PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — "I’m Erica McClellan's mother. I lost my daughter to a single gunshot wound to the left side of her chest."
"My son was Ryan Dillon. He was shot four times."
"My son’s name was Nasir Gredic. He was 20 years old."
The three mothers who spoke these pain-filled words on the east side of City Hall on Wednesday are part of a non-profit group called "Mothers Bonded By Grief."
They are calling on Philadelphia leaders to align their priorities to curtail the record number of shootings and murders, including two more in Philadelphia on Wednesday.
The first occurred just before 11 a.m. near 28th Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue, where a 37-year-old woman was shot in the head. The other happened at about 6:30 p.m. on Fairmount Avenue in the Poplar neighborhood, where a 29-year-old man was shot several times before dying minutes later.
With the homicide toll now above 420 victims, Philadelphia is on pace to reach 1,000 people killed in two years.
Organizer Johndell Gredic, Nasir's mother, said her son was one of those victims. He was fatally shot in the back while trying to break up a fight.
"When he turned around to walk away, the guy shot him in his back and in his butt," Gredic said.
Gredic and her fellow group members didn't just speak at City Hall. She and the other families stood with signs and pictures of the children they lost to bullets over the last few years, all in different neighborhoods, with different stories.
"You’re not supposed to bury your child," Gredic exclaimed.
"We are grieving mothers, but we are not just grieving mothers. We formed a sisterhood, where if one of us is having a bad day, we can lean on each other, any time of the day, for anything."
The group wants the mayor, district attorney, and police commissioner to cooperate with urgency in slowing the bloodshed.
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"They kept saying they know where the high crime areas are, OK, so put the cameras out there. They kept promising they were going to put more police on the street...they still didn't do that. Nobody is safe. It's sad. It's sad," Gredic said.
"I know what I went through and some mothers and fathers are not strong enough to deal with this kind of pain, and just like having a child, there’s no script with losing a child."
As Gredic also added, "it’s costing our children their lives."