One Lexington responds to deadly mass shooting

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“And so we just want the community to know that our heart is with you.”

LEXINGTON, Ky. (ABC 36 NEWS NOW) — “We can’t have this senseless violence going on,” says Devine Carama, director of One Lexington.

Lexington Police are asking for the community’s help as the search continues for the suspect or suspects in a deadly mass shooting that claimed the life of one person and injured five others at El Cid Restaurant in Lexington.

The shooting happened in the early hours of Friday morning.

“And so we just want the community to know that our heart is with you. We have had the opportunity either through the one Lexington staff or our community partners to reach out to every single victim that was involved in that incident,” added Carama.

The shooting putting gun violence at the forefront once again, as homicide numbers remain at a low compared to a year ago.

“The progress is not something that we celebrate, but we do acknowledge it, right? Because it’s a metric of we’re doing the right things. We’re coming together as a community. We’ve addressed this issue that has affected so many families. And so of course, we, we acknowledge the progress that we’re seeing, but for us who are in this fight every single day, families are still being affected every single week,” also said Carama.

As One Lexington continues working with community partnerships to try to help victims and reduce gun violence in the city.

One Lexington’s mission is to coordinate, leverage and mobilize city government and community resources to reduce gun violence with youth and young adults ages 13 – 29 in the city of Lexington.

“We have a strategy, we brought over 50 community partners three years ago to create a plan to address gun violence. We gotta adhere to that plan, we gotta stick with it just because we have a spike here and there doesn’t mean we can abandon something that is taking months and months of building along with community members and just abandon it,” also says Carama.

Currently the city has seen nine homicides, last year we were sitting at around 14 this time. Carama adds that the city and their partners are working to provide a variety of resources for families impacted by gun violence.

“We have done everything from help families relocate. Maybe they lost a son in this home and, it’s hard for them to even walk in the same room or maybe, their lives are in danger and they need to, to move to another location. Sometimes it’s temporary housing. Sometimes it is connecting them to a faith community. A lot of times which we just got a request today from somebody that was affected by last week’s incident. We connect them with mental health resources, I’m struggling to sleep, I’m struggling to deal and so we connect them there. A lot of times there’s children in the home when these incidents happen or there’s children to these parents who’ve been affected by gun violence. And so we connect them to mentoring groups and we put a village around these kids,” also said Carama about the resources they can offer.

If you need any assistance from One Lexington you can contact them, at (859) 825-2255.

If you have any information regarding the shooting at El Cid, you can call police or contact Bluegrass Crime Stoppers at (859) 253-2020.





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