By Rev. Donald L. Perryman, Ph.D.
The Truth Contributor
Every teenager isn’t bad, every parent don’t raise their kids to go out and do what they did — but I just hope situations like these open our eyes… – Cierra Wells
He was limping toward her, dazed and bleeding. A 16-year-old boy, in the middle of what had been the Old West End community festival minutes before. Cierra Wells, a nurse for eight years who had been fundraising for her daughters’ cheerleading squad, saw him and went to work.
“Ma’am, please, please, I don’t want to die. Please keep me alive,” he kept saying.
She asked his name and his age, holding his attention and his life together with her voice and her hands, while keeping her eyes on her own daughters somewhere in the chaos. That is what June 6, 2026, asked of Cierra Wells. She answered.
Getting Up
Wells was not alone. Whitney Beachum, a nurse practitioner who had been eating from a food truck with friends when the shooting started, hit the ground like everyone else. When it stopped, she got up.
She spotted two wounded individuals and approached a police officer. “Hey, I am a medical professional. Do you want my help?” He said yes. She got gloves and went to work — assessing wounds, applying pressure, moving from victim to victim alongside law enforcement. “In those moments,” Beachum said, “you don’t care who someone is or what they look like. You’re just trying to help them and save their life.”
That is not a press conference or an ordinance. That is Toledo — getting up off the ground before anyone in authority said what to do next.
The Man Who Ran In
Matt Killam, chief External Relations Officer for MetroParks Toledo, lives on Robinwood — a few blocks from the Agnes Reynolds Jackson Arboretum. His fiancée’s daughter was in that same crowd when the shooting started. Killam ran in, found her hiding in a garage just north of the arboretum, and got her out.
In the days that followed, Killam’s team did what they had already spent a year doing — coordinating hour by hour with the chief of police, the chief of fire, the head of EMS, the mayor’s office, and the county commissioners to make sure that when Toledo gathered again at Watershed Weekend, it gathered safely. Tens of thousands showed up without incident.
Killam also said something that deserves to be on record. Talking about the two 20-year-olds whose private grievance became Toledo’s public nightmare, he said: “They are still children to me. We have all failed them.” That is not the language of someone who manages the relationship between MetroParks and the Toledo it serves from a distance. It is the language of someone who understands that the boy Cierra Wells held together on June 6, and the boys who fired the shots, came from the same city, and that city has not yet done enough for either of them.
What They Catalyzed
Wells and Beachum did not write the mayor’s new safety ordinance. They did not double the police presence for the Fourth of July or create the special event safety zones. But what they did in the immediate aftermath of June 6 — getting off the ground and helping without being asked — showed Toledo what its response needed to look like.
This Saturday, an estimated 100,000 people will gather at Promenade Park for Toledo’s fireworks show. The city is doubling its police presence. The same Riverwalk that Killam’s team built — no fences, no gates, no walls — built for everyone — will hold all of those who chose to show up.
Last year, six people were killed over the Fourth of July weekend. Two of those homicides came just hours after the fireworks ended. This year, Toledo shows up anyway — because Wells got off the ground, because Beachum got off the ground, because Killam ran in. Their actions catalyzed an entire city.
As Killam himself put it, “good activation pushes out the bad.”
All because we got off the ground.
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, PhD, at drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org