Every time someone gets shot in Oakland, Lynette Gibson McElhaney’s smartphone rattles.

The City Council president receives executive phone alerts from the city’s Police Department so often that the one that pealed from her phone on Dec. 20 — for a “245,” or shooting — seemed like any other. Until McElhaney got a call from her adopted son, Antoine, she didn’t know that this particular 245 was, in fact, deeply personal.

The victim was a teen the councilwoman considered a grandson. Torian Hughes, 17, was shot during a robbery attempt 2 blocks from the West Oakland BART Station, in the district McElhaney represents.

Within hours, the boy McElhaney had spent years raising was dead.

McElhaney, who learned of the death in a phone call with police, dropped the phone, scudded down the stairs of her two-story Victorian, and opened her mouth to tell her husband: “Sweetheart, someone’s shot Torian. They’ve killed Torian.”

But all that came out was a terrified, lacerating scream.

Torian, a thoughtful teen who struggled to navigate the dangers of Oakland, was slain as he tried to buy a gun from two other teens, authorities say.

Back to Gallery Oakland violence hits home for councilwoman struggling... 4 1 of 4 Photo: Nathaniel Y. Downes, Special to The Chronicle 2 of 4 Photo: Connor Radnovich / The Chronicle 3 of 4 Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle 4 of 4 Photo: Courtesy of Lynette McElhaney







Living in fear, danger

A month after Torian’s death, McElhaney sat in her office at City Hall, still trying to make sense of what happened.

“At first I was angry,” she said. “I was angry at myself. Torian had been at my house the week before. We had talked about his fears. We had talked about the dangers of the streets.”

Her voice stiffened. “Did I say enough? Did I do enough? Should I have put the snatch on him?”

As a legislator, McElhaney had spent years trying to curb the bloodshed in Oakland. She was elected in 2012 on a platform that emphasized public safety. She’d seen children in her neighborhood in T-shirts commemorating slain friends, shown up at memorial services, and grieved when her husband’s cousin was slain.

Now, the violence had hit home.

The way McElhaney remembers him, Torian was a floppy-haired sprite who taught himself how to do no-handed cartwheels and loved to run around in tighty-whities. He was also prone to depression and struggled in school, McElhaney said.

He was the oldest son of Audrey Hughes Cornish, a streetwise girl from West Oakland who, as a child, raised her siblings after her parents fell into drug addiction. She met McElhaney while gathering food donations from Mingleton Temple Church, on Market Street, where the councilwoman was a parishioner.

“She knew not to ask me where my parents were,” Cornish says about that day. “She knew I’d come alone.”

The two bonded, and when Cornish was 12, McElhaney took her in. Five years later, Cornish became pregnant and gave birth to Torian. She was 17 and a single mom, and moved to the City Towers Apartments, a high-rise housing project on Eighth Street near the Nimitz Freeway. Torian’s early years were turbulent, McElhaney said. Once, Oakland police raided his home and arrested his stepfather. A few years later, he and his friends found a body behind a trash bin. He went to bed almost every night hearing gunfire.

Torian was 8 when he went to live with McElhaney. He’d fallen behind in school. His mother didn’t have permanent housing and constantly moved from one relative’s couch to another.

McElhaney enrolled him in the Aspire Berkley Maynard Academy, a charter elementary school in Oakland. He caught up to his peers in academics and participated in an after-school arts program. In middle school, he took kickboxing classes. He went to bed at the same time every night and got help with his homework.

Still, Torian had spells of fear and sadness, McElhaney said. In fifth grade, a counselor told McElhaney he appeared to be depressed. Although he began therapy, he remained haunted by past traumas and was never far away from crime and poverty.

Barely escaping gunfire

One day as he, his mother and younger brother were returning to the housing projects from a trip to the grocery store, some men warned them that a gunfight was about to begin on the block.

“The men were getting ready to start shooting,” Cornish recalled. “They saw me and my children getting out of the car, and they told me, ‘Sister, hurry up and get yourself and the babies in the house because it’s going down.’”

One man escorted the family to the elevator of Cornish’s apartment building. As soon as the elevator doors closed behind them, gunfire erupted outside.

“So me and my children got in the house, and I looked at Torian, and he looked at me, and we felt special,” she said. “We could have been in the middle of all that.”

McElhaney said the incident terrified Torian.

“I had taken him out of that high-stress environment, and his mother and siblings were still in the Towers,” McElhaney said. “So he hears a threat, his mother hears a warning.”

For weeks thereafter, Torian had nightmares, McElhaney recalled. Cornish was baffled.

“She’s grown up with a whole different perspective,” McElhaney said. “She’s like, ‘You’re not supposed to be scared. You can’t be no punk out in these streets.’”

The councilwoman paused, flinching.

“And she’s right,” McElhaney said. “He couldn’t be a punk out in the streets.”

In an environment where the threat of violence is omnipresent, it’s not hard to see why a kind boy like Torian would feel the need to arm himself, McElhaney said.

