Churchill: When Albany children lie down to sleep – Times Union

ALBANY — The bullet entered the daycare on a winter day, traveling through one classroom and into another.

Thank God it was nap time. Thank God the children under Demetris Barrett’s care were laying low. Because if they had been standing? If they had been playing?

Barrett doesn’t want to think about what might have happened.

Infinite Care, as her center is called, is on Quail Street in Albany’s West Hill neighborhood. The bullet that entered her building and threatened the safety of her children was intended for Anthony Malloy, a 35-year-old father of three who died from a spray of bullets on that January day in 2018.

Across town, in a different section of Albany, a bullet entered another daycare last week, only this time a child was hit and hurt.

Two guys were walking up Third Avenue in the South End on Friday when other young males, wearing masks, jumped out of a car and opened fire. It reads like something out of a movie, but the scene was unfortunately real.

The first pair ran and the second group followed, with guns blazing. One bullet entered the daycare, traveled through a closet and hit a three-year-old boy in the arm as he lay sleeping. It feels like a miracle that he wasn’t more seriously heart.

This happened in the middle of the day. In a crowded city neighborhood. The idiots with guns didn’t care. They have no respect for life.

“This outrageous act put an entire neighborhood at risk,” said Police Chief Eric Hawkins, who was clearly and rightly angered by the shooting. “We have a child that was simply sleeping in a bed that was a victim here — and there could’ve been many others.”

Those who don’t know the neighborhood sometimes characterize the South End as a misbegotten wasteland, but that isn’t accurate. Around Third and Elizabeth, where the shooting happened, there’s a playground and a community garden. There are churches and daycares. There is vitality.

But it’s also a neighborhood where violence is too common, and where a napping toddler was put in danger because of troublemakers with too many guns and not enough common sense.

Is there anything more precious and beautiful than a sleeping child? Any parent would say no. To have that peace, that sweetness, interrupted by a bullet is awful. And heartbreaking.

On Quail, Barrett heard the news and sympathized. She also knows the difficulty of protecting children in a neighborhood with too many dangers. The outside of her building, where a mural declares that “knowledge is power,” is pockmarked by bullet holes.

“We try to keep them safe, but we have circumstances that make that hard,” said Barrett, who opened the business 13 years ago. “We cannot control what happens outside.”

Shootings are down significantly in Albany so far this year, but you wouldn’t know it on Quail in West Hill. There was one there just last week, on Monday, within a block of Barrett’s business.

What can be done to stop the madness?

Barrett would like to see a bigger police presence on her street. The children under her care act up less when they know somebody is watching, she said, and the same applies to those who hang around outside.

More cops on the city’s most dangerous blocks would help, certainly. But the city is not a daycare, and police can’t be everywhere. And so the solution is bigger than anything the police alone can achieve.

It means ensuring that three-year-old boys from troubled city neighborhoods don’t grow up to join the war on the streets. It means fathers who take the responsibility seriously and schools were children actually learn. It means jobs and opportunity instead of poverty and despair.

On Wednesday, Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul was in Albany to tout projects happening in the Clinton Square section of downtown, near the Palace Theater. “This city is on the cusp of greatness,” Hochul said.

I get what she means. Albany is a fine and underrated place, and it’s getting better all the time.

But this city can’t really be great until toddlers in West Hill and the South End take naps without threat from stray bullets. It won’t be great until children in poor neighborhoods have the chances in life granted to kids with money.

Until those things are true in all its cities, America won’t be great either.

cchurchill@timesunion.com ■ 518-454-5442 ■ @chris_churchill