When she was in sixth grade, Sandra Parks wrote an award-winning essay about gun violence and crime in her hometown, Milwaukee.

On Monday, two years after she described how “we are in a state of chaos,” she was fatally shot when someone outside fired a gun at her home and a stray bullet went into her bedroom.

Sandra, 13, was watching television at the time, her sister, Tatiana Ingram, told the television station WISN.

“My sister took it like a soldier: She just walked in the room and said, ‘Mama, I’m shot,’ ” Ingram said. “She was only hit one time, in her chest. The bullet wasn’t even for her.”

Sandra’s mother, Bernice Parks, told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that her daughter “was everything this world is not.”

“My baby did not like violence,” she said of Sandra, her middle child, adding, “She was my angel from the time she was in my womb to the time she came out.”

In Sandra’s essay, which placed third in her school district’s 2016 Martin Luther King Jr. essay contest, she called for more empathy and less negativity, and emphasized the importance of getting an education to make the world a better place.

“We are the future leaders, but if we don’t have an education, we will accomplish nothing,” she wrote.

She described a world where “little children are victims of senseless gun violence” and “there is too much black-on-black crime.”

“Sometimes, I sit back and I have to escape from what I see and hear every day,” she wrote. “When I do; I come to the same conclusion … we are in a state of chaos.”

Sandra, then a sixth-grader, told Wisconsin Public Radio that she chose to write about violence because “all you hear about is somebody dying or somebody getting shot and people do not just think about whose father or son or granddaughter or grandson who it was that was just killed.”

Vickie Brown-Gurley, who worked as the principal of Keefe Avenue School when Sandra was in fifth and sixth grade, remembered Sandra as a confident student with a “really good sense of humor.”

Over the past two years, 12 students in Milwaukee public schools were homicide victims, a spokeswoman for the school district said. Sandra is the seventh since January.

“It’s part of the insanity we see in Milwaukee,” Mayor Tom Barrett told reporters Tuesday. “I look at where we are now as a city and it breaks my heart to stand here. As a dad, it breaks my heart.”

The Milwaukee Police Department, which is investigating Sandra’s death, said Tuesday that a 26-year-old man was in custody. The Milwaukee County district attorney’s office is now reviewing the case.

“The motive is still being determined,” Sgt. Sheronda Grant, a spokeswoman for the Milwaukee Police Department, said Wednesday.

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On Sandra’s family’s GoFundMe page, Bernice Parks said her daughter had hoped to attend college and become a writer.

“Sandra was special,” Parks told the television station WITI. “She didn’t deserve to leave this world like that.”