MUNCIE, Ind. — When Tay Phillips was shot to death last week at an eastside Muncie apartment complex, the pain was personal for George Foley, Jr., program director for Muncie Parks.
”This is the first time we’ve lost a kid in our program in our five years,” said Foley in his Parks office, a photo of this summer’s Muncie Teen Internship Program participants on a shelf over his shoulder. ”He just asked us to give him a chance, trying to do better, do better in society, and that honestly really touched us, you don’t get that from a lot of youth that wanna be better in their community and be better in their life and so he worked with us for six weeks, never missed a day, did the assignment he was supposed to do, never heard a bad report about him whatsoever.”
The 15-year-old camper was murdered in a suspected robbery attempt.
Five teens, ages 14 to 19 years old, have been charged in the case.
”It was very hurtful for me as an individual because we’ve always talked about how do we reach these kids after the program and he was one of those kids where we wanted to continue to touch,” said Foley.
While announcing the charges, Delaware County Prosecutor Eric Hoffman said, “Muncie does indeed have a juvenile gang problem.”
Muncie Parks Superintendent Carl Malone has spent more than a decade working with Muncie youth and doesn’t necessarily buy the juvenile gang assessment.
“We do have to hammer out the fact that there is crisis right here in our community,” he said. “I would say a crisis more so than I would say gang problem. I would say we have a crisis problem because we have a core house that is allowing kids to carry handguns, and then who is responsible?”
Malone said from 2012 to 2016, Muncie promoted programs aimed at curbing youth violence, but that interest waned until a street party shooting last summer left one man dead and several wounded.
”We’re in a crisis now,” he said. “So, we missed the trigger phase where we could’ve educated and put the resources in place but now we’re at the crisis mode and that’s where things happen, that’s where things get out of control, that’s where multiple guns become a problem.”
Following the street party shooting in 2023, Mayor Dan Ridenour convened meetings with community stakeholders to study Muncie violence and propose solutions.
Malone said that effort has been slow to get off the ground.
”The prosecutor’s office was there in the meeting and there was the deputy mayor along with some probationary people and some other core people in the community just to have conversations about how do we move forward and what’s our game plan,” he said. “Let’s start putting the schools and the judges and the prosecutors and everybody in the room and family to talk about how do we get this under control.”
Malone said the mayor’s office has begun exploring federal grant funding opportunities to find the money to pay for such programs.
