Top photo: Michelle Kenney looks out of the Allegheny County Courthouse window before the start of the homicide trial of former East Pittsburgh police officer Michael Rosfeld, charged in the fatal shooting of her son, 17-year-old Antwon Rose II. “As a mom, you can’t prepare for this — you just have to do it — there is no go-to map on this,” Ms. Kenney said. “I’ll treat it as any other role that I have as Antwon’s mother. I just have to do it.”

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“We will continue to reach out to the community, to call on the community to come together,” said 1Hood activist/musician Jasiri X during a vigil in Rankin to honor Antwon. People gathered on the basketball court in Hawkins Village where Antwon once played, a painting of Antwon’s smiling face looking out above an altar of flowers and candles. Addressing Antwon’s family, Jasiri said, “We will not abandon you in this time… We are with you.”

The words came after a weekend of marches into businesses and through the streets in dark, rain, and shine after the acquittal of former East Pittsburgh Police officer Michael Rosfeld in the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Rose. The marches continued through the week, with hundreds of students walking out from school and into the rain to flood the streets of downtown Pittsburgh and chanting the name of Antown Rose II. Third grader Esme carried a painting she made of Antwon that read, “This is why we kneel. #JusticeforAntwon.” Across town at Woodland Hills High School, Antwon’s mother addressed his former high school classmates. “I got up there and said what I would have said to Antwon,” Ms. Kenney said. Don’t walk out of school in protest, she told them. Get an education and work to effect change. Vote. “Do what Antwon isn’t here to do.”

If you have suggestions on stories you want to see from your Western PA community, feel free to contact me to start a conversation.

Hearing Kim Bowles tell her story in between catching frogs, drawing with chalk, and healing the stubbed toes of her two small children really allowed me to feel why the stakes are so high for her, why when she heard “Stage-3 Cancer” months after giving birth to her second child, she did everything she could to make sure she’d be there to raise her children. What I didn’t know, is that the twisted, nightmarish experience she had on the operating table is one that is going on with women across the country. 

“Bowles, a stage 3 breast cancer survivor, had just undergone double mastectomy surgery and had told her surgeon to make her “flat”—that is, do not reconstruct her breasts. No implants. No molding of a boob from excess skin. Nothing. But as the fuzzy haze of anesthesia began to wear off, she realized he had completely disregarded what they had agreed upon—her body reshaped by a doctor while she was unconscious.”

An angered community is coming together in Facebook groups devoted to sharing the photos of the pockets of skin left against women’s will after mastectomies. Reporter Catherine Guthrie found surgeons making decisions against patients’ consent, stating they’re leaving the undesired flaps of skin “in case the patient changes their mind” about going flat. The trend points towards a medical culture in which women’s desire to go flat is challenged or outright ignored.  Bowles is now routinely protesting topless outside of the hospital where her surgery went wrong. Read about her amazing story in Cosmopolitan here.