6-Year-Old Goes Viral On Facebook With Anti-Gun Violence Plea: 'I'm Really Scared To Die'
This 6-year-old St. Louis boy has a powerful message about gun violence —"all these people out here that are killing each other need to stop."
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This article originally appeared on People.
A 6-year-old St. Louis boy has gone viral on Facebook with an emotional anti-violence message.
“People need to stop killing each other because this is just making me feel bad,” Jeffrey Laney said in a video posted by his mother last week, which has so far been seen by more than 160,000 people and shared more than 6,000 times.
Jeffrey’s mother, Leanndra Cheatham, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that her son, who is in kindergarten, wanted to pass along his message because he was afraid of becoming a victim.
“He listens to everything around him and watches the news, and there’s not a lot of good things on there,” she said.
Cheatham said she videotaped her son after the death of her 17-year-old cousin, who was killed in a drive-by shooting last month.
“I don’t want nothing to happen to all my family, and I’m really serious because I’m really scared to die and I’m really scared for my family to die,” Jeffrey says in the four-minute-and-20-second video.
“I’m not supposed to know about all these guns,” Jeffrey says. “I know about all bad stuff. I’m supposed to be learning about school.”
“People need to stop killing each other,” he adds. “We are supposed to be happy and loving each other.”
Cheatham, who works at the St. Louis Justice Center, told the Post-Dispatch that she cut her son’s video short because she didn’t want people to hear her crying in the background.
I was hurt,” she said, “but proud.”