Editor’s note: The first piece is newly-written foreword by Shaka – a birthday present to himself – to the essay, “my Son, the 51sts Homicide,” to which members of the SSFC sliced, mixed, and put into an audio-visual format. In this post, you can read the foreword, watch/listen to the track, and read the full essay.
“21 Gun Salute to Jela Simba Shakur, also known as Mark Steven Lasenby”
Today, August 18, 2026, is the 25th anniversary of Jela’s passing over to the world of our ancestors. And in remembrance, i release the following.
It’s still raw, some 25 years later, and i spent the past 24 years in some form of captivity and incarceration.
This piece was written over a decade ago when I was in a lot of pain and dealing with a range of emotions. People said that i should change some words or alter the context, etc.
i can’t do that because it would detract from the realness and the rawness of the moment. People judge me but don’t know me. And they ain’t walked in my shoes.
Jela left me a beautiful daughter/granddaughter who graduated, went into the military for four years and was discharged, and is holding down a good job in the medical field while going to school. All the while, she is holding down the most important job of all for her that is motherhood, which now makes me a great grandfather.
As one transition, so shall another RISE.
The bloodline continues…
Peace
Free the Land!
Shaka A. Shakur
“my Son, the 51st Homicide
by Shaka A. Shakur
remixed by Tyrah Kingcade
This track is based off an essay wrote over a decade ago after losing his only biological son, Jela Simba Shakur, the day before Shaka’s birthday. Tyrah Kingcade remixed it into a song and other volunteers with the Shaka Shakur Freedom Campaign added images. The full essay is directly below!
“my Son, the 51st Homicide: An essay by Shaka A. Shakur”
This is Shaka Shakur. i originally wrote this piece, i started writing this piece in 2011, finished it in 2012. i didn’t update it because i figured it’d take away from the from the texture of the piece. But the piece is called “my Son, the 51st Homicide.”
It’s still raw. i would think that after 11 years, the pain, the memories, the sadness, the simmering rage, would have abated by now. It’s still raw. i would think that the daily bombardment of that day, that night, would stop its assault on my senses. It’s still raw.
i would think that the nightmares, the repeated replaying of that night, the what-ifs and the should-haves would have stopped by now, and yet it’s still raw. i would think by now the tears of sorrow, of sadness and rage, would have dried up by now. i would think that the thirst for justice, for vengeance, the thirst for just a peace of mind would have come to pass by now, and yet it’s still raw. i would think that after 11 years of being on the edge of madness, of 11 years of hanging off the ledge, the cliff of insanity by my fingertips, that i would have been able to claw and crawl my way back to a balance of mind. And yet it’s still raw.
i still remember that day like it was today or yesterday. my path to self-destruction. This— the day before my birthday on August 18th, 2001, my son and only biological child, Mark Steven Lasenby, also known as Jela Simba Shakur, was murdered by 2 shotgun blasts to the back— to the back by cowards. My son was the 51st homicide victim for that year in Gary, Indiana. Jela was killed over something as simple as a joke by someone he had been playing basketball and video games with all day, someone he thought was a friend.
After playfully joking with each other in front of a girl or girls and an argument ensuing, he was shot in the back while trying to walk away. Approximately 30 minutes before Jela was murdered, he called me on my cell and asked me to come pick him up. i could hear arguing in the background. i asked him was he okay, and he said, “yeah, just come to get me.” i told him i was on the way home to change clothes and would be to get him shortly.
He never let on that he was in any kind of, any kind of danger or the urgency of the matter. Pride wouldn’t allow him to. As i walked in the house about 20 or 30 minutes later, i was being handed the phone with his mother crying and saying into the phone, Markey has been shot, and in the next breath saying, shocker, he is gone, he is gone. While the friend and i raced to the scene, his mother’s words played in my head over and over. Shocker, he is gone.
