BALTIMORE — Kelly Butler is a voice of one.
On the corner of North and Greenmount she took to a bullhorn...turned heads.
This mother had struggled with addiction -- was incarcerated; she wasn’t there when her son was shot -- survived, and then shot again.
She got clean she says, because she has a message: if you survive the crime -- make sure you survive the trauma.
"There is therapy that needs to be done. There is people that they can go and like, talk to and mentor to other young children and let them know what they've been through but if they are not educated, if they don’t have the support, if they don’t have people standing up and raising their voice, then they are just lost souls walking dead in the street," Butler said.
Butler is pushing out a message -- advocating for those who survive violent crime and their families.
She is reaching out to touch those who were struck by trauma.
Her movement is called Dope Moms and her friends say the inspiration came to her like a bolt.
"She said it came to her and she just wrestled with it and wrestled with it and it was just burning in her spirit that we have to be a voice against the senseless violence that’s going on,” her friend Rodney Ward said. “Yeah so when she put the call out, we just had to come and support her."
And on this night -- her message landed with a few people in this busy intersection.
Tonight, it is East Baltimore but Butler is taking this movement west, north and south too.
"I am gonna pick a new date and I am gonna stand on another corner and another corner…because there is power in numbers," Butler said.
A single mother hoping to grow into a sustainable support system for the hundred of people who survive Baltimore’s hundreds of violent crimes.
