The Shamoya McKenzie Foundation 2nd Annual Gala honoured Community Samaritans at the Eastwood Manor located in the Bronx.
Shamoya McKenzie was on top of the world as she left midday basketball practice on New Year’s Eve 2016. The 6-foot-2 middle-schooler had just learned she was moving up to the high school varsity and her mother had promised to buy her a new pair of sneakers and a new phone.
Mother and daughter chatted excitedly as they drove home through the narrow streets of Mount Vernon, New York. Before long, traffic slowed and a car cut them off. Then a guy got out and started shooting at a man down the block. “I heard the sound,” Nadine McKenzie recalled, “but I was able to drive off.” She pulled her aging Toyota Camry around the corner and glanced at her 13-year-old daughter, who was slumping toward her from the passenger’s seat.
McKenzie, an eighth-grader at Graham Elementary School, was taken to Montefiore Mount Vernon Hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
CEO Cynthia Turnquest-Jones of Tha Brown Urban Mother Partnership honoured by The Shamoya McKenzie Foundation with the “Community Humanitarian Award”. I spoke of the dash we live which is from brith to death. It is the dash poem I often read at funerals of boys who have been murdered but felt that it was appropriate to read now for those to adjust their dash… “So, when your eulogy is being read, With your life’s actions to rehash; Would you be proud of the things they say, About how you spent your dash?”
With Love,
Cynthia
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