A 13-year-old girl who wrote an inspiring essay about gun violence has been killed after being hit by a stray bullet.

Sandra Parks was shot dead last Thursday while she was sat in her bedroom in Milwaukee.

Her mother Bernice Parks had been awoken by the sound of gunshots at around 7pm and quickly rushed to her daughter and found her bleeding.

Prosecutors said: ‘The next thing she heard was (Sandra) yelling: ‘I’m shot! I’m shot!’

A young girl penned a winning essay about gun violence in Milwaukee, two years before she was killed by a bullet in her own home.That girl was 13-year-old Sandra Parks, an eighth-grade student. She was was in her bedroom Thursday night near 13th and Hopkins when someone shot into her house, killing her.

In an essay she wrote two years before her death, she talked about hoping to see an end to violence in her neighborhood.

“We shall overcome has been lost in lies of who we are. Who we have become,” wrote Parks an essay.

“We need to rewrite our story so that faith and hope for a better tomorrow is not only within us. But we believe it and we put it into action.”

The words of then-11-year-old Parks as she reads her essay on Dr. Martin Luther King Junior.

Isaac Barnes, 26, was arrested for first-degree reckless homicide in connection with the shooting and also faces a number of other charges.

Prosecutors said he was trying to shoot his former girlfriend, who was visiting her sister who lives in the neighbourhood, with an ‘AK-47 style firearm’.

Untrell Oden, 27, was also arrested and faces two counts of possession of a firearm by a felon.

He is accused of helping Barnes hide his weapons.

Metro.co.uk