Hickory Hill faced a spate of violence and tragedy recently, with a deadly shooting occuring earlier today and a fatal hit-and-run crash claiming the lives of three, among them a former MSCS teacher. According to Action News 5, police responded to a call on Hickory Cove just before 6:30 a.m. where they found a man shot who was pronounced dead at the scene; as of now, there's no information available on any suspect. Similarly, WREG reported that officers arrived a little before 6 a.m. in the 6000 block of Hickory Cove, to discover the victim, asking the public for any leads that could be reported to CrimeStoppers.
In conjunction with the shooting incident another sequence of despair unfolded after a former teacher, remembered fondly for her dedication to children, lost her life in an egregious hit-and-run crash, Lachell Boyd was her name and she was a beacon of light in her community and a cherished educator in Memphis-Shelby County Schools (MSCS), as a relative explained the loss and her character to FOX13 Memphis, "She was a great business-minded person. She loved kids. She was a teacher for so many years and was more of a born giver, not a receiver," and Dewayne Lewis, Boyd's cousin went on to share, "She loved her kids" after speaking on when they heard the devastating news of her passing, Memphis Police seeks to interview drivers of six vehicles seen leaving the site of the collision which also caused significant infrastructure damage including the downing of power lines.
The Hickory Hill area thus stands in the shadow of an all too common American narrative of gun violence and reckless endangerment, where names become statistics, and statistics become names yet onlookers sometimes become numb to the cycle of news of another shooting.
