Syeisha Byrd’s main focus early Tuesday, as she started work, was making sure eight Syracuse outdoor public pools had everything in place to face an opening week of steaming June heat: Enough staff, enough chlorine and all the complex plumbing and machinery at each site, working right.
Amid all that, Byrd — commissioner of city parks — received an afternoon call from Kevin Henry, the city’s director of operations and maintenance. She guessed he had some everyday question involving the progress of a city painting crew he was overseeing, at Onondaga Park. Instead, Henry said:
“Syeisha. They believe someone has been shot.”
In that instant, for Byrd — seven months into her tenure as the city’s new commissioner of parks — everything about this summer not only changed, but took on an aching measure of heartbreaking urgency.
A teenager had been fatally wounded at the city park Syeisha and her childhood friends always called “Higher Onondaga.” A crowd of at least 150, Byrd said — mainly parents, teens and younger children, happy to cool off in their final week of school — had gathered at the pool and nearby sprinkler for relief from 94-degree heat that shattered temperature records for the day.
Adhon Thomas, 15, died after a gunman shot him outside the fence, near the pool entrance, according to Police Chief Joseph Cecile. Byrd said the attack happened in the presence of 17 lifeguards, many of them teenagers, as well as a big community gathering there for the pool and adjacent sprinkler and playground.
Alarmed, Byrd was barely off the phone with Henry when the bloodshed became even more personal: She heard from a distraught cousin, who was at Onondaga to go swimming with two siblings and Byrd’s aunt — all now part of the frightened crowd.
“My first thought,” Byrd said, “was to get to my staff.”
Once at the park, she learned — to her deep gratitude and admiration —how her young lifeguards responded in a way that Byrd, Cecile and Mayor Ben Walsh all describe as extraordinary, a fast and selfless reaction during what Walsh called “an incredibly difficult moment.”
Byrd said the pool crew shepherded everyone out of the water and into the poolhouse, sticking exactly to a city safety plan. Some members of the staff — as they waited for ambulance workers to arrive — rendered emergency care to the young man who’d been shot, while others locked the gate to make sure all their swimmers were safe from the gunman.
After investigators gave Byrd a fast summary of how a killer used a gun at a park crowded with kids, “we pulled the staff into the poolhouse,” she said. Walsh, who also went straight to the pool, thought of Byrd’s training in social work, and how she spent much of her life training for that moment. Young lifeguards and pool attendants were traumatized. In the first of what became several meetings, Byrd promised them the city would provide fast access to counseling and other means of support.
“You need to cry, you cry,” she said. “You need to scream, you scream.”
Byrd understood why some lifeguards might decide not to come back. The pool was closed the next day, to provide a little time for solace. She told the young women and men — if they did choose to return — that their presence would have powerful meaning. She said many children in the pools come from neighborhoods of struggle, where street violence is all too much a part of life.
The city parks are supposed to be a respite, a green sanctuary. Familiar faces at the pool — providing daily welcome — can mean everything to a girl or boy who values a sense of warmth and security, above all else.
Especially a child who witnessed the kind of horror that just happened at the park.
Thursday, when the quiet pool reopened on a cool and overcast afternoon, Byrd had lifeguards in every chair.
She said it was a statement of courage from the staff, a gift to every child who shows up at the pool. The best atmosphere the parks can provide — especially after such a tragedy — is a quiet landscape where “kids are just being kids,” Byrd said.
Among those showing up to swim, towel under his arm, was Joe Horan. His daughter Clare is a lifeguard at the pool, and he was there as a dad’s gesture of support. Horan is also founder of the “Building Men” program in Syracuse, an initiative in the city schools focused on helping young men follow a pathway that builds courage, grace and commitment.
The soul and insight of those students inspires Horan, and he views the shooting at the park with the same no-other-choice clarity he draws from every heartbreaking act of violence:
The high-profile shock of the attack, to Horan, can swiftly overwhelm the reality that thousands upon thousands of young people in Syracuse wake up every morning simply trying to do the best they can, with tenacity, in difficult circumstances — a kind of quiet bravery he sees up-close all the time.
