As Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson's candid letter on crime made the rounds this week, two of the hundreds of families impacted by gun violence read it for the first time.
"My mother is one of these statistics," Keith Lee said, reading the letter not far from the spot his mother was killed. "Truthfully it seems like more of the same old thing," he said.
His mother, 79-year-old Gloria Roque, was shot and killed in her living room in early November. A few days later and miles away, 15-year-old Mikel Phillips was gunned down on the basketball court outside Robert L. Thornton Elementary.
"There's been six or seven more since we put him in the ground, so I don't know if it's going to get better," Shamekia White, Phillips mother said.
In his letter to City Manager T.C. Broadnax, Mayor Johnson called the level of violent crime in Dallas "patently unacceptable," going on to demand a plan from Dallas Police to make the city safer.
"If we are going and asking hey we need cameras, hey we needs lights, we need it," White said "Without it, the crime happens."
White believes Dallas Police are in many cases doing the best they can and it's up to city leaders to do a better job supporting them.
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"It's good to talk about it but you have to be about and do what you say you are going to do," she said regarding Mayor Johnson's letter.
Keith Lee shares White's belief that real change has to begin at the neighborhood level, telling NBC 5 that Dallas Police have done a good job on his mother's case. But like that of White's son, his mother's murder remains unsolved.
"The United States is a violent society, that's just the truth of the matter," Lee said.
