City, police, nonprofits unite to interrupt gun violence

LORAIN — It is late October, and Lori Flanigan's Elyria home is bustling with friends and family. A dog barks every time a cousin, nephew, sister or brother comes in through the kitchen where pans sizzle and a ceiling fan whirls overhead on a warm afternoon. Mylar balloons bounce lazily against the ceiling when not in the clutches of a small child running through the living room to chase after a dog or relative. It is loud and vibrant — everything Lori Flanigan describes her son, Jordan Flanigan, 24, as before he was shot to death last year. The night he died, Lori Flanigan's phone buzzed with texts almost immediately — what she was certain at first must be a terrible joke. Jordan Flanigan had been hanging out with a friend at Midview Crossing that night, his mother knew. So she hurried there. "For the longest time, I didn't believe it was my son on the ground because those weren't his shoes," Lori Flanigan recalled. "He didn't have on a pair of black tennis shoes. So I sat there and I waited … and when they picked him up to put him in the (body) bag, his arm fell and I knew the jacket. I knew that was my child." Jordan Flanigan died in Elyria on Oct. 27, 2022. Henry C. Spooner, 21, was indicted in January on three counts of murder with with specifications, two counts of felonious assault, having weapons under disability, tampering with evidence and improperly handling firearms in a motor vehicle in connection with Jordan Flanigan's death. His trial will start in the coming year. Brothers Antwon Nathanuel President, 22, and Nathanuel Antwon President, 15, were also charged in connection with Jordan Flanigan's death. Some of the young men charged in connection to her son's death had stayed on his couch, and went to school with her youngest, Justin, Lori Flanigan said. And now her family is left with a hole that will never be filled because of a disagreement. "If these kids understood in the streets that this wasn't a game, (guns) aren't toys, things might be better," she said. "But it takes a community to solve the problem that we have going on." Jordan Flanigan's death resonated with the people who loved him and also sparked conversations among strangers he would never meet. In the days after his death, Elyria and Lorain officials hosted a town hall meeting announcing the cities were seeking a $2 million grant to create a violence interrupter program, hoping to resolve conflicts before those involved pull the trigger. In early 2023 the program, through the Lorain County Urban League, received $600,000 to pilot the initiative in Elyria: $200,000 from the Nord Family Foundation and $400,000 from the state. Rational choice Angela Lee, program manager for the Urban League's Serving Our Streets initiative, said her new position is just formalizing work she had done in Cleveland for years. "It's been in my veins," she said, sitting in a conference room on the second floor of LCUL's offices off Middle Avenue. "... My kids would always tell me 'Mom, you can't save the world.' Well, I can do one kid at a time." For Lee, it is about changing the norm — seeing the path students are going down and keeping them from going to the juvenile detention home, or jail, she said. It isn't just a violence issue, it is a mental health one. Damian Calvert will oversee Elyria's three violence interrupters, acting as the bridge between those outreach workers and local law enforcement and city officials. It's a role he held in Cleveland for close to a decade. But before that, he served 18 years in prison for murder — giving him an understanding of the path those young men and women are headed down, and what can happen if outreach programs like the Urban League's do not reach them in time. Since he was released, he has rebuilt his life while reaching out to youths in Cleveland before accepting the position in Elyria. While working at Cleveland Metropolitan School District's John F. Kennedy High School, he said a teen texted him that he was at a girl's house off Buckeye and there were men outside ready to shoot him. "He said I got my pipe on me — my pistol — but I ain't trying to go there," Calvert said. "I said, say less, I'm on my way and I came and I got him." Calvert picked the boy up on the condition he left the gun in Calvert's car to be turned in to the police. "He trusted me enough for a lifeline. He thought in terms of consequences — like I can be bold and go out there and shoot them up but the fallout, you have to live (with) your consequences," Calvert said. "So he made a rational choice, he called me." That rational choice came from a relationship Calvert had built, he said. The violence interrupters in Elyria will do the same thing, while Calvert keeps lines of communication open with Elyria Police. The target audience for Elyria's pilot program will be teens and young adults, ages 14-24, Lee said. In Cleveland, the work was reframed as a public health issue, Calvert said, former Mayor Frank Jackson recognizing the correlation between economically depressed and blighted areas of the city and high violence