Shneaqua Purvis in front of Tompkins Houses, the public housing project in Brooklyn where her sister was shot to death in their family home in 2002. Joel Arbaje for The Trace
By Laura Esposito, the Trace, September 7, 2023
Shneaqua Purvis grew up to the sound of gunfire. As kids in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, in the 1980s and ’90s, she and her sisters would all duck their heads and crawl under the kitchen table when the shooting started. Their first-floor apartment was next to an alley so crime-ridden it was dubbed “Death Lane” by residents of Tompkins Houses, the public housing complex where they lived.
A few days after Christmas, in 2002, Purvis walked the six familiar Brooklyn blocks between her apartment and Tompkins, toting lamb chops in one arm and her 5-month-old daughter, Shaniya, in the other. She’d moved out of her family home a few years earlier, but she frequently returned to cook for her mother and four younger sisters. Her favorite was Maisha, a sports fanatic who, at 28, was two years her junior.
On that sunny afternoon, Purvis arrived at her old home and handed her baby off to Maisha, who retreated into her room to watch a football game with Purvis’s then-husband. Purvis thought she was used to the sound of shooting, but a shot rang out that sounded like nothing she had ever heard before. It was louder, like a firecracker, she said. Closer. She stood up from her crouched position under the table, screamed for her baby, and went to her sister’s room, where Maisha was last holding Shaniya.
Comments (0)