ORLANDO, Fla. — Community activists are working to stop youth violence in Orange County and parts of Orlando.
It comes after Orlando Police said gangs were involved in the downtown shooting that injured nine people back in July.
Activists said with schools out for winter break, it is peak time for violence to break out. However, a familiar face with many of the players in these potential turf wars is trying to play peacemaker.
For over 20 years, Ellis Daniley or who many simply know as “coach” worked in the parks and recreation department for Orange County in a program called “Rec & Roll.”
The program traveled to different parks across the community, trying to provide and promote recreation for kids.
The parks program is no more, but the coach is still in the game. Mentoring and coaching kids and teenagers on the track and football field.
“The kids that I developed and had relationships with when they were seven and eight-year-old kids, there was never an ending point,” Ellis Daniley more commonly known by coach in the community, says.
Some of his former athletes have grown up to compete in the olympics, or play college football. Some have even made it to the NFL.
Others have got in to turf wars all across Orlando and Orange County. These disputes, he said, mostly originate from music.
“I say something about my hood. This person says something about their hood,” Ellis explains. “Sometimes these turf wars and stuff like that don’t even make sense.”
Over the last 20 plus years, these turf wars have reached all over Orange County. Areas such as Carver Shores, Mercy Drive, Pine Hills, Silver Star, Apopka, and West Orlando.
Fellow community leader, Bishop Kelvin Cobaris sadly has done many of the funerals.
“It’s coming to the point where it is beef to blood,” Bishop Kelvin Cobaris says. “To the point where I will take someone’s life because they don’t live in my neighborhood.”
Cobaris continues to go in to neighborhoods to preach, sadly it often ends with needed prayers.
“If you live by the sword, you will die by the sword,” Cobaris states. “You take someone’s life. It’s a guarantee someone’s going to take yours.”
Not all turf wars end in death. Some also end behind bars. That’s another area coach Ellis tries to help but with bail as a bail-bondsman. Of the hundreds of kids he used to coach, he said roughly 20% of them have eventually either been arrested, shot, or killed.
When a former player or one of their parents comes to his office across from the Orange County jail, he said it gives him a chance to explain why they never want to be back in his office.
Ellis is now ready for a fresh approach, trying to sit down with many of these individuals who are inciting the neighborhood violence.
“It is a lot, but it only takes one or two to create an open pathway so we can avoid a lot of this foolishness,” said Ellis.
Coach Ellis is trying to call a winning play. The hope is that the players involved will listen.
According to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office gang unit, from January to November of this year they have made 49 physical arrests of people known to be documented gang members.
Besides those physical arrests, OCSO says it issued 27 warrants, but like the physical arrests, may not have happened from a gang related incident.