“It began as an ordinary evening, preparing dinner…anticipating the gathering of loved ones around the dinner table. However, what unfolded that evening was anything but ordinary. An evening that would forever alter the course of my life.

My 34-year-old son, Shawn Moss, was not coming home for supper. On that fateful August evening in 2014, after hours filled with desperation, chasing ambulances, and searching for Shawn, I received the worst news a parent could ever hear. You see it in movies, a doctor comes in covered in blood and they're explaining things to a family, but this I knew was different because someone else was with the doctor - and it was the chaplain," recalled Moss.

“Your son is dead, and because it's a homicide, you can't see him.” They said.

You wonder how do you function? How do you move forward? How do I get up? How do I understand that Shawn won't come up the steps to look into my room to make sure I'm OK?

There was no denying Shawn. He was 6-foot-7, and his smile lit up the room without even saying anything. He knew when I was working through something, and he'd always come to me to say, 'There's nothing you can't do.” These words echoed my mind in the days, weeks, and months that followed Shawn's death, providing motivation to establish the SWAG Foundation in Shawn’s name.

“I had two choices. I could lay down and just accept what happened, depriving my other two sons of the love they deserved, or I could fight," she said, "I got up, and I began to fight. The statistics show that the Black and Brown community is the most highly affected community when it comes to gun violence – education and resources are two big factors. If we can't get education and resources to the community, nothing will change, we will always be the highest."