ALLEGHENY COUNTY — It’s a message spread across the sidewalk and from far away, it appears to just be a bunch of tennis shoes.
“Each pair of shoes represents our children; each mom designed their own design,” said Tina Ford.
There is a set for each child killed by gun violence across our area. Ford knows the pain all too well, as her 23-year-old son Armani Ford was shot and killed in Clairton in 2019.
That’s why she is working to bring attention to what she calls the problem by creating a growing memorial of shoes laid out in public.
“It’s sad, it really is because all those children who displayed shoes, they should be here. It was selfless crimes — they should all be here,” Ford said.
“You can see it I set it up as a visual and the way we set it up you can walk through the shoes, so you are just walking through the shoes reading the messages and one lady she started tearing up and looking at her son and the shoes,” Ford said.
Just this year, Allegheny County said 66 people were murdered. Ford told Channel 11 that number is too high. While she can’t change her son’s outcome, she wants to use his memory to show people and lawmakers that she won’t stop fighting until people put down their guns.
“We could just sit down and suffer in our grief, but I told the ladies we got to keep this going because the message for the shoes is where our children’s footprints end is where we begin,” Ford said.
Ford plans to continue bringing the shoes to events across the city, but she also hopes to get more parents involved who have lost their children to gun violence and take that memorial all the way to Harrisburg and Washington, D.C.
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