Usually, whenever Danielle and her sons pulled into their old neighborhood, the first row of townhomes off Farrell Lane in Spotsylania’s Olde Greenwich community, they’d drive around the block a couple of times before parking.
“Because, that’s just our thing,” she said.
But one evening in April last year, they took a straight line home. Maybe it was the trunkful of groceries that influenced the route. Or, maybe, a child’s intuition.
“For some reason that day my boys were like, ‘No, mommy, let’s just go home and get in the house,’” she recalled. “It was just … it was a weird day. But that day I was just like, ‘OK, we’re just going to go in the house.’”
Danielle remembers closing the door behind her and her sons. Then, she heard the sound that continues to reverberate through their lives more than a year later: gunshots.
Shaky, short-lived Facebook videos — filmed through curtains and between venetian blinds — fill in the visual gaps. In one clip, a pair of masked, assault-rifle-wielding teens rove through the parking lot, one with an apparent gunshot wound. Suddenly, they break into a run.
Within minutes on April 8, 2025, three men — none of whom had reached the age of 21 — were dead.
The next morning, schools in two different jurisdictions operated on a two-hour delay.
And, in the months to follow, five teens would be charged and convicted in what became generally understood as a gun deal gone bad.
But for the residents of Olde Greenwich, life went on. The incident left scars, some visible to the naked eye — bullet-riddled brick facades — and others known only to those who continue to call the neighborhood home.
Sounding the Alarm
Juanita Shanks heard it, too. Shanks, the president and CEO of the nonprofit FailSafe-ERA, was holding a training session at an office building less than half a mile away off Lafayette Boulevard.
The session was titled, “Courage to Change,” and it was geared toward FailSafe’s target population — the formerly incarcerated — as they attempt to re-enter society.
Shanks recalls that while she was confused by the noise, one of her clients recognized it immediately.
“Somebody in the class kept saying, ‘Those are gunshots, guys,’” she said.
Over the next few hours, they witnessed a steady cavalcade of emergency vehicles streaming into and out of the neighborhood, which was placed under a shelter-in-place order by the county sheriff’s department.
“We were stuck there for hours, not knowing what happened,” Shanks recalled.
On a sunny morning in May, a little more than a year after the shooting, Shanks, Pastor Gary Holland and a member of the Olde Greenwich homeowners association have gathered in a parking lot at the head of the development, which straddles the boundary between the City of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania County.
The shooting took place in the 500 block of Olde Greenwich Circle, on the Spotsylvania side.
Within a month, Shanks convened a makeshift coalition of community and faith leaders and law enforcement for a “think-tank-style” conversation on youth violence.
Over the past year, the response, now known as Sounding the Alarm, has grown into a robust initiative, with an emphasis on early intervention and youth empowerment. And one concrete, if ambitious, aim: to build a playground, a space for the kids of Olde Greenwich not covered in pavement.
An old playground that sits unused and unkept in the Olde Greenwich subdivision is being giving a chance for a new life, thanks to the efforts of Juanita Shanks and Pastor Gary Holland.
It’s not much of a playground yet, more like a vacant lot between Farrell Lane and Olde Greenwich Circle with an unanchored jungle gym painted (perhaps conveniently) the color of rust. A broken skateboard sits splintered at the base of a slide.
Press the Issue
Failsafe-ERA is raising funds and seeking community partnerships to build a new playground in the Olde Greenwich neighborhood. Learn more and donate here.
But, as Shanks holds up a contractor’s rendering titled “Olde Greenwich Community Option 1,” she can envision mulch, manicured grass and merriment.
The other thing that she remembers about that day was the weather. Temperatures dipped into the low 40s, a slight atmospheric anomaly that she reasons may have prevented a more chilling outcome.
“I think if it had not been cold, the kids would have been out there, and they would have been caught in the middle of that gunfire,” she said. “And that’s why this playground is so important, because they need a place to play other than in the middle of the street.”
‘I barely come outside’
According to law enforcement and media reports, somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 rounds were fired on April 8, 2025.
One of them lodged in a woman’s refrigerator.
The woman, who asked not to be identified, lives in the 400 block of Olde Greenwich Circle with her mother. She said they were in the kitchen around the time the shooting started but quickly sought cover.
“Lucky we did, and headed our separate ways,” she recounted. “And the bullet had came through our kitchen window. It shattered our kitchen window. It came through the kitchen window and went through our refrigerator. So we all had to get a new refrigerator.”
Spotsylvania sheriff’s deputies interviewed her, she said, and attempted to gather physical evidence. That particular search, however, ended up a cold case.
“He said, ‘Well, we’re not going in your refrigerator to look for it,’” the woman recalled. “It was a big old bullet hole through the refrigerator and stuff like that. And when they went to go move it, they said, ‘Oh, we could never find the trajectory.’”
A bullet hole in the brick facade of a townhome leaves a subtle reminder of the events of April 8, 2025, when three teens lost their lives to gun violence.
Another bullet lodged in the brick facade of the woman’s home and a third, she pointed out during an interview, chipped a shutter on the second floor. When the shooting stopped, the woman finally worked up the nerve to open her front door.
