By Rev. Ray Williams

For the many mothers who have lost a child to street violence, justice moves at a snail’s pace.

The savage snatching of their sons and daughters has much of the same horror of an unsolved kidnapping: this is the anguish that parents like Carol Jones experience every day.

Every gunshot heard in the neighborhood; every siren wailing past their window; the telephone ringing at an awkward hour — all combine to create anxiety as these wounded women await that word of closure, that the “killer has been caught.”

Patrick Scott, the affable, playful, 27-year-old disabled man, who ambled about like a child half of his years, has been gone now nearly four years, and police and investigating authorities do not appear to be any closer to solving the brutal crime than they were on Feb. 3, 2018.

On that day, Scott was ripped from his mother’s embrace as she hurriedly tried to drive his bullet-ridden body to Oakland’s Children’s Hospital, holding on to a thread of life.

The classic Bible character Isaiah asked, “How long, Lord, how long?” Carol Jones joins other brooding mothers in echoing Isaiah’s plea, “Lord, how long?”

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