On a recent afternoon, with the sun peaking in between the blinds, Shelia Mixon was in her living room, talking absently to a photo of her mother sitting in the corner.

In a moment of grief, she was wondering aloud to the photo if her brother, Corey Hardy, had found his way to their mother’s side in the afterlife.

As she was speaking, two red birds landed in the window and chirped incessantly at one another – Mixon said her mother always claimed that seeing a red bird meant that someone’s soul had come to pay you a visit.

“That made me feel so good,” Mixon said. “I knew they were together.”

On Jan. 20, 2018, Hardy was one of two people murdered in a brutal double homicide. It was the first homicide of 2018.

While traveling down County Road 7, a truck, driven by Christopher Gordon, flagged down Hardy, who was driving, and his friend – the two apparently knew the man, as they pulled over and waited for him to approach the vehicle.

When Gordon approached the vehicle, he shot the passenger in the chest and left him in the car – Hardy attempted to flee and was shot repeatedly in the back. When he finally fell to the ground, Gordon walked up and put another bullet in his head.

Afterwards, he set the vehicle Hardy had been driving on fire, burning the passenger’s body to little more than ash.

There would have been little to indicate what had happened that day if nearby hunters had not witnessed the whole thing – while a couple of hunters ran down Gordon’s vehicle, one of their wives noted the make and model of the vehicle and, most importantly, the fact that it carried a deep dent in one of its sides.

“Those witnesses were brave people,” Mixon said. “My family could never have done it without them.”

Mixon said police were able to locate the vehicle and, when they approached Gordon’s home, he extended his arms and admitted to killing both men apparently over a red duffle bag he had taken from the trunk – to date, the contents of that bag are still unknown.

Mixon remembers the preliminary hearing.

“Oh, that awful feeling of being in the same room with a murderer,” Mixon said, noting with frustration that the preliminary hearing is as far as the case as gone – to date, Gordon still sits in the county jail and has not had a formal trial.

Mixon, who lost her mother just over a year before her brother was murdered, noted the difference in losing someone naturally and having a loved one stolen by violence.

“No one deserves to be taken from their family,” Mixon said. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about it. It just did something to the family. At the first of the year, it’s a new time. It’s supposed to be a fresh start. You’re not supposed to be burying your loved one, but people just keep killing each other around here.”

Aside from having to give statements and file reports with the police, Mixon had to have a police escort to her brother’s funeral, for fear of additional violence, and explain to her children what happened to their uncle and assure them that, despite their fears, they were safe.

After reading about the first killing of 2019 – which took place on Jan. 8 when Alan Bishop exited his home to find his car in flames and was then allegedly shot to death by David Lewis – she felt she had to recall her family’s situation and call on the city to do something to end the plague of violence.

“My message today is stop the violence,” Mixon said. “We as a race have to stop killing each other. Guns are not the answer. I’m crying out to the city – think before you pick up a gun, that’s somebody’s child, father, sister or brother.”

Mixon noted that mild violence is a hallmark of youth – when she was young, children would have a skirmish and be friends within a couple of days – but murder can’t be recovered from, there is no way to make amends when someone has been killed, she said.

“These young people have got to find a different way,” Mixon said. “Violence is not the answer.”

Already, her son refuses to return to Selma because of the rampant violence and she has seen countless friends and neighbors abandon the city for safer spaces, but Mixon is holding out hope for her hometown.

“It’s going to get better,” Mixon said. “It’s got to. We can’t go through too much more.”