A tragedy, then, only causes Horan to redouble his efforts to protect and console those students. In the same way, thinking of the courage of his daughter and other young lifeguards at Onondaga, Horan wanted to offer a message of gratitude that he said is best delivered through love and presence:
Those teens would not go it alone “as they get back up.”
Byrd, the mother of four, appreciates that resolve. Her vision for the children of Syracuse — two of her kids attend the city schools — was shaped by strong figures, when she was young. She grew up on Slocum Avenue, on the near West Side. Her parents — Matthew and Donna Spinner-Byrd — routinely welcomed kids into their home from around the neighborhood, and Byrd said that gentle empathy offered a lesson in the same ethic that ought to define the parks.
“The reason I am the way I am is because I had positive, wonderful people who wrapped themselves around me,” Byrd said. That was amplified by the staff members — and mentors — who supported her at the Shonnard Street Boys and Girls Club, where Byrd spent countless hours as a teen.
“The only way to curb violence is to wrap a support system” around every child, she said. That work needs to help define the purpose of the parks, as well, and she views the violent loss of that young life at Onondaga, a place that should be a refuge, as a searing rip in that civic tapestry.
To her, the magnitude of the healing begins with the whole community.
Byrd grew up in a city neighborhood wounded by gun violence. Fueled by parental faith and expectations, she graduated from Fowler High School, earned an associate’s degree from Onondaga Community College and went on to receive her bachelor’s from Keuka College, by studying at night.
For years, she worked at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Syracuse, but it was the same sense of urgency she’s feeling this week — that idea that she “could be doing even more” — that caused her to return to Syracuse University in her early 30s, to earn a graduate degree in social work.
Her dad remains a symbol of relentless inspiration. He struggled to read, Byrd said, and he spent his adult life doing harsh work, in the hot confines of a foundry. Until the day he died in 2020, he emphasized the breakout value of education for his kids and grandchildren.
Matthew Byrd lived to see his daughter move into a job at SU as director of community engagement at Hendricks Chapel, before she took over the family engagement office for the Early Childhood Alliance Onondaga, created to support vulnerable children in the region. Her Central Village office put her in the heart of the community on the South Side — and quickly made her familiar to Walsh and others in City Hall.
Last autumn, she accepted the mayor’s offer to run the city parks.
Byrd speaks with gratitude of all the offers of help she’s received in recent days. She’s in close touch with Cecile and police investigators. Through Rev. Lateef Johnson-Kinsey, director of a City Hall initiative to reduce gun violence, she’s heard from several community groups willing to be a presence at city pools, both for support and vigilance.
Cecile said the police are “making tremendous progress” toward capturing the gunman. He said they’re also creating a summertime police detail he calls “rovers,” a patrol whose duty — every day — will be moving from pool to pool. If the staff at any site is having problems, the officers will remain at that pool.
The chief said school resource officers will be utilized throughout the summer to reinforce pool security. And Cecile makes this request of any city residents, using the pools or parks: If you see or hear anything that alarms you, call 911 — and alert the pool staff.
Byrd knows many people throughout the city — shaken by this killing on a June Tuesday, at a busy city park — are asking the same question:
Against such senseless violence, what can anyone really do?
“Be here,” is Byrd’s immediate request.
She sees it as the best means of protecting our children, as well as an immediate statement of affirmation. Simply show up. Keep using the parks. Take in the skyline view from the Schiller hilltop or walk the trails of the E.M. Mills rose garden, at Thornden. Enjoy the playgrounds. Play golf or pickleball. Shoot baskets. Have a picnic.
The city parks are a community treasure, and using them — more than ever — projects the message that violence and chaos will not drive away the intended beneficiary of the entire system:
You, and your children.
For Byrd, the death of Adhon Thomas only amplifies that fierce sense of mission. Her best way of memorializing that young life is by committing every minute she spends on the job to making sure every girl or boy can still count on basic truths:
There is no sound, Byrd said, like pausing at a park on a July morning and hearing the laughter of children on the swings. It is the music of summer every kid deserves, and after a week of trauma and grief she makes this promise about this city, and its parks.
“We’ll be here,” said Byrd, who is hoping you stop by.
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