They come from all over the city to pay their respects, dropping off flowers, teddy bears, footballs and candles to remember a fallen son. That son, 15-year-old Palo Verde High School student Chris Privett, was shot dead on the sidewalk of Alta Drive near Pavilion Center Road on the early afternoon of February 15. Police continue to investigate how Privett and the alleged shooter, 16-year-old Gerald Davison, have become connected in this tragedy; two families are left shattered, and the suburban community of Summerlin is asking questions that may never be answered. And the roadside memorial to Privett, at the exact spot the teenager was shot, stands as a grim reminder to those who drive and walk past it of the violent times we seem to be living in today.
Of the four .22-caliber shots fired, one hit Privett, striking him in the chest. One other hit a student’s backpack, and the other two impacted into the wall of a home and a cement wall, seen above.
Audiea and Caroline are two Palo Verde freshmen who walk home from school almost every day. Besides knowing both the victim and the alleged shooter, both say they are not afraid to walk down Alta and past the memorial, even though their parents are worried that another shooting may happen. But neither girl thinks the shootings had anything to do with skin color. “[The shooting] was not about race. They were trying to play a prank and it went bad,” Audiea says. “I knew the people who did it, and they weren’t racist towards any color. I’m friends with a few [of the people in the car]. They are cool people to be around.” Still, Caroline seems to be in shock over seeing people she knew entangled in this sad affair. “It didn’t seem like something they’d do,” she says.
Some people who stop at the memorial do so to pay homage to Privett and his family—like my own mother, who dropped a flower at the memorial shortly after the shooting. Others do so out of a sort of morbid curiosity. It’s understandable, with the shooting being one of the most high-profile criminal acts to shake the Summerlin community in some time. But Rajnie and her son and daughter, Mark and Kristin, stop by the memorial to pay homage to someone they lost that was close to them. “We know what it’s like to lose a son,” Rajnie says with an earnest yet protective look in her eyes. “I lost my son two years ago. You’ll never understand the pain they are going through.” But while the Summerlin resident isn’t entirely clear on the circumstances surrounding the shooting, it saddens her to think that this is the path that society has decided to choose. A society where guns, not fists or words, are used to settle scores. “Every day you hear in the news that there’s something going on in schools. It’s very sad,” she says. “I just don’t want to hear about it anymore. It’s just all bad news all the time.”
Friends and students Kyle, Cray, Tom and Jared are your average high-school students walking down Alta. But as they pass the roadside memorial they stop and take a breath and sigh. Kyle had known Privett since third grade, and Jared had shared a math class with Privett. While they can’t make sense of the violence, none of them really had any closer of a connection to the shooting than the Nottingham-born Tom, who was no more than 30 feet away walking home from school in the adjacent concrete wash when the shooting occurred. “Me and my friend were on the other side of this fence, and we were right down [in the wash], 30 feet away,” Tom says. “We heard the shots and ducked, but we dismissed it and thought it was a cap gun. But we saw the cops speeding by, and we realized someone had been shot, so we went and told the cops what we heard.”
The Privett memorial has been in place three weeks, but crowds still come to pay respects. The memorial’s ultimate fate will likely depend more on the weathering of time than the outpouring of sympathy from the Valley. The harsh winds will eventually cause the flowers to die and the candles to burn out, and the stuffed animals will eventually be taken by the family, donated or unfortunately stolen. But no matter how the ravages of time alter the landmark, it’s clear that at this small spot on Alta Drive, there will always be a place where two lives intersected, and a spontaneous symbol of grief was created.
Aaron Thompson is the Weekly’s calendar editor.
Photographs by Aaron Thompson