And yet it didn’t register. Arriving on the scene, it was like an out-of-body experience, surreal. You had a huge crowd of 50 or 60 people. Mostly young people, police everywhere. And as i exited my vehicle and walked through, walked through into the front of the crowd looking for his mother, i found her, her brother, and his wife standing approximately 15 or 20 feet from my son, who was laying uncovered face down in a pool of blood, clearly dead on the ground.
my emotional reaction was delayed. i felt a tremendous loss. But i felt like he is gone. That’s not him. my mind was bombarded with a million thoughts, and as i gazed around the scene, taking in the laughing and smiling cops in various huddles, as i scanned the crowd’s violent faces, i walked up to a cop and asked to speak with the commanding officer, who came, and i asked if they could cover his body, and then i began to calm the crowd.
At crime scene, doing my own investigation. i knew more in 30 minutes about the murder of my son than the police knew in 6 months. As the emotions began to hit me as i sat on the curb all by myself, i had to leave the scene, drive the 10 blocks or so to his mother’s house, and remove the 2 assault rifles that had been placed in the trunk. i broke down, and it was at that point i not only declared war, i officially lost my way and my mind. my son, who most people knew.
my son, who most people knew him as Mickey, was killed in an area in Gary known as Glen Park. Glen Park is an area where civil wars have been raging for years, if not decades. A civil war where the body count and devastation is very high and have attracted— has attracted a heavy toll, extracted a heavy toll from its residents. You have a multitude of different factions engaged in urban guerrilla combat, either over simple beefs or the drug economy markets, or the never-ending cycle of violence, of attack/counterattack. In fact, for the last 15 years minimum, you have had one whole side of the city, East Side versus West Side, in about a 30 to 35 block radius, engaged in a protracted blood war that has taken countless lives.
Glen Park is very seductive to the unknown and untrained eye. You see block after block of nice middle-class or upper working-class homes with nice yards and nice schools. When i was a kid, Glen Park was where mostly white people lived, or Blacks fleeing the inner city of Gary. As more and more Blacks moved out to Glen Park, the whites pushed further out into Merrillville, where you better not get caught out in the dark because you was Black. Today in 2012, Glen Park is some of the most heavily patrolled and surveilled real estate in Gary, Indiana, by multi-jurisdictions such as the county police, the state police, various surrounding city police, plus the local Gary police.
This doesn’t even include the alphabet soup of feds— DEA, ATF, FBI, Multitask force, etc. That saturated— that saturated the area for various multi-agency and multi-jurisdictional task forces that conduct operations in the area. Glen Park is in fact a de-aided war, and despite all of the police and the violence and body count continues and remains a steady beat. A question: so what are all these police/security forces/shock troops for the state actually doing?
Whose interests are they really serving? Because it couldn’t possibly be the community if the body count and the casualty rate has either continued to rise or remained rock steady. Recently, We have witnessed several mass shootings, two of the most recent being Aurora, Colorado, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 18 babies and eight adults was gunned down in classrooms and hallways. A crime so outrageous and horrendous it caused the President of the United States to shed tears on national TV and sparked a national debate and conversation about guns and violence. And yet in the state of Illinois, it reached a homicide body count of 500.
In Philly, a body count of over 300, which is usually the story for most inner-city, urban, or ghetto areas, whatever euphemism you choose to use. My question is, who, who cries for the Black child other than the parents? Who feels the pain? Of the loss of the Black child. 500 fucking bodies in and around Chicago and no tears from the president, no national debate or conversation.
Is the pain from the mother of a Black child any less painful or hurtful? Is the tears from the father of a Black child, inner city child, urban child, any less real? i buried two sons, one 18 years old and his half-brother, 14 years old, both shot in the back five years apart. Both leaving girlfriends to raise newborn daughters. For the urban child, it’s doing society a favor.
For the suburban child, it’s a tragedy. The government talks about “stop the violence in Syria” and “bringing democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq,” and yet you can’t bring jobs to the ghetto. Civil wars rage amongst our kids, and there’s no peacekeepers, only grand weepers with a badge. No counselors for mental health or PTSD.
Y’all only intervention in the ghetto are gun buyback programs while others continue to arm. No foreign aid or Red Cross here, y’all. Only first responders in the booming funeral home industry as another casket dropping another kid. Our stuff. i’m screaming now, but y’all can’t hear me though.
Peace.