“Think about what happened to Torian, think about the trauma that our young people endure,” McElhaney said. “How do you not get depression, or ADHD, or some of these other things that our teachers talk about?”

Chaotic final years

The last three years of Torian’s life were particularly chaotic, she said. Cornish, who by then had two younger boys, wanted her whole family together again. Torian was 14 when she took him back and tried to become the primary influence in his life.

Shortly before his death, Torian told his mother that he wanted to buy a gun. He’d been robbed several times, and the girl he was dating was a sex trafficking survivor who would occasionally run into her former pimp and panic, McElhaney said.

“I know he felt unsafe,” the councilwoman said. “I know Audrey had a conversation with him and said, ‘That’s not the type of people we are.’”

Torian died on a bright, brittle Sunday afternoon. He and a 16-year-old friend had gone to a desolate stretch of Mandela Parkway to meet up with two acquaintances — a man police identified as 19-year-old Shiheim Johnson, and a 15-year-old whose name police withheld because he’s a minor. They had allegedly promised to sell Torian a gun.

Instead, the two pulled out guns and tried to rob Torian and his friend, according to court documents. When Torian resisted, the 15-year-old allegedly shot him.

He died from his injuries at Highland Hospital. His friend was not injured. Johnson and the 15-year-old were arrested in January and now face charges of murder, robbery and unlawful use of firearms.

Hundreds of friends and relatives packed the pews of Shiloh Church in East Oakland on the day of Torian’s funeral. Some had black and red ribbons pinned to their shirt pockets. Some said they didn’t know the slain boy but had come to express their frustration with a seemingly unstoppable cycle of violence in Oakland.

Torian lay in a casket draped with lilies and white roses. His mother approached him cautiously, her face a mask of self-possession. She leaned over to kiss his forehead. In the background, a gospel keyboardist played the melody to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

A ‘collective failure’

People stood before the crowd and gave speeches. Many expressed sympathy for the 15-year-old who allegedly killed Torian, saying that he too had essentially lost his life that day.

“I am not angry. I am not bitter. I am not aggressive — not even at the unfortunate young man who did this,” Cornish told the crowd. “The young men are being forced to make a decision. ‘Do I pick up a gun? Not because it’s part of my character, but for protection.’”

In the weeks that followed, the councilwoman’s anger shifted outward: Why does society produce conditions that turn children into fearful and desperate teens who turn to guns for protection?

“You don’t necessarily have to be a bad kid. ... They’re living in high stress, they feel like they need to be strapped,” she said. “Now that you are strapped, the (National Council on Crime & Delinquency) data reveals that you’re six times more likely to be a victim or to resort to violence — even if you’re a nonviolent person. The gun itself changes who you are and how you stand in life.”

If society had failed Torian, it had also let down his accused 15-year-old shooter, the councilwoman said.

“There is a story that says ... this 15-year-old ... he made a bad choice,” she said. “That choice is going to change his life forever. That choice was a senseless act of violence.”

Or, she said, “there’s also the narrative that this child was born into a society that gave him early exposure to lead, poor schools, crime-ridden communities, produced upon him the stress that caused him desperation, and gave him an overly constrained box of choices.”

And then, she said, “he ends up, one day, with a gun.”

In January, the Oakland City Council passed new gun regulations, including one that requires residents to lock weapons in boxes when leaving them in unattended vehicles. McElhaney pushed for these laws and said she hopes this year to create citywide Offices of Violence Prevention and Community Safety to provide resources for people most at risk of committing violent crime. The city’s crime rate, including homicides, is down when compared to this time last year.

But legislation alone won’t end the killings in Oakland, she said. Gun violence in the United States, after all, isn’t a provincial issue; it’s a social pathology.

“When I think about Torian, I see collective failure,” McElhaney said. “But I also see the opportunity to create a national dialogue that saves our children, that saves the soul of our nation.”

Pain and tears

Inside her dark and sparsely furnished cottage in East Oakland, Torian’s mother boiled water and incense in the small kitchen and pored over family photographs strewn on the dining room table.

One picture showed Torian as a chubby baby in overalls and booties. In another, Cornish held him to her chest, his cheek pressing into her right shoulder.

“He was always helping people,” she said, remembering how her son taught his younger brothers to swim and how he was quick to intervene when he saw another kid getting picked on.

In March, Cornish decided she was no longer safe living in East Oakland. For weeks, she and her sons have been sleeping on relatives’ couches. Some nights they stay with McElhaney.

On a recent night she woke up at 3 a.m. in McElhaney’s house, wailing uncontrollably.

“She could not stop crying and could not sleep,” the councilwoman wrote, chronicling their grief in a Facebook post.

That night, the two women sat in McElhaney’s living room for hours listening to gospel music and watching worship videos on YouTube.

“I feel completely incapable of describing what this feels like,” McElhaney said the next day. “So you’re going to arrest these children, maybe they’ll be convicted of a crime — OK. But it doesn’t feel like justice to me. It doesn’t feel like other mothers won’t feel this.”

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan