Toledo Mayor Mike Bell announces a $5,000 reward for information in the shooting death of one-year-old Keondra Hooks. It's a shocking crime sparking outrage throughout the community.
The mayor spoke at a prayer vigil on Tuesday after visiting Keondra's two-year-old sister in the hospital who was injured in last week's shooting at Moody Manor Apartments in Central Toledo.
As police continue to search for suspects, Mayor Bell told the sisters' family and Moody Manor community that whoever shot those two little girls will be caught.
"We're going to do whatever we can to make this place safe, OK? We want you to be able to sleep at night," Mayor Bell reassured a group of kids at Moody Manor several days after gunmen shot and killed one-year-old Keondra Hooks and injured her two-year-old sister Leondra as the girls were asleep in the living room.
"Those babies, my kids play with those babies," says Donya Ramos who at Moody Manor. "We had just seen them hours before this. And it's sad."
Ramos, who lives next door and heard the shots fired at the home last Thursday, moved her own kids out.
"I took them to a relative's house," says Ramos. " A lot of stuff going on out here and I just don't feel they're safe here right now."
"We pray God that you will give them hope although they live in a hopeless condition," says one pastor in prayer.
On Tuesday Toledo area ministry leaders held a prayer vigil outside the unit where gunmen fired 12 shots late last Thursday night hitting the sleeping sisters inside.
"A worm has more courage than what they did, has more spine than what they did," says Deacon Zettie Williams of Family Baptist Church.
Williams is a former gang member calling for the community to unite.
"All these young men out here are not lost. It's just that somewhere the people that are in the same age bracket that I am, we dropped the ball somewhere," says Williams. "That's why these young men are out here in the streets. Nobody's out here teaching them what's right and what's wrong. They come from broken homes, the majority of them don't know who their father is."
Before the vigil, which was guarded with a heavy police presence, Mayor Bell visited Leondra who is recovering in the hospital.
"Seeing somebody that is so little and realizing the person that's actually dead was smaller than her, it's just so sad. But what I told her parents and I will tell you all here, we will catch them. But we need community help and will catch them," says Bell.
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