As gun fire increases in Mpls., women becoming more frequent targets
One Minneapolis shooting victim and her family began to notice the trend years ago
Haneefah King was walking from the bus stop to her mother’s south Minneapolis home one night in 2016 when her life changed forever.
King’s mother watched her three children some evenings while she worked at a Minneapolis bank.
"I did have my headphones on, and I was kind of, like, zoning out because it was a regular routine for me,” King recalled of the night she was shot. “But I just seen sparks, and that’s what made me pull them out. Then, before you knew it, ‘pop!’"
The bullet shattered King’s heel into pieces, she said. Unable to work for about one year, King’s family had to move back in with her mother near where she was shot.
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Minneapolis police reported 17 percent of the more than 650 people shot in the city last year were women. That’s up from a steady 14 to 15 percent in recent years, according to the department. It’s a similar story in St. Paul, where 20 percent of shooting victims were women in 2021, up from 17 percent in 2020, and 12 percent in 2019.
After five years, King describes the incident in a calm tone, but the now 42-year-old wife, mother and business owner still struggles with the traumatic experience.
After the shooting King became an aesthetician. With her business partner, a nurse, King opened Glo Skin Space about one year ago in Crystal, just outside Minneapolis.
The space is bright, pristine and calm. King said it was important for her to work for herself after the shooting and to be able to control her surroundings and schedule.
“Sometimes, even in public settings, it kind of trips me out, you know,” King said.
Support for victims
Incidentally, King’s sister, Pastor Jalilia Abdul-Brown was already working with victims of gun violence and their families when King was shot.
Abdul-Brown said that at that time her work centered mostly around men, who commit the bulk of shootings and make up most of the victims in the city.
Since watching her sister’s healing journey, Abdul-Brown has started a nonprofit, called Change Starts With Community, centered around women and gun violence. She’s organized community support groups at Shiloh Temple church in north Minneapolis, where she says hundreds of women, mostly Black women, have come to seek help.
“Most we have seen for the last three years have not been domestic violence. It’s been recreation, neighborhood violence,” Abdul-Brown said.
Sasha Cotton heads the Minneapolis Office of Violence Prevention.
She has noticed an increase in both women victims and perpetrators of gun violence since the start of the pandemic. Cotton says the uptick in violence requires investments beyond more law enforcement.
"It’s much harder to see how, like, having a really good after-school program keeps you from getting shot. But we know when we look at the data, they are deeply interconnected,” Cotton said.
Cotton added the city is working with Abdul-Brown and others who are properly trained to help people experiencing trauma to meet victims at their bedside in major area hospitals. Cotton said the city is also considering how to best use recovery aid from the federal government to provide more individualized care for victims.
Some crime victims, including King, are able to get their medical bills paid for by the state.
‘Impact is huge’
Abdul-Brown said there are still many additional costs that victims have to handle alone and the stress can be debilitating.
“Even though you take a bullet to your body, you also take it to your brain,” Abdul-Brown said.
Like with the vast majority of shooting victims in Minneapolis over recent years, King’s shooter has never been identified, which also adds to her trauma.
"Nothing ever happened,” King said. “I stayed on top of it for about a year.”
In a recent news conference addressing the last historic year of violence, interim Minneapolis police chief Amelia Huffman said shootings are some of the most challenging investigations because people with information are reluctant to come forward.
“There is a desire among people who are involved in group violence to settle disputes among themselves, not through official systems of government,” Huffman said.
While the police department does not break down women shooting victims by race, more than 80 percent of the city’s overall shooting victims in 2021 were Black. Abdul-Brown said many of the women shot are breadwinners.
"Sometimes they’re single mothers, and the social, emotional economic impact is huge,” Abdul-Brown said.
King believes that by continuing to care for herself through her healing journey, she can best help others.
"I feel like being shot has become common, but talking about and healing from it has not.”