rates. The public health approach is also the direction Elyria will take. The peacemakers The violence interrupter program is far from the first effort in Northeast Ohio to address gun violence and the young men and women lost to it. Cleveland's Peacemakers Alliance has been doing the work for more than a decade. Myesha Watkins leads the organization out of a hole-in-the-wall office at MetroHealth's Buckeye Health Center. She said that what started with about a dozen trained violence interrupters when she took over the group in 2020 has dwindled to six due to funding losses. Entirely grant-funded, the effort looks to reach younger teens and children before they pick up a gun or deter those already in the streets from making life-altering decisions. "One life lost is too much," Watkins said. "And oftentimes we talk about this city having high community violence and this city does not, but one life lost in any city is a problem. So looking at it from a regional approach of how do we create a widespread knowledge of language and resources that can reduce community violence regionally — from Cleveland to Lorain." Workers meet with young men in hospital beds, or with family members gathering outside of crime scene tape. They show up in schools, at parks, wherever they are needed to address community violence, she said. The work is done in Central, St. Clair-Superior, Glenville, and the Lee-Miles neighborhoods. There are no set hours, and information comes in through social media and phone calls, informal and formal channels overlapping in a call for help Watkins' staff responds to. Outreach workers meet patients admitted at Cleveland's two Level I trauma hospitals — MetroHealth and University Hospitals Main Campus — with gunshot wounds. While one worker counsels the gunshot victim and their families, another goes to the scene of the shooting, often trying to de-escalate bystanders or calm down family members when their loved one has been killed. They drive family members to the hospital, call city council members, call the coroner, call funeral homes, offer food, parking vouchers, grief support — anything to address the needs in that immediate crisis, Watkins said. Outreach worker Andre Taylor has been on every side of the issue. Growing up on Cleveland's east side, he started selling drugs at 12 and 13 years old in Hough and Wade Park. He saw the pimps, the pushers and drug dealers and wanted more, he said. He has been on both sides of the gun. Shot twice, once in 1989 and again in 1990. "Couldn't nobody tell me nothing at my age at that time because of what I was seeing," he said. "All the older guys, when I was younger, they was using drugs because the crack epidemic was at its height at the time. So when I was 17, 18, all the guys 21, 22 was users … so why would I respect you if you a drug user and then I'm out here as a 17-year-old and I'm selling drugs. … They buying drugs from me, so you belittling yourself." He did not see a future for himself, he said, living day by day and expecting to be dead by the time he was 21. Instead, he spent 22 years in prison on a murder charge, eventually mentoring the sons of men and women from the neighborhoods he had grown up in. Once released, he formalized that work, continuing to give back to a community he once harmed. "I look at our city and I see how (broken) our city is with the violence and no solution for it. I feel like me being from the streets and well-respected in the streets, I can make a change," Taylor said. "A lot of times your peers, older guys, the OGs, people look down on our youth, they turn their back on them … I feel like it's who they learn from. If they don't have no guidance, nobody to teach them, show them a better way, it's not going to be helped, the problem can't be solved." When a shooting happens in Cleveland, Taylor is one of the first on the scene, looking for family members and trying to keep everyone calm. Meanwhile, fellow outreach worker Maryum Patterson is at the hospital acting as a liaison between medical staff and family. Oftentimes Patterson helps identify patients brought in with gunshot wounds and no ID, she said, helping staff at MetroHealth or University Hospitals contact next of kin. She remembered working a scene with Taylor where a man had been shot and family and friends started showing up to the scene, panicked and half-dressed. She put a call out on social media, asking for sweatpants, shoes, coats and blankets — and got an overwhelming response. "That's something that never happened before with us. But us working together we got through it," she said. "Like you don't have training for this stuff, there's no handbook to follow. Just think of it as you and me, think of it as yourself — how would you want someone to show up for you?" The ultimate goal is to work themselves out of a job, Watkins said, but in the interim, they'll take the small wins — the triggers that aren't pulled in anger or retaliation, the young people who aren't put in handcuffs for a split-second decision. "Part of community violence intervention work is we're a complement to law