1/ Stick with this thread to the end.

Friday in Hartford a young woman named Solmary Cruz nervously handed me a slip of paper with a neatly written list of changes she wants.

"You promise you're going to read it?" she asked in a weak but purposeful voice.

2/ Written in red pen, she meticulously outlines the steps she thinks will make her Hartford neighborhood safer.

At the top of the paper are her topics:

"*increase patrols and walking
*programs for youth
*stolen car issue
*gun laws
*profiling"

3/ One section is about the need to integrate kids from different neighborhoods. She explains how many homicides are about grudges between blocks or neighborhoods that kids inherit. Meeting the kids they are taught to hate might break the cycle of violence, Solmary writes.

4/ Her paper is comprehensive, thoughtful, and nuanced.

Which is stunning, bc 2 weeks earlier, Solmary was in a car with her three young kids when another car pulled up alongside and a gunman started firing in to the car.

Moments later, her 3 year old son, Randell, was dead.

5/ It's hard to explain or comprehend the trauma of something like this. The impact on her two girls, ages 4 and 5, who witnessed the shooting, has been extraordinary - that story is too private to share, but suffice it to say the girls are reeling.

This is Solmary, on the left.

6/ And the violence may not be over. The target of the shooting survived, and later that same day, a 16 year old was shot blocks away in a connected killing.

A local pastor told me that parents in the neighborhood won't let their young kids leave the house now.

7/ But the real gut punch of her letter came at the end.

"What have YOU done to better this situation?" she writes.

8/ In the next two months, Congress will debate measures to deal with America's epidemic of gun violence.

And the answer to Solmary's question cannot be NOTHING.

I will do my part. But I beg of you - do yours too. Become part of this movement. Before this happens again.