By Barb Shelly
KC Mothers in Charge Volunteer
Rosilyn Temple is used to being awakened by a ringing phone. As executive director of Kansas City Mothers in Charge, she frequently is contacted by police officers who ask her to respond to homicide scenes and help the families and loved ones of the victims.
But on this night, June 16, Temple’s personal cell phone was sounding at 4 a.m. She answered it and heard someone screaming. “Shanda’s gone. Shanda’s gone,” the caller said.
The next few minutes were chaos. The caller said Temple’s daughter, LaShanda, was in an ambulance on her way to Truman Medical Center. Temple didn’t press for details. She jumped in the car with her fiance and son and headed for the hospital.
There, she learned her daughter was critically injured. Not by gunshots -- the form of violence with which Temple is intimately familiar -- but by a hit-and-run vehicle.
LaShanda had been leaving a nightclub at 31st Street and Benton Boulevard when a car barreled into her. “She said she heard screeching tires,” Temple said. “By the time she turned around, the car was already there. She couldn’t do anything.”
A doctor pulled Temple aside and presented her with a brutal choice. He asked her to authorize the amputation of her daughter’s right leg below the knee. Without the surgery, LaShanda probably wouldn’t survive, he said. Temple signed the paper.
For the next few days, TMC became Temple’s second home. LaShanda’s left leg was also shattered and required surgery. “I would go home for a couple of hours, maybe change clothes, and go right back,” Temple said.
Meanwhile, police were searching for the driver who had run into LaShanda. He had stepped out of his car immediately after the collision and asked if everyone was all right. But then he had disappeared into the car and driven away. Police arrested the man a couple of weeks later, with the help of witnesses and cameras in the area.
Seven years ago, Temple had stood outside of an apartment building while police discovered the body of her murdered son, Antonio, who went by Pee Wee. Out of her grief she founded KC Mothers in Charge to assist families affected by homicide and work to reduce violence.
Now a different kind of violence had nearly claimed her daughter’s life. “This community is so violent and it’s not just gun violence,” Temple said. “It’s somebody using a car to take someone’s life, take someone limbs.”
While all this was going on, Temple was dealing with another situation. For months she had struggled with worsening pain in her left arm, neck and shoulder. Finally an MRI had detected a torn rotator cuff and bicep. On July 16, exactly one month after her daughter’s injury, she had surgery to correct the problems.
Recovery from rotator cuff surgery is notoriously painful. “I think having children was easier than having this surgery,” Temple said. Doctors told her she needed to take a four-week leave from work, and she did. But not long after she was showing up at homicide scenes, her Mothers in Charge t-shirt cut at the neck to fit over the brace she had to wear.
Temple praises staffers Latrice Murray and Jennifer Alexander and the core mothers and volunteers of Mothers in Charge for keeping the group’s mission and programs on track during her absence.
LaShanda Temple is slowly putting her life back together, her mother said. After eight surgeries on her legs, she’s undergoing physical therapy and awaiting a prosthetic leg. And she’s working through her anger at the driver who upended her life.
“She needs to speak to someone and figure out how to embrace this new life,” Temple said. “Because life has changed.”
Temple, meanwhile, is trying to use the hardships of the past few months to kindle a renewed purpose for herself and for KC Mothers in Charge.
“Some days I wanted to run away,” she said. “I wanted to take a break. I wanted to get out of Kansas City. But I think about my son, he was murdered here and I'm still fighting for justice. His case is still unsolved. I felt like God has not bought me this far to leave me. That I know. So I'm still here.”