10 years since Hadiya Pendleton killed in Kenwood shooting weeks after attending Obama inauguration
The 15-year-old had just left a final exam, joining friends at Harsh Park, when a car pulled up and shot at the group.
CHICAGO (WLS) -- Sunday marks ten years since Hadiya Pendleton was killed in Chicago gun violence.
The teen's image is frozen in time on her mother's sweatshirt, as a smiling and happy 15-year-old.
In 2013, Pendleton was shot and killed while under a park pavilion in the city's Kenwood neighborhