This columnist is talking about the person who came upon the murder, but my point is, this girl was killed for absolutely no reason whatsoever except the shooter could. While we bemoan the beheading of Americans caught up in the world stage that is Iraq, do we need to go overseas to face a type of terrorism that exists here?
These kids had not done anything to anybody except stopped at a light before merging onto a freeway to go home.
Diana Griego Erwin: Touched again by horrific violence, Sacramentan issues a challenge
By Diana Griego Erwin -- Bee Columnist
Published 2:15 am PDT Sunday, July 4, 2004
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Violence was part of Roz Myers' growing up years, one girl among seven brothers in a rough section of St. Louis.
"I have seen (people shot) and watched them die before help arrived. My family has been the victim of gun violence and death by guns," she said. "You never get used to it. But on the flip side, we learned ... to (not) engage in activities that put you in danger. You learn to change the odds of risk."
Myers' family moved in the 1970s to Sacramento, then considered quieter, safer, calmer. That was three decades ago, and much has changed. Myers knows it. She reads the paper. She hears about violent crime and, even though it is way down nationwide, the odds of risk are still at work.
She didn't expect them to reach into her world, though. Not now. Not last Sunday.
It was her moonlighting job cleaning rentals to send her teen son to the Junior Olympics that had Myers - who works for the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing by day - in midtown Sacramento after midnight June 27. As she started getting on Highway 99 south at N Street, a car in her lane stopped. Two back-seat passengers piled out.
She braked abruptly to avoid hitting an hysterical young man running toward her car. He shouted for her to call 911; that his girlfriend had been shot. Myers hit her emergency flashers and ran to the other car, dialing 911 as she did.
"It was horrific. There was this gorgeous young woman slumped over from the driver's side of the car into the arm of the male passenger. There was blood everywhere. ... I reached in to take her pulse. I could not feel one."
The driver was Marissa Ann Flores Krog, 26, who worked with developmentally disabled children.
Myers turned her attention to the two young men running around the onramp trying to get other cars to stop. None did.
They frantically called family but were too distraught to dial properly, Myers said. She called their parents instead.
"I was trying not to say what had actually happened, but the young woman's father got on the line and demanded to know what was going on. So, I had to tell him that his daughter had been shot and that his son was holding her until the paramedics came." Get here as soon as possible, she said.
In the front seat, Krog's younger brother was "clutching her, rocking her, begging her to hold on and asking God why."
The young men with the victim knew she was gone before the emergency crews arrived. Myers, a mother and grandmother, held the young men, prayed with them and sang to them to give them some comfort - all on an onramp to Highway 99.
That was the mother in her, the comforter. Now she is angry.
"I really have not slept well. It has been replaying in my dreams. I have not cried yet, but I want to so badly.
"I am so angry with these predator-type people; the senseless taking of life. I am also angry with ... Sacramento citizens who would not stop to lend a helping hand in an emergency. What if it was them or their child (who) was the victim?"
Myers wants to start something. She is challenging the shooter to turn his life around and others to get involved with challenged youth and make a difference; to help a child or struggling family, all of these acts that can change the odds of risk.
"You can't move away from crime and poverty," you have to get involved in change, she said. "You can't move away from the problem as we did in the '70s and not expect it to catch up with you or your children or your grandchildren."
