Just before 9 a.m. on July 31st, a 25-year-old woman named Kimarii McLemore was shot and killed at the Parker Community Resource Center, a converted elementary school in East Oakland that now houses the district’s adult education program. She was there for a carpentry class. She was supposed to graduate that same day.

A second victim, also in their 20s, was shot and is expected to survive. Police say the shooting lasted up to a minute, which is a long time to stand somewhere when a gun is being repeatedly fired. Oakland’s new police chief, James Beere, called it “heartbreaking and tragic” and “a very intentional crime,” which is chief-speak for “we know this wasn’t random; we’re just not going to tell you why yet.” He says they have “good leads.” I’ve heard that before, and so have you, and so has every family in Oakland who’s been told the same thing while they wait for an arrest that may or may not ever come.

Here’s what makes this one worse than the usual gunfire-in-a-parking-lot story. McLemore’s aunt told reporters her niece had been trying to turn her life around. She’d enrolled in the carpentry program at the school and was about to walk across a stage and get a diploma to show for it.

According to her family, she told her mother that same morning she didn’t feel safe going to class because of a dispute with a man in the program. Nobody’s confirmed whether that man had anything to do with the shooting. But she said it out loud, hours before she was killed on that campus.

The Oakland Unified School District put out its statement about schools being “oases” of safety, which is the kind of sentence that sounds nice until you remember this district put out an almost identical one after a student was shot at Skyline High last fall.

Roots Community Health, which shares the building with the school, put out something with a little more spine to it, calling the place an anchor for a community that depends on it for “safety, resources, connection, healing, and support” and offering an actual phone number for anyone who needs it. One of those statements sounds like it came from a PR department. The other sounds like it came from people who were actually there.

This isn’t the first time gunfire has found its way onto an Oakland campus meant for adults trying to better themselves. Back in 2012, One Goh walked into Oikos University, a small nursing school a few miles from Parker, and killed seven students over a dispute about a tuition refund.

Goh spent years being ruled mentally incompetent before he finally pleaded no contest and got seven life sentences. He died in prison in 2019, having failed to serve a single one of them in full. I doubt anyone will ever accuse whoever did this of Goh’s particular flavor of paranoid delusion. Police are already saying it was targeted, not the work of someone spiraling in isolation. But the pattern holds up uncomfortably well. Adults who went back to school looking for a second chance were shot down by someone who apparently couldn’t stand to let them have one.

As of the time of this writing, no suspect, motive, or arrest has been announced. Just a family standing outside a converted elementary school telling reporters their daughter had finally gotten her life together and a police chief promising he’s confident they’ll get to the bottom of it.

I hope he’s right because we’ve heard that promise plenty of times before.

(Sources)

• Person killed, another injured in shooting on campus of East Oakland adult education center
• East Oakland School Shooting Leaves 1 Student Dead, Another Injured
• 1 dead, 1 injured after shooting on campus of adult school in Oakland
• Student killed, another person wounded at Oakland adult school
• Woman killed in shooting near Oakland Adult & Career Education Center