Nza-Ari Khepra vividly remembers the day her friend Hadiya Pendleton was shot and killed in a park on Chicago’s south side.
On 29 January 2013, just after school let out, Khepra was upset, complaining about something that – in retrospect – didn’t “even matter”.
“[Hadiya] saw me in the hallway and said … ‘What’s up?’” said Khepra, 19. “It was just like a passing greeting. [But] she noticed at that moment that I wasn’t my happiest. Of course, I smiled back … but she saw through that all. Not only did she see through it, but she also made sure to stay there and talk to me.”
That moment, Khepra said, perfectly illustrated Hadiya’s personality. A couple of hours later, she was dead.
A week before, the 15-year-old had performed as a drum majorette at Barack Obama’s second presidential inauguration.
“She was just such a vibrant, beautiful soul,” Khepra said. “She made sure that everybody around her always felt comfortable and happy … she was dedicated to making sure her friends were living life happily.”
Following Hadiya’s death, her friends started meeting to discuss the effects of gun violence. The meetings sparked Project Orange Tree – a gun violence awareness campaign. At events, Khepra said, “we asked everybody to wear orange.”
The symbolism is potent. Hunters wear orange, Khepra said, to show “they’re not the target and not to shoot at them”. By wearing orange, the group was saying “we didn’t want to be the next victims of Chicago’s gun violence”.
On Thursday, which would have been Hadiya’s 19th birthday, cities across the US are commemorating her life in a second annual National Gun Violence Awareness Day. Chicago is the centerpiece of nearly 200 events; nationally, buildings and monuments including the Empire State building and Niagara Falls have been bathed in orange light.
The rapid attention gained by Project Orange Tree shows “people are ready” for change, said Khepra, who is now a junior at Columbia University, studying economics.
“It means the world to me to know that … we have so many people in support of this movement,” she said. “We need the support in order to execute, in order to make a change, in order to make people want to make a change.”
Thursday’s events come amid a sharp rise in gun violence across Chicago. Over Memorial Day weekend, at least 60 people were shot. Six died. As of Tuesday, roughly 1,500 people have been shot in the city this year, according to the Chicago Tribune, up from about 950 this time in 2015. Fatal shootings have increased in that timeframe from 164 to at least 250.
Khepra said the level of violence “shows that we have to continue to work” to raise awareness. About 500 people attended last year’s rally in Chicago, she said, where Hadiya’s parents sang Happy Birthday with the crowd.
“Today is an especially hard day because Hadiya would’ve been 18 years old,” Cleo Pendleton, Hadiya’s mother, said then. “She would’ve been ready to graduate … she would’ve been excited to go to college.”
Khepra said watching the Wear Orange campaign grow into a national event had been a remarkable experience.
“I’m just in awe of it all,” she said. “I’m just really thankful that so many other people are helping. It’s definitely greater than anything I could ever do.
“It’s breathtaking. I’m sure it’s a step in the right direction.”
