When people in Beaverdale awoke a week ago Sunday to news there had been another fatal shootout, Facebook posts began to fly all over again.

Council members jumped to attention. Efforts to pump up Neighborhood Watch accelerated.

City of Des Moines leaders and police came together in an awkward press conference to announce the availability of a $50,000 fund to shake loose the kind of intel that can help put people away.

“We need to take back our neighborhood,” was the rally cry heard by Sean Bagniewski, the outgoing president of the Beaverdale Neighborhood Association.

Gun violence is top of mind in many corners of this rapidly growing metro, I've learned on a walking tour this spring of Des Moines’ 52 neighborhoods.

Concerns began in 2015, when 21 people were killed within the city limits — the most since the drug-gang turf wars of the 1980s and 1990s.

Many were bewildered when grandmother Barbara Perry was struck down last September by a stray bullet in a Family Dollar parking lot at 12th Street and University Avenue.

Sadness cloaked many neighborhoods when 14-year-old Yore Jiang, a well-liked Roosevelt High School freshman, was shot in the head at a busy intersection near downtown last October.

'He was full of dreams and potential': 14-year-old homicide victim laid to rest

The entire city was left gobsmacked and sullen after the early morning ambush of two metro police officers by Scott Michael Greene in November.

And then, in a steady clip, shots fire in and around Beaverdale:

It turns out Gach and the three others injured that night had come to the church, a home away from home for many refugees, because there was a gathering there involving relatives.

Sudanese family members inside the church had been engaged in a long negotiation for a wedding dowry. Those inside the church said they knew nothing about the argument that took place outside between Gach, Yien Nhial, 27, Simon Joseph, 23, and Tethloach Jack, 28, of Des Moines, police said.

But Gach wound up dead and three others were injured. Another gun was confiscated.

Myths about shootings abound

One myth swirling among neighbors is that overall crime in Beaverdale, where houses have been selling this spring in a matter of hours, is getting worse as the city grows.

It hasn’t, according to police and to Bagniewski, whose active association tracks all crimes affecting the 6,400 homes that now make up the diverse neighborhood.

Another is that the gunfire is largely being caused by recent transplants from Chicago. It’s not, police say.

“We’ve really got to stop that," said Sgt. Paul Parizek, public information officer for Des Moines police. "There’s no truth to it. And it detracts from what the real issues are."

The 15 unsettling homicides so this year and much of the other gunfire are the casualties of a mix of societal ills — mental illness, domestic violence, lingering cultural conflicts, disenfranchised youth and broken-down families.

Drugs are part of the problem, but arguments over turf and trafficking aren't the primary cause like they were in the '80s and '90s, Parizek said.

Younger teens involved in gangs today are more involved in thug life than the drug trade, he said.

But the easy availability of guns runs through all of it.

Two of the three young men involved in Sunday's gun battle lived on the east side. One was from a near north-side neighborhood where guns are arguably easier to find than jobs.

State Rep. Ako Abdul-Samad, who has run his nonprofit Creative Visions from that neighborhood since the 1980s, says he's getting tired of collecting those guns.

He says he’s betting that sooner or later, the gunfire will force all the people in the city currently working in separate silos — city leaders, nonprofits, churches, schools — to come together to try to create a better strategy to prevent it.

In a metro area that added 12,145 new residents in 2016 and could see 1 million by 2040, the city needs a better one, he said.

Abdul-Samad is pressing local leaders to do something more sustainable to curb the violence. He's pushing for jobs, programming and opportunity in parts of the city that have missed out.

"People in this area are growing tired of their children not being educated and not having the same opportunities as others in other neighborhoods," he said.

Police Chief Dana Wingert echoed the same thing Thursday. The police department has been confiscating records numbers of guns this year. Much of the "reckless" gunfire involves a relative few young people, mostly ages 17 to 25, he said.

"We need to develop a strategy where we don't lose any more kids," Wingert said.

Sadly, however, Samad predicts no sense of urgency until someone of prominence, likely white, dies.

Because no one blinked when Trey Leon Lee, 24, was shot to death in the middle of the day in March near Evelyn Davis Park. And the outrage over grandmother Perry's death was short-lived.

More vigilance required

What’s not a myth is how unsettling the gunfire feels to those who brush with it.

Marc Shonka says he and his wife were pretty shaken up after they were sitting at Saints one night in January and heard bullets fly around 12:30 a.m.

Shonka called police the day after the shooting — a witness wanting to help with the investigation. He never got a call back, he says.

And he says he never got a call back from the Polk County Attorney’s Office after he’d heard Oscar Gipson, 39, had been charged with going armed with intent, intimidation with a dangerous weapon and felon in possession of a firearm.

He says he wanted someone to explain why Gipson wasn’t charged with attempted murder.

“If you weren’t trying to kill somebody, you wouldn’t be firing an AK-47 into a restaurant,” he says.

Shonka and his wife, who’ve been in Beaverdale more than 10 years, have offered to get involved in bolstering Neighborhood Watch this summer in the area.

But the father of one kid in college, another entering high school and another in first grade also wonders sometimes if it isn’t time to move farther west.

“There are a lot of young kids 15 to 20 carrying guns around this city,” he says. “It’s a scary deal.”

Nick Gerhart, 41, who has four kids ages 11 to 5 months, says he had just gotten off a treadmill at Anytime Fitness the night Quinn and James were shot in April.

Police said drugs were involved, but the conflict that triggered the shooting lingered long before, Parizek said.

After Sunday’s shootings, Gerhart told his good friend Chris Coleman it was time to quit planning and start implementing better Neighborhood Watch throughout Beaverdale.

“I used to live in St. Louis and you kind of got numb to it there,” he said. “People don’t expect it here. But we’re becoming a bigger city and you have to take different risk precautions.”

Gerhart, who moved to Beaverdale in 2010, isn’t planning on moving out of the area anytime soon.

So he hopes people do come together sooner rather than later to help build skills in the city's neglected neighborhoods and work collectively with youth who need attention now.

“People struggle when they don’t have hope, and the economy has left a lot of people behind,” he said.

Watchdog Unleashed

The concept: Reader's Watchdog columnist Lee Rood hatched the idea on a cold night when she wanted to get back to her favorite solo activity: walking. When spring arrived, Rood resolved to break up her well-worn routes to rediscover the more than 50 neighborhoods that populate her hometown of 20 years.

For the next few months, she'll focus reporting on the big issues facing some of those neighborhoods.

Where she's been: ACCENT, Beaverdale, Capitol Park, Chautauqua Park, Cheatom Park, Lower Beaver, McKinley School-Columbus Park, Salisbury Oaks, downtown Des Moines, River Bend, Woodland Heights, Sherman Hill.

Where she's headed: Indianola Hills and Martin Luther King Jr.

What should she Watchdog next? Write her at lrood@dmreg.com, Twitter: @LeeRood, Facebook, and DesMoinesRegister.com/ReadersWatchdog.