Shooting sparks plan for anti-violence rally

In the darkness Thursday night, Esther Schultz ran into the kind of criminals who give this city a bad name.

Schultz, 25, parked her car on 24th Street near Parrish, in Fairmount, at about 9 p.m. and started walking toward her house, chatting with her mother on a cell phone along the way. A car pulled up alongside her and a man jumped out and tried to steal her purse, police said.

The man knocked Schultz, a therapist for Keystone Hospice, to the ground. Police said a female passenger shouted, "Shoot the bitch! Shoot the bitch!" and the man opened fire, wounding Schultz in the shoulder.

Schultz survived her encounter with the heartless street thug. And on Friday, investigators said they arrested Akeim Bullock, 35, and Teakesha Jones, 36. Both were charged with attempted murder, robbery, aggravated assaulted and related offenses.

But the arrests weren't enough for Gail Inderwies, executive director of Keystone Hospice.

Inderwies said she couldn't understand how Schultz, a young woman who devotes herself to helping the city's poor, sick, elderly residents, could be shot for seemingly no reason at all.

So Inderwies reached out to her colleagues in the nursing community and organized an anti-violence rally that will take place at the Convention Center today at 2 p.m.

The rally - which will be attended by staffers from Keystone Hospice, Keystone Home Health, the Pennsylvania Home Care Association and dozens of others - will be followed by a march to City Hall, where the city's homicide victims will be remembered.

"This is a public-health crisis," she said. "It took years for the crime to get this bad, and it's not going to get better over night."

Inderwies said the rally will serve to launch the new Coalition for Safer Streets, which she hopes will bring together politicians, health groups, businesses and citizens. "It's time for us to join together and fight this plague," she said. *