enforcement," she said. "Our roles are different, our responsibilities are different, our relationship to community is different. But we know that in order for us to do this work, it's going to take all of us." For Watkins, success is often measured by others in blood — how many people were shot, how many killed? But what she focuses on is the life-saving measures — how many graduations, how many people are employed, how many are housed? A 'Ministry of presence' Cleveland is more than six times the size of Elyria, with gun violence a near-daily occurrence in some neighborhoods. But the approach between Cleveland and Elyria will be similar once Elyria's group is up and running. Both are based on the Cure Violence model, used in Baltimore, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia. "There's stark difference between Cleveland and Elyria in terms of scale of violence, but here we have a great opportunity for a serious investment in the prevention aspect. Because one shooting is too much, right?" Damian Calvert said. Calvert and Angela Lee agree it is also about a "ministry of presence" within schools. Success will be measured in the absence of sirens and crime tape, a lack of shootings and violence in the city as well as an increase in students sitting at their desks in school, rather than a detention home, Lee said. "I think we'll have a good start in that after Christmas vacation we've still got these winter months. When it's cold, they're more apt to either be at home or in school or be somewhere stationary," Calvert said. "So we have this opportunity while there's less movement to kind of practice that ministry of presence piece with the hope that by the time the weather breaks that rapport has been established and there's some trust." Bridging the gap Sitting in his office in November, Elyria Police Chief William Pelko said a new approach is a step in the right direction. "What we're doing isn't working," he admitted. The Elyria Police Department has just under 80 officers, but for 2024 it is budgeted for 90. At one time it had designated officers out in the community. But years of budget cuts and staff shortages ended the program, and the rift between residents and officers grew wider. And Elyria Police, like other departments, has a problem with getting people to talk during investigations, Pelko said. He said he hopes the violence interrupter program could help bridge that gap, but he recognized that interrupters are not obligated to turn things over to police. "They have to have a good relationship with the community," he said. "But it's going to be interesting to see how it all plays out." It is work his officers have tried to do informally, he said, often reaching out to family members of victims to urge them to let the justice system handle their loved one's case, rather than take matters into their own hands. Now Calvert will be that conduit between the interrupters and a designated officer — allowing the Urban League's outreach workers to maintain trust within the community rather than be seen as an arm of the police department. "It's just that disconnect that we have sometimes the victim's families just don't want to talk to the police for whatever reason. I don't know if it's a culture thing but we're trying to bridge that gap," Pelko said. Retaliation still happens, he said, even if those involved do not call the police to report it. "I don't know if we'll ever get over that hurdle," he said. "But we can try." Hope for change Lori Flanigan is the first to admit, her third-oldest child was no angel. She remembers him as the young man who stopped to help a stranger get his car out of a ditch, the child who stole her car while she was asleep to pick up his cousin, the one who went to a friend's apartment to kill a mouse for her late at night. He was the family clown, making everyone laugh, always quick to volunteer to babysit his nieces and nephews. "He's always been the one that kept me on my toes," she said with a laugh. "... But when it comes to his family he was always there for us, no matter what we went through. He cared." Now he's a memory Lori Flanigan shares with his daughter, Khloe. The 4-year-old is quick to tell people she gets her looks from her daddy. The child walks around her grandmother's house in a shirt that pictures her with her father. In the image, Jordan Flanigan is carefully painting Khloe's nails. Lori Flanigan knows her family's loss is permanent. What she hopes to see now in her city is change. A bullet does not have a name on it, Lori Flanigan said, and there is no coming back from pulling the trigger. "It's not going to come to an end until the community is willing to step up and take a stand and help try to end this," she said. You keep your mouth closed, you see something in the street and you don't say nothing. You just bite your tongue and keep on walking. "We need people to speak up for the community. The community needs to step up … they're too afraid to step up and say anything, they're afraid there's going to be backlash." Contact Carissa Woytach at (440) 329-7245 or cwoytach@chroniclet.com.