Victoria Noe

Award-winning Author, Speaker, Activist

blogpage

Blog

Hadiya Pendleton

Watching Your Best Friend Die

Watching Your Best Friend Die
May 07, 2013 by Victoria Noe

npr.org I wasn’t going to write about Hadiya Pendleton. I live in Chicago and frankly, there are too damn many Hadiya Pendletons: young people murdered for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.   Sunday’s Chicago Tribune carried a front page article about Hadiya’s closest girlfriends. They’re typical kids, teenagers, whose lives will never be the same: both for their close friendships with Hadiya and the horrible death they witnessed.   The shots detonate like firecrackers – boom boom boom boom boom – and the friends, a dozen of them altogether, run.   The girl named Danetria does not run well. She is out of breath, struggling to keep up, when, ahead of her, she sees one of her friends fall,...