It’s January 22, 2020. I’m working late and the newsroom scanner crackles. Multiple people shot at 3rd and Pine. It’s chaos when I get to the scene. The TV cameras are clustered around the yellow tape. I go the other direction, looking for the people on the edges, the ones nobody’s interviewing. A homeless man sitting against a building wall had watched the whole thing. He saw a woman die. He saw a child get shot. He told me everything, and his hands were still shaking.
Eight people were hit by gunfire that night. Tanya Jackson was killed. She was 50 years old. Seven others were wounded, including a 9-year-old boy who took a bullet in the femur while walking with his family after a trip to the Pacific Science Center.
It was a gang shootout. The two men responsible, Marquise Tolbert and William Tolliver, had 65 combined arrests and 35 combined convictions before they pulled the triggers…