School Board member leads a crusade to end youth violence

NORFOLK

Billy Cook’s cell phone rang around 7 p.m. on June 6, a Friday .

He and his wife were resting in their Chesterfield Heights home after taking their 14-year-old son, Calvert, to a tuxedo-fitting for an eighth-grade dance.

Cal had gone off to play basketball with a friend, but the caller ID showed that he was calling now. Sharon Cook groaned and hit the mute.

The phone rang again. Again it was Cal’s number.

Sharon answered. The voice on the other end was not her son’s.

“Ms. Cook, you’ve got to come out here,” a girl said. “Cal got shot.”

Questions flooded Sharon’s mind: Where is he shot? Is he bleeding? Is he hurting? Is he conscious? Who shot him? Why would somebody shoot him?

Billy Cook’s military training kicked in. He felt like he needed to save a soldier on the battlefield.

Cook is an Army lieutenant colonel, an instructor at the Joint Forces Staff College and a member of the Norfolk School Board. Sharon teaches English at Maury High School.

Too often, they recognize the names of victims or assailants in Norfolk crimes – kids Sharon taught in Norfolk schools or Cook drove to church years before.

“These children are our children,” Cook said. “They’re good children. They are children who make mistakes.”

The death of a 20-year-old man named Dakota Wood was one of the first to hit home.

City workers discovered his body floating in a retention pond in October 2006. Cook learned the identity from the 5 o’clock news, and it stopped him cold.

Wood had been in a fifth- grade class he’d taught at then-Bowling Park Elementary years earlier.

Cook still remembered the quiet boy with the beautiful smile. He and Sharon had given Wood and his siblings rides to church. “I just thought, 'How?’” Cook said. “Who would hurt this kid?”

There were others.

From Sharon’s time teaching at Lafayette-Winona Middle School , she knew Derrick Ellis, a 15-year-old boy who was shot in the head while standing outside his home in Olde Huntersville in June 2005. “Short kid,” she remembered. “Cute as a button.”

Ronald Marcus, who was fatally shot at 26 in May 2005, was a former student of Sharon’s at Northside Middle School. “A very funny kid,” she said. “Life of the party.”

One of the men convicted in Marcus’ murder, Dontae Ebron, was also a former student of Sharon’s and classmate of their eldest son. When he attended Lafayette-Winona, Ebron played basketball, volleyball and wrestled. He was smart. He was witty. His mother attended parent conferences.

“Dontae could have easily gone to U.Va. or Virginia Tech,” Sharon said. “To know he was involved in that, like what happened ?”

Each time Cook heard about another shooting, beating or murder, he e-mailed messages to nearly 100 people. Sometimes he gave media interviews, calling for action from principals, pastors and community leaders – even local sports leagues. “We’ve got to put our arms around our kids,” Cook said, “even the ones who are acting a fool.”

The Cooks’ brick house, with its white-trimmed porch and Virginia Tech flag, sits near the middle of Marlboro Avenue, a block away from the Elizabeth R iver, a little farther from Grandy Village, a public housing community. On any given day at the Cooks’, teenage boys hang around or a friend might drop by.

This is where Cook grew up.

He was born in Baltimore, the fourth of seven children. His family moved to Norfolk while he was a baby, and he lived in Diggs Town and Navy housing before moving to Marlboro Avenue at the age of 6.

Now 45, Cook remembers riding his bike all over town, to Berkley, Campostella, even as far as Norview.

His father was in the Navy. His mother, Jessie Cook, was a licensed practical nurse. She stressed the value of giving and an obligation to serve, Cook said. His parents were foster parents, so there were always extra people to take care of. “If it was a baby, we had to watch the baby,” Cook said. “If it was an older couple, we had to watch them.”

He met his future wife, Sharon Davidson , when they were students at Norfolk high schools. Sharon’s mother had taught Cook’s two older brothers in middle school. Her father was a football coach at Booker T. Washington High School. She has a brother and a sister , and her parents often welcomed students into their home .

“We were just used to having kids,” Sharon, 43, said. “It was kind of like in our blood.”

