Shanae watkins biography
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Seante Hatcher of Bloomberg’s Center for Adolescent Health took the microphone. She is used to telling her story.
She can’t spare the time.
So she gets by as best she can. It was a dumb squabble over a 19-year-old guy.
It’s been more than a decade since Watkins cut short Chineye Mills’ life at age 13, seven years since she left a juvenile detention center with a chance to start hers over again.
Far from burying the murder in a corner of her psyche, Watkins, now 23, relives it all the time.
Then as now, her voice is clear and strong; so is her knack for expressing herself in wrenching ways.
“Whatever you do will follow you,” she told the girls. … You never know what’s going to happen.”
A question-and-answer session gave the girls a lot to ponder. Shanae fatally stabbed the girl in the neck with a kitchen knife.
And I’m not where I could be, given where I’ve been,” she said, meaning she could be into “drugs, running the streets, locked up.” Megan, for example, has been arrested several times and has a prostitution conviction.
Watkins lives in a garden apartment off Belair Road in Northeast Baltimore with her three children – two girls, 3 and 5, and a boy, 2.
It's tough love."
Today, 29-year-old Shanae says her life is completely different than it was all those years ago. Besides, with society full of highly successful women, do they really need her as a role model?
Watkins shrugs off the concerns with a world-weary smile. On April 29, 1997, she and Chineye fought over the 19-year-old both had dated.
While she has turned her life around, there is one thing she hasn't done: met with her victim's family.
"There was a time where we were supposed to get together... Now it envisions taking her on a sort of nationwide roadshow.
“Her story is going to have her all over the country,” predicted LaMarr Shields, the institute’s president, “and people will pay to sit at her feet to hear what she says about girls’ issues.”
The institute plans to publish her memoir next year, but before then it intends to reach out widely to youth services providers, public agencies, schools and nonprofit groups to promote Watkins.
Find a trustworthy adult in whom you can confide. “To some people my story is inspirational, but some people feel I’m not worthy,” she said in an interview.
When Shanae Watkins was 12, she killed a girl. “She didn’t grow up to be a junkie or a homeless person or something like that,” said the Dunbar Middle School eighth-grader.
After watching the documentary you will have a ton of questions and Shanae answers all of them in her book.
Check out my interview with Shanae and be sure to purchase her book From Girlhood to Womanhood.
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I wanted to know Shanae’s story, the documentary painted her story with a very broad brush.They never addressed the trauma she experienced at such a young age.
During the job interview, she was asked if she had ever been arrested. The girls were at the corner of Howard and Saratoga streets. That never really came together," Shanae says. And we finally got to do our interview and this time I was ready.