Jermaine Knox, 37, a youth football coach in Cincinnati, was gunned down outside the College Hill Recreation Facility on Tuesday night according to reports.
It is unclear what led to the shooting. But practice had just concluded when someone opened fire with a gun. Knox died at the scene, and another man was wounded in the leg and was taken to a hospital. None of the children were injured.
But they witnessed their coach being murdered.
At a memorial service on Wednesday many local community members gathered to pay their respects and honor the coach.
“He’s going to be truly missed,” a mourner told WLWT. “Good man. I can’t say anything bad about him because he didn’t have a bad bone, and he had a good heart.”
Knox was affectionately known as “King Maine,” and hundreds of people turned out with many offering kind words.
“If you knew Maine, you knew he loved every last one of these kids,” another mourner shared with the outlet. “There isn’t anything he wouldn’t do for anyone.”
Another person shared their memory of Knox: “The one thing about Jermaine, he loved this team with his heart and soul. I only got one wish for the Trojan Black organization: to keep it going the same way he would.”
Cincinnati police say the investigation is ongoing and at this time they do not have any suspects. They urged members of the community with information to come forward.
In July gunshots stopped a Little League Baseball game in Wilson, North Carolina.
Not even two months after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 students dead.
In August Yaqub Salik Talib, the brother of former All-Pro cornerback Aqib Talib, turned himself in to authorities after police identified him as the suspect in the shooting death of youth football coach Michael Hickmon, 43, in Lancaster, Texas.
In September, Joe Pastrana, the defensive coordinator at Vallejo High School in California, was shot in the hip while breaking up a fight at the end of the school day.
By Oct. 21, 35,785 people in the United States have died due to gun violence, according to Gun Violence Archive. Another 31,900 people have been injured as a result of gun violence.
It seems no matter how many times stories like this come up, nothing changes. Politicians turn gun violence into a partisan issue when the safety of citizens should be of paramount importance.
Polling data indicates almost three-quarters of Americans think that gun violence is a big or moderately big problem.
Among all economically developed nations, the United States is No. 1 in all gun related deaths by a wide margin. Major point of difference? Gun laws in the other countries are far more restrictive.
You like to think that at some point this will all come to a point where the politicians and people in charge will follow the will of the people and do what is right. But gunshots ring out daily and their sounds fall on deaf ears.