Cook enlisted in the Army in 1980 and earned a bachelor’s degree from Virginia Tech in 1985. He has worked as an elementary school teacher, a counselor for troubled teens and a youth pastor. Sharon attended Virginia Tech with him but received a bachelor’s degree from Kansas State University in 1988.

They have four children: B.J., 21, a senior mass communications major at Norfolk State University; Courtney, 19, a sophomore dance and choreography major at Virginia Commonwealth University; Cal, 14, a freshman at Booker T. Washington ; and Micah, 10, a fifth-grader at Chesterfield Academy.

They’ve helped raise other children, too.

In the late 1990s, the Cooks invited four teenagers to live with them. Two of the girls had babies of their own. At one point, the dining room served as a makeshift bedroom, said Quiana Claiborne, now 30.

“If she could take every child that needed a home, she would,” Claiborne said of Sharon, whom she calls “Ron.” “We would tell her, 'OK, Ron, you can’t save the world.’”

After the Marlboro Avenue house fell into disrepair, Cook cleaned it up and bought it from his father. In 2003, the family moved there from Virginia Beach. Neighbors still remembered Cook’s mother, and people gravitated to his front porch, just like when he was a child. Cook became civic league president and made a habit of cleaning up litter on the corner of Ballentine Boulevard and Westmin ster Avenue .

He called his college friend’s sister, City Councilwoman Daun Hester, and asked for something to do in the community. She recommended him for the city’s library board, then for the School Board.

Anthony Burfoot, Norfolk’s vice mayor, attended high school with Cook: “Billy is one of those guys that hasn’t forgotten where he came from.”

About a year ago, the Cooks’ youngest child, Micah, was playing at a park after a trip to the zoo. Some kids came up to him as he drank from a water fountain: “Are you for the Bloods or the Crips?”

“I’m not for nobody,” Micah said.

His brother Cal, a soft-spoken teen, has a similar response when approached by gang members. “I just tell them I’m my own person,” he said. “You can’t let people run over you.”

Cook and his wife try to watch their children and keep track of their friends. They hold family meetings and one-on-one conversations with their kids. According to Cal, his parents’ advice on safety is straightforward: “They say just stay away from trouble, really.”

But it hasn’t been that simple.

Troy Wilkins was one of the kids who hung out on their porch, so quiet that Sharon always asked if he was OK. He didn’t curse or leave litter, and he was there the day Cook stopped his yardwork to lecture Cal and his friends about making good choices.

Three months later, Troy was arrested in connection with the murder of Dominic Young, a 15-year-old boy who was shot last November in a restaurant robbery as he tried to protect his mother.

After that, Cook started looking at the other kids a little differently: “Could they be involved in something like that?”

On Jan. 11, while walking home from a neighborhood birthday party around 8 p.m., Cal and a friend were stopped by a car full of men. They pointed guns and patted down their victims. They stole $15, shoes and a jacket.

Cal burst into the house, fighting tears. “Why do they mess with little kids?” he demanded of his mother.

His parents didn’t have an answer.

Sharon thought about moving away, to Suffolk or Fredericksburg. “Then there’s that other part that says, 'Why do I have to leave? Why do I have to uproot?’” she said. “It’s not fair.”

They bought Cal a cell phone, even though his older siblings hadn’t received one until high school.

Cook also did a lot of praying, asking God, “how can I work in the community if I can’t protect my own home?”

He sent an e-mail message, stating his intent to resign from the School Board to focus on his family. City leaders weredisappointed. They see Cook as passionate, urgent, intense and vocal. He is also the only black man on the seven-member board.

“Unless we do something differently, we’re losing a generation,” School Board member Stephen Tonelson said. “He is doing everything in his power to, in fact, keep that from happening.”

Sharon persuaded Cook to stay on the board.

“These kids need you,” she told her husband. “It’s not just about us. It’s bigger than us.”

The call in June about Cal’s shooting came from his new cell phone.

When his parents arrived at Grandy Village, they saw crime scene tape and the flashing lights of police cars. An ambulance. So many people. Blood splatters on the pavement.

“Is that my child’s blood?” Sharon asked.

