It was in those early days of searching for her 15-year-old daughter that the red cardinals, signifying a visitation by a deceased loved one, began to pass across the front window of the mother’s car.
“Every morning,” Saleemah Graham-Fleming said. “And I knew what red birds meant, but it was like – no, this can’t be.”
Twenty-four days after she reported her daughter missing in April 2021, Graham-Fleming walked into a mother’s nightmare – worse even. Her pain still, she said, five years after the death of Sanaa Amenhotep, is indescribable.
“I could say devastating, but that just hits a fraction of it,” Graham-Fleming said. “I could say life changing, but that’s just a morsel of it. It’s world shifting, but that’s just a corner of it. The whole of it is in this experience that I wouldn’t wish on the devil.”
Sanaa’s body was found in a makeshift grave in Lexington County. She had been shot, from what coroners could count, 14 times by a gun with extended magazines – a detail that will stick with Graham-Fleming forever, she said.
Sanaa was known to be sweet. Graham-Fleming even nicknamed her “Cakie” at a young age. She loved her younger sisters. She loved Dej Loaf. She loved music and people, her mother said.
You never think you or your family will be a victim of gun violence, Graham-Fleming said.
“I am a person who has college degrees,” she said. “I am a well-versed person. I rub elbows with just about everybody. I am a part of a sorority. I am considered a middle-class person. And I’m not the kind of person who is negligent to my children academically. And it happened to me.”
Police, prosecutors and a jury said three teens killed her.
Sanaa had considered one of the teens her close friend.
“She didn’t believe in treating people as less than,” Graham-Fleming said, describing her daughter as loyal and kind. “We raised her that way. We raised her to advocate for the underdog. We just didn’t know it would cost her her life to do it.”
How a mother survives
The 15-year-old had plans of completing high school and going to cosmetology school, her mother said.
“She wanted to do a lot of things,” Graham-Fleming said. But most of all, she wanted to help people.
And through her mother, now, Sanaa does.
That first Christmas without Sanaa, Graham-Fleming received a gift basket from Moms Demand Action, a nonprofit that advocates for gun safety in America.
“When I came downstairs to get it, there were about three or four moms, and I said, ‘Yeah, I gotta stay connected to this because this is how I’m gonna survive,’” Graham-Fleming said.
Moms Demand Action Midlands leader Patty Tuttle and other Columbia moms – like Roberta Mckelvin, who lost her son, Nate, due to gun violence in 2013 – became Graham-Fleming’s lifeline.
“We advocate for common-sense gun laws,” Tuttle said. “We support the 2nd Amendment. However, keeping firearms away from people who are not authorized to have them and requiring gun owners to responsibly store their firearms will save lives.”
Gun violence kills 120 people in the country every day and costs America $500 billion each year, Tuttle said.
Most of the Moms Demand Action volunteers have experienced gun violence firsthand.
“Unfortunately, this type of advocacy is not very successful in South Carolina,” Tuttle said. “The majority of our current legislators have shown they are more likely to make it easier for everyone to access guns.”
So, the group is starting to focus on other tactics to get its point across, Tuttle said.
Avoiding ‘blanket panic’
Both Moms Demand Action and Graham-Fleming speak highly of the work that the Richland County Sheriff’s Department has done to help curb youth violence and access to firearms.
But even the sheriff’s department needs help sometimes, Lt. Terrance Acox said.
The department’s 2025 crime report also acknowledges the need for parental support in youth programs, especially as the summertime approaches.
“They have all day to be home by themselves and run the streets without supervision,” Acox said. “Because there is no parent at home, because they’re either at work or out doing Lord knows what, there is no supervision of the kid.”
Pinpointing the causal factors of youth gun violence can be difficult. But advocates and the sheriff’s department both agree on one thing – parents need to be more involved.
“We’re in a world now where things have evolved and kids aren’t growing up the way that I did,” said Acox, who was born in 1969.
Kids would never bring guns to school then, Acox said.
“For a lot of kids now, it’s all about identity–being a certain person that they can’t be or that they want to be or portray to be,” Acox said.
Social media also should be regulated by parents in some form, Acox said.
University of South Carolina race and media assistant professor Jabari Evans said social media does play a role in youth gun violence.
But, he said, “social media does not create violence out of thin air.”
Instead, it intensifies visibility, speeds up conflict and makes interpersonal tensions more public, more permanent and more difficult to defuse, Evans said.
“That is why I think the real conversation should be about guidance and accountability rather than blanket panic,” Evans said. “Children and adolescents need support in learning how to interpret what they consume.”
Similarly, Acox said the programs Richland County deputies offer are only helpful if parents are involved.
“To see your child’s or your kid’s progress, you have to have skin in the game, too,” Acox said. “Until our parents realize that, we’re going to continue to have gun violence, we’re going to continue to have these kids out there trying to find love in the streets instead of at home.”
This story was filed as part of an editorial partnership between South Carolina Public Radio and the University of South Carolina’s Carolina News and Reporter. You can learn more about the Carolina News and Reporter here.
