For years, Minneapolis anti-violence activist KG Wilson has consoled grieving families as they said their final goodbyes to loved ones taken by violence.
This time, they had his back.
His mother, Anita Echols, had a heart attack and lapsed into a coma, and by the time Wilson's phone rang with the news last week, doctors at the Chicago hospital where she was taken had already delivered a grim prognosis: She had days, if not hours, to live.
The trouble was that Wilson, the youngest of her three surviving sons, was hundreds of miles away in Minneapolis, with no money to fly home and a fierce winter storm bearing down on the region.
Wilson posted a frantic message on his Facebook page later that night. Others did too, including V.J. Smith, founder of the violence prevention group MAD DADS and former cop turned community organizer Lisa Clemons, soliciting donations to buy Wilson a bus ticket down to Chicago and to help cover some of his meals.
"The next day V.J. called me and said that they had some help for me. And Lisa said that she had help for me. And then some other people called me to say that they had help for me. Next thing you know, I had a ticket," Wilson said.
MAD DADS gave $100, as did Clemons' group, A Mother's Love. Others from Wilson's past also chipped in, or offered condolences and prayers, including Marsha Mayes, whose 3-year-old son Terrell was killed by a stray bullet that pierced the walls of his North Side home on the day after Christmas in 2011. Like he has for dozens of other victims of gun violence, Wilson stood beside Mayes at a vigil mourning her son. Despite a $60,000 reward, the case remains unsolved seven years later.
"How could you not take his pain away when he was out here taking so many other people's pain away?" said Clemons, who along with Wilson was part of a group that patrolled downtown streets to try to end street violence.
