Lexington mothers of gun violence victims urge to put the guns down over the summer

LEXINGTON, Ky. (WTVQ) — It’s National Youth Violence Prevention Week and on Tuesday,  city leaders in Lexington joined mothers who have lost children to gun violence to share their pleas for a safer summer.

The city has seen four homicides so far this year, city leaders say Lexington has seen a 75% decrease in gun-related homicides among youths.

“I’ll never be able to have grandchildren, um, or see her get married. Um, you know, all those special moments, um, have been taken away from me,” says Priscilla Sandifer, who lost her daughter Amaya Taylor last May, the case remains unsolved.

Another mother, Deana Mullins lost her son Sean Howard in 2017, he was shot and killed in a car, the case went to trial during COVID, “there’s no justice in this. Whether you do get, whether you do get a sentence, whether you do get a guilty plea, whether you get life in prison, there’s no justice because whatever the jury decides or the judge decides my child is not going to walk back through that door.”

She adds that the pain of losing Sean is something she will continue to cope with, “my child’s not going to come home. So there’s no justice in it. You don’t ever feel like you have accomplish what you set out for when you start the court proceedings, there’s never a time frame that will ever amount to the time that I’ve lost with Sean.”

For Priscilla , the loss of her daughter is even more painful, with the case remaining open, she says when tragedy struck, her daughter, Amaya Taylor Sandifer was an innocent bystander dropping off a friend at a park.

“It angers me because I don’t have my daughter, you know, the reality of it is that, you know, my daughter is actually six feet under the ground. You know, she’s not at home. I can’t talk to her. I can’t call her. I’ll never see her smile again, she was so full of life,” she says.

Both mothers hope their message helps prevent another mother from losing a child.

“Our grief and kind of anger is, you know, a little different. It makes me more upset to know that, you know, somebody took my daughter’s life and she was not involved in whatever was going on,” said Sandifer.

Mullins adding that, “the bullet has no sense of race, age, sex, the bullet doesn’t see anything when it hits. It’s just a matter of you being there.”