No one is safe just for existing: remembering Sakia Gunn

This is an opinion piece produced as part of the 2025 Citizen Journalism class by Jennah Cherry Romain titled “No one is safe just for existing: remembering Sakia Gunn.”

A memorial to Sakia Gunn painted by muralist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh stretches across a wall at McCarter Highway in Newark. Photo by Jennah Cherry-Romain.

In 2003, Sakia Gunn was walking home in Newark with her friends when a man pulled up, made advances, and did not like the answer he got. She said no. He stabbed her in the chest.

She did not survive.

She was only 15.

More than 20 years later, I still think about how easy it is for a girl to lose her life over something like that. Saying no. Walking away. Existing in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong person nearby. 

Sakia was murdered for doing nothing other than being herself. That is what sticks with me most. She did not fight. She did not provoke. She just lived, and that was enough for someone to take her away.

People like to believe the world has changed since 2003. That girls are safer now. That Newark has moved on. But any girl who has ever walked past Penn Station at night with her hood up and heart racing, or stood at a bus stop on Clinton Avenue pretending to be on the phone just to avoid being seen, knows the truth. We are still learning how to survive in a world that was never built with our safety in mind.

We still deal with the stares, the comments, the threats. We still get followed. We still get blamed when we do not “say no the right way” or “should have known better.” We are told to carry pepper spray, share our locations, keep keys between our fingers, avoid eye contact, walk fast and trust no one. We do all of that. And still, some of us do not make it back home.

Recently, Newark lost Kayla Tutt, a 16-year-old girl full of life and promise. On Friday, June 27, 2025 she was shot multiple times in what police described as a domestic violence incident on Huntington Terrace in the South Ward. Officers found her critically wounded and rushed her to University Hospital for emergency surgery. She fought for her life, but despite the effort to save her, she did not make it. Days later, she was pronounced dead. The suspect, 18-year-old Amir Sanderson was arrested and charged with purposeful murder. Kayla was robbed of her future, her dreams, and everything she had yet to become.

While the arrest of her shooter may bring some sense of justice, it cannot undo the trauma or erase the loss. Newark is grieving again because this pain never truly goes away.

Right now, people are lighting candles, posting memories, and holding vigils. Kayla’s family is devastated, and her friends are trying to process the unthinkable. Girls across the city, especially Black girls, are reminded of how fragile their safety can be, even in their own neighborhoods.

The violence is at times loud. Headlines. 911 calls. Funerals. Other times, it whispers quietly, the man on the bus who gets too close, footsteps behind you at night, or a teacher who ignores boys making girls uncomfortable in class. It does not always leave bruises, but it always leaves something.

People say, “It’s not all men.” But we never claimed it was. What we’re saying is that it could be any man, and we never know which one until it’s too late. That is the fear we carry. That is what it feels like growing up where safety is never promised, but a gamble we live with every day.

When I think of Sakia, I think of girls like her. Girls like Kayla. Girls who laugh loud and feel free with their friends. Girls who just want to be left alone when they walk to the store. Girls who want to say no without fearing for their lives. Girls who grow up learning to shrink themselves, to walk fast, keep their heads down, and text “made it home” after every night out.

We carry fear like it is part of being born, a heavy cost, the price of being a girl in Newark.

Sakia should still be here.

Kayla should still be here.

Both should have had the chance to grow old. To explore their futures. To figure things out. To fall in love. To fail. To rise. To just live. Instead, their names become hashtags. Their lives become lessons. Their deaths become statistics.

The views expressed in this article express those of the writer alone and not necessarily those of Public Square Amplified.