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OAKLAND — On a twilit sidewalk outside UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland, Brijjanna Price stood quietly with family members and worked to compose herself.
Then she talked briefly and poignantly about being strong and hopeful for her 4-year-old son Na’vaun Jackson, now on life support, suffering from a brain injury and recovering from surgery Wednesday after a shooting incident at an East Oakland house.
“He’s in critical condition, he’s still in the same position he was in when the situation happened. We can do nothing but take it day by day, and hope for better,” Price said. “I’m a mother. I have to be strong. I’m holding in there. I’ve got a lot of pain.”
Price described Na’vaun as a mama’s boy who loved playing with toy dinosaurs. “He’s attached to my hip. I can’t go nowhere without him. … Can’t nobody watch him without him crying.”
Price’s father, Ramon Price, said that doctors plan to keep Na’vaun heavily sedated before gradually taking him off medication to see how he responds.
“We’re asking everybody to keep my family and my grandson in your prayers,” Ramon Price said, before decrying what he called incorrect updates from others on the boy’s condition. “If it doesn’t come from my daughter or a representative of this family, it’s not from us.”
When asked for comment on the shooting, he said, “The person whose house it was took ownership of it. He told the police that it was indeed his gun and that my daughter did not know it was here. We’re praying for him as well, because it’s a tragedy all the way around.”
Price said he has set up a GoFundMe account with a goal of raising $50,000 to support the family’s needs.
Family members attested to previous tragic encounters with gun violence. Jamilia Land, Na’vaun’s great-aunt, said Na’vaun’s father, Nathan Jackson, had lost two brothers as well as a sister last year to guns.
“Our family is devastated, and we’re praying that Na’vaun pulls through,” Land said in a statement Thursday. “We need to recognize that gun violence is a public health crisis that is ravaging our communities. This is an emergency, and every day of inaction is another ten lives lost.”
Brijjanna Price said she also had lost her brother, Lamont Price, in February 2012, in addition to cousins and friends, to gun violence.
“Stay home, because your house is the safest place,” Brijjanna Price said. “You never know what nobody got in their house.”
Contact George Kelly at 408-859-5180.