LINC remembers 15-year-old Terrell Bell, lost in gun violence

LINC Caring Communities Site Coordinator Bryan Geddes, left, leads a “Family Feud” game with Terrell Bell, wearing red shorts, at Smith-Hale Middle School in April 2019. Bell, 15, was slain by a gunshot June 8, 2021, in Sycamore Park in Ruskin Heights.

One more time, Terrell Bell came looking for LINC’s Bryan Geddes, “chipper as usual,” Geddes said.

How’s your summer treating you? What are your plans? Come see me!

That was Monday, June 7 — just a short conversation outside Geddes’s Ruskin High School office. They were going to talk again soon, same as they did back at Smith-Hale Middle School, where Geddes also serves as Caring Communities Coordinator, and where Terrell was one of the students who frequently took Geddes up on his offer to share lunch in his office. “Just to talk about life,” Geddes said.

But by mid-afternoon Tuesday, June 8, police responding to a report of a shooting found Terrell dying from a gunshot wound in nearby Sycamore Park. He was 15.

Now Kansas City’s struggle with gun violence bears down on the Hickman Mills School District community and on the many of the LINC staff and students Terrell knew.

Those casual lunches and the standing invitation to LINC’s open-door offices often became mentoring sessions — meaningful time together that now feels like it has slipped away.

“It’s disheartening, all this potential,” Geddes said. “He touched so many people. We all were rooting for him. You speak so much encouragement, breathe in the positive, so many great things into him, and his life was cut short.”

The violence that strikes Kansas City-area neighborhoods presses deeply in LINC’s Caring Communities. Children lose parents and older siblings. And too often children are wounded or slain.

In the past three years, Center Elementary School LINC student Brian Bartlett, 8, died when a gunman fired into his house in August 2019.

Jazmine Hall, 7, a LINC Caring Communities student at Holliday Montessori, survived a shooting that killed her older brother, Zavien Hall, 17, when gunfire erupted in an argument later that same month.

Dominic Young Jr., 9, a third grader at Ingels Elementary in the Hickman Mills School District, was killed by a stray bullet in the middle of a rolling gun battle between two vehicles in January 2018.

Demonte Walker, 15, a youth in LINC’s transition program for foster children preparing for independent living, was killed with his friend Jeremiah Stewart, 16, by gunfire in June 2018.

Terrell Bell was tall and strong, a football player at Ruskin High School. Now a sophomore, he had already graduated from LINC’s program, which goes through the ninth grade. But he frequently came by to visit the LINC staff he’d known since elementary school.

“He always loved his LINC people,” said Jene Counts, the LINC Caring Communities Coordinator who was in charge of Terrell’s LINC program at the now-closed Symington Elementary School.

“He had a lot of support from his teachers and his LINC staff.”

Terrell was “always energetic,” Counts said. He was an extrovert. “He loved to crack jokes.”

The police investigation is ongoing, but Terrell’s family is grieving over what his mother said in interviews appears to have been a fight that turned fatal. Police reported Thursday, June 10, that a juvenile had been arrested and charged in connection with Terrell’s death.

“It’s just sad,” Counts said, “that it came down to gun violence. Because of a decision someone made in a situation, two families are suffering.”

Terrell had two younger siblings on his mother’s side, and four younger siblings on his father’s side. He played basketball for LINC’s team at Symington, and was a drummer on LINC’s raucous drum line at Smith-Hale.

“We were always a listening ear,” Geddes said. “An encouraging voice.”

“He was a great kid.”

By Joe Robertson/LINC Writer