed at an apartment complex on Palisades Drive Sunday night, making him the 11th victim of homicide in Stockton.
It happened hours after a 36-year-old man and his 10-year-old daughter were shot through the window of their El Dorado Street apartment. A relative said they were recovering from their injuries after a hospital stay.
Those two events followed a deadly double shooting Friday morning at South Stockton's Ernie Shropshire Park. The 18-year-old woman killed in that shooting has been identified as Kaitlyn Valdovinos.
"The guns, the knives, the violence, the trouble, the drugs and so on and so on. So what do our children do? Because they’re not really getting the attention they need, they’re not getting the training that they need, they run to those things," Lattimore said.
Despite the violent weekend, this year's 11 homicides so far compares with 17 at this point in 2023, according to Stockton Police Department data.
"That's not enough progress at all," Lattimore said. "It seems like we're doing the same thing; we just might be doing it slower."
