When 41-year-old Trelisa McCray saw dozens of shell casings scattered across a shooting scene on Thursday night, she understood why her son had not been answering his phone.
“There’s too many shell casings out here. You can’t tell me my baby didn’t get hit,” she would recall saying.
McCray is a member of an anti-gun and violence-prevention group called Mother’s Love, and for eight years she has gone from crime scene to crime scene in her home city of Minneapolis.
“More than I can count,” she told The Daily Beast. “We de-escalate the crowd and comfort families.”
On Thursday night, she started at a parking lot off Knox Avenue, where a 16-year-old had been fatally shot. The officers at the scene then received a report of four people shot on Broadway Avenue.
“The police just rushed outta here,” she recalled.
Her 24-year-old son spends time in that area, and she called his phone.
“It was a mother’s intuition,” she later said.
There was no reply.
“That’s not like my son not to answer the phone,” she noted.
Other family members began calling her son, whom she did not want named. But he had still not answered when she arrived at Broadway Avenue. That was when she saw the dozens of shell casings that she and law enforcement officials say were the sign of a growing threat on the streets of Minneapolis.
Over the past year, the city has witnessed an increased use of guns illegally converted from semi-automatic to fully automatic with the installation of a penny-size device called an auto sear. It is available for as little as $20 and known on the street as a “switch.”
A single pull of the trigger unleashes an entire magazine of 15 or sometimes 33 or even as many as 100 rounds. The Minneapolis police report that the use of what are essentially machine guns has increased 338 percent over the past year, with 1,799 bullets fired in 171 shootings as of July. Homicides in the city are up 18 percent over the previous three-year average.
“Too many people are getting handguns and they’re using switches,” McCray said.
The Minneapolis police and ATF are working to address the problem of the semi-automatic weapons converted to machine guns. A 25-year-old Minneapolis man was charged in federal court on Wednesday with using a 3-D printer to make auto sears in his home.
But the “switch“ shootings continue and the resulting deadly sprays often hit innocent bystanders. McCray felt sure on Thursday night that her son was among them.
“I can’t hardly breathe,” she recalled. “I’m gonna lose my mind.”
She was told that nobody with her son’s name had been taken by ambulance. But he was still not answering his phone, and she decided he may have taken some other form of transportation. She went to one hospital and was directed to another, which confirmed her son was there.
“When they said, ‘Yeah,’ I fell to my knees and started crying,” McCray remembered. “And I’m telling them, ‘I told y’all all my baby got hit. I told y’all there was too many casings out there.’ And they said he had to get rushed into surgery because he was shot in his chest.”
Her son was in surgery for at least four hours. She got no word on his condition until a surgeon emerged.
“The doctor came and said, ‘It’s a miracle that he's alive because where he got shot, people don’t survive those,’” she recalled.
She was allowed to see her son in the recovery room. He was in considerable pain. He told her that after the bullet felled him and he was sprawled on the ground, he had been visited by a cousin who had been shot to death in 2014.
“And I asked him, ‘What did she say?’” McCray recalled. “He said, ‘She kept telling me to go back.’ He said she gave him a hug.”
McCray later told The Daily Beast, “My son was dying. When he collapsed on that ground, he was dying, close to dead. But she came to him. So that was the angel that was watching over him when he got shot.”
He was left with firsthand knowledge that a bullet can come out of nowhere at any time and hit anyone. That included his mother. And he now became anxious if she was not back at the hospital right at 8 a.m. when visiting hours started.
“He worries,” McCray said. “And he doesn’t want the nurses doing anything until I’m there with him.”
On Tuesday, he noticed that McCray was not wearing false eyelashes, as she usually does.
“My son was like, ‘Mom, where your lashes at?’” she recalled. “I said, ‘I cried them off.’ He said, ‘Well, you done?’ I said, ‘I’m not getting done until you come home. As long as you’re in this hospital bed, I’m going to keep crying.’”
The police say the shooting remains an active investigation. They are also investigating the shooting of four people on Friday just down the street from where McCray’s son was nearly killed. A 34-year-old man died. The three wounded included two pregnant women, one 21, the other just 17.
McCray hopes her son will be home this Friday. She then will be able to stop crying and put on her trademark eyelashes. She will resume going from shooting scene to shooting scene, seeking to comfort others suffering trauma that she now knows all too well in a city of deadly weapons made deadlier.