Editorial: Keep asking questions about school violence

“No child should ever go to school and never come home.”

Terra Campbell is absolutely right. She knows that better than anyone.

Her son, Marquis, was shot and killed as he sat in a school van outside Oliver Citywide Academy on Jan. 19, 2022.

On Thursday, Eugene Watson was sentenced for the shooting. Today, Watson is 19 because he has gotten to grow up and become a legal adult in the two years since he walked up to the van, talked briefly to the driver, pulled a revolver and fired it twice through the window.

It didn’t take long for Marquis to die. It took a year for Watson and his brother, Brandon, to be charged. Brandon was 16 at the time of the killing and adjudicated as a juvenile. Watson was 17 and charged as an adult. He pleaded guilty in October.

The three teens had fights in the fall of 2021. Watson’s parents told the judge about the kid with friends and faith as a little boy who struggled later with violence.

Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Edward J. Borkowski listened. He also listened to the mother grieving a child who will never grow up. He gave Watson a sentence of 20 to 40 years in prison.

It is a case rife with questions. How do things unravel to the point that a kid can get shot sitting outside his own school? How do kids having fights — the kind of thing that can happen in any schoolyard or any hallway — end in a kid losing his life?

But more importantly than what happened in 2021 and 2022, there is what happens this year and the years to come. How will schools intervene to stop violence growing between students? What can we do to diffuse tension before it explodes in gunfire? How do we keep our kids safe everywhere, every day, but especially in school?

These aren’t new questions. They’ve been asked too often amid small personal conflicts like the one that ended Marquis’ life and violent bombshell events like a mass casualty school shooting.

Until there are answers, the questions have to be asked over and over again. Because Terra Campbell is absolutely right.

No child should ever go to to school and never come home.