They spotted Cal on a porch with his leg wrapped and propped up. Sharon stopped at the crime tape. Cook kept going. His heart was racing, but he knew he had to be calm. It all felt so surreal.

“Dad,” Cal said, “are you mad at me?”

Cook rode with his son in the ambulance.

Back in Grandy Village, the mothers consoled and prayed with Sharon, who had rushed out of the house barefoot. She looked out at the crowd, wondering whether the shooter was there.

“Why?” she asked. “Help me understand why. Because it’s senseless. This has got to stop.”

Cal spent the weekend in the hospital with a hole in his right leg, near the ankle. He didn’t want to fall asleep because he was scared he wouldn’t wake up.

Cal told police that he heard gunfire from a blue station wagon as he and his friend walked to the basketball court. Cal and his friend ran , he said, but a bullet caught him.

“I felt my bone move,” Cal said. “I saw blood squirting out like a water fountain.”

He worried most about whether his injury would ruin his dream of becoming a professional football player.

Classmates, teachers and coaches brought cards and video games. O thers asked questions that Cook and Sharon found disturbing: Where do you live? Who does your son hang out with? Is he in a gang?

The investigating officer wrote on the incident report, “Victim does not belong to any gang nor was he wearing any colors.” Still, the Cooks caught the implicit meaning: What did you do or not do to allow this to happen?

They visited Cal at school. They attended his football games. They looked at his MySpace page. The bedroom he shares with Micah doesn’t even have a door.

“What could we have done different?” Sharon asked her husband.

This time, Cook didn’t consider stepping down from the School Board. Cal’s experience fueled his determination.

“The only way to protect my son and all of us that live here is do something about crime in all of our communities,” Cook wrote in an e-mail. “My son represents all of the children that I serve and have served in this community.”

This fall, fear of violence forced Norfolk high schools to move three night football games to the daytime for security reasons. The City Council ordered the city manager to coordinate efforts to work on gang issues. And school officials heightened security at Maury High School.

In a news conference this month, Hester called for Norfolk parents and business owners to join in a grass-roots effort to create a healthy community.

Cook stood silently amid a cadre of civic league presidents as the cameras whirred. “I’m just glad to see other people who are expressing what I expressed in their own words,” he said.

At Maury, Sharon continues to hold private conversations with students who throw gang signs, encouraging them to make better choices.

Within weeks of Cal’s shooting, she ran into a former student whose leg was amputated because of damage from bullets. “All I could do was hold his mom,” she said. “I know that pain.”

The bullet was removed from Cal’s leg on Aug. 22, and he played for Booker T. Washington ’s junior varsity football team in the fall.

He described the shooting as a wake-up call.

“People that think they’ve been through a lot, they haven’t been through nothing, really,” Cal said. “I’m just glad I can walk again.”

No arrests have been made in either crime.

Cook believes his family’s faith carried them through the year. He’s unsure what the future will bring. Now that he’s close to mandatory retirement from the military, he is considering a post in Europe.

If Cook stays, he plans to continue to participate in Norfolk’s campaign against youth violence. Some have questioned whether Cook, as a School Board member, could do more to combat youth violence; others say he has done as much as one person can.

On a Saturday afternoon in July, he spoke at a rally in The Gallery at Military Circle mall. As he paced a stage in the food court , sweating under the lights , Cook spoke of the struggle.

“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired of reading in the newspaper about our young African American boys either being killed or killing somebody over something stupid,” Cook said.

The audience looked up with curiosity from hamburgers and Cokes. They watched as he furrowed his brow and pointed his finger.

He listed the names of the children who had been shot or killed, pointing to Cal, who sat quietly eating french fries. Cook described the funerals he’d attended, including the one for Derrius Walton, a former Lake Taylor High School football player, who was fatally shot in Arizona, where he was in college. The Cooks had helped his sister care for a baby. “As we were getting in our cars after the funeral … several young men take out their guns and started firing in the air at the funeral,” Cook said. “And then one guy at the funeral goes to his car, gets a gun, and goes after him.”

“Can y’all see why I’m sick and tired?”

Amy Jeter, (757) 446-2730, amy.jeter@pilotonline.com