It was a mistake. On the sidewalk directly in front of her, she saw someone wearing all hot pink suffering from a gunshot wound to the head.
“We started crying because I thought it was a girl,” she said.
The woman who spoke to the Free Press said she used to enjoy washing her vehicle before the shooting. That vehicle had to be replaced because of several bullet holes, and she’s no longer concerned about keeping up appearances.
“I barely come outside,” she said. “What I do is talk to my neighbors real quick and come back in. That’s about it.”
‘We owe them that’
The walls of the conference room bore motivational quotes from Oprah, JFK and Nelson Mandela, and the list of attendees wasn’t lacking in star power, either.
The June meeting of Sounding the Alarm, held at FailSafe’s headquarters in the Westwood Shopping Center, included Fredericksburg Schools Superintendent Dr. Marci Catlett, Fredericksburg Commonwealth’s Attorney Libby Humphries and motivational speaker Antwaun Gay, among others.
Over the next 90 minutes, the group discussed everything from getting the word out to future plans to fundraising options for the playground.
Sgt. Steven Curtis of the Stafford Sheriff’s Office offered a thorough accounting of youth crime statistics in Planning District 16, which encompasses Stafford, Spotsylvania, Caroline and King George counties and the City of Fredericksburg.
In the Fredericksburg area, explained Curtis, youth gangs operate primarily through subtle social media use.
“You’re not going to see a lot of flashing gang signs or tattoos and things like that,” he said.
And, he noted, 88% of all juvenile court case offenses in 2024 concerned the 13- to 17-year-old age range.
“Once they get through the teen years and go into 18, 20 and past that, you do see a heavy downtrend,” Curtis said.
Getting kids through those teen years has become Holland’s focus within the initiative. Each month, the pastor brings teens from all over the community together to learn basic financial literacy, life skills — or, as was the case last month — simply to experience a Fredericksburg Nationals game.
“Some of them had never been to a game, ever,” he said.
Humphries noted that the city’s teen violence steering committee, which was formed in the wake of the murder of former James Monroe High School student Jasiah Smith in 2023, hired a consultant to produce a comprehensive survey on the multifaceted issue. That report is now complete, she told the group, and City Council will discuss its findings in the coming months.
For her part, Shanks brought the conversation back to the playground. Sounding the Alarm applied for a grant for the project through Lowe’s but won’t hear back until after the summer, she said.
Juanita Shanks, the founder and CEO of FailSafe-ERA, looks over plans for a new playground in the Olde Greenwich subdivision.
The group discussed various funding possibilities — including partnerships with local builders and contractors — but didn’t settle on any definitive action.
Per one estimate, the project will cost $250,000, and no money has come in yet.
Until that happens, the playground is just a promise, Shanks said: a promise to that neighborhood’s youth left unfulfilled.
“And we owe them that,” Shanks said. “We owe that to ourselves. We owe that to our communities.
The broken house
At first glance, the block in question hasn’t changed much since the day of the shooting.
Trash cans line both sides of the street, arranged at regular intervals.
Due to a drainage issue, the sidewalk still floods after any appreciable amount of rainfall, neighbors said, forcing them to leave their house in rainboots.
And, while it’s unlikely that Olde Greenwich will ever again experience anything like the April 2025 event that fits most definitions of a mass shooting, the spectre of gun violence lives rent-free in residents’ minds.
The 500 block of Olde Greenwich Circle was the scene of a mass shooting on April 8, 2025.
Danielle remembers her boys — ages 4, 8 and 10 at the time — running upstairs during the April shooting, her oldest dropping to his knees in prayer. For Danielle, who recently turned 40 and has been living in Fredericksburg her whole life, the event shook her faith in the neighborhood.
It shattered for good, along with the windows of her husband’s SUV, about 2:30 a.m. on July 13, 2025. Another bullet pierced the front of the townhouse and lodged in the back door. According to the Spotsylvania Sheriffs Office, the case is still open, and there are no suspects or leads.
“After that, I was really done,” Danielle said. “I mean, it’s like, how many times, you know, does this have to happen in order for you to be like, ‘OK, this is not where I’m supposed to be.’”
At her husband’s urging, she and her sons moved in with her parents; he stayed behind.
“Even with going back to the house, having to get my stuff and minding my children’s things, it’s like it replays,” said Danielle, who requested that the Free Press use her first name as she still has family in the neighborhood.
It was mid-October, Danielle said, before she slept through the night.
Both she and her sons have sought counseling in the wake of the shootings. Her youngest — who was sleeping during the July incident — seemed most affected.
“I think the hardest part of listening to him talk is, he refers to the [Farrell Lane] townhouse as ‘the broken house,’” Danielle said.
In the past six months, however, Danielle has noticed a change in her boys. They’re sleeping better, smiling more, once again asking to ride their bikes.
“Just from the neighborhood alone,” she said. “You don’t want your kids to live in fear.”
Editor’s note: This is the first installment in a series of stories about youth gun violence in the Fredericksburg area and what is being done to address the issue.
