The sanctity of a public square is often measured by the safety of those who walk its streets, but on a tragic Monday afternoon on Fifth Street, that sanctity was shattered by the cold, indiscriminate reach of gun violence. At approximately 5:30 p.m., a time when the golden light of the late afternoon usually signals the transition from the workday to the peace of home, the air was instead filled with the sharp, mechanical staccato of gunfire. When the echoes finally faded, a twenty-year-old woman named Mariana Gómez lay mortally wounded, an innocent casualty of a conflict that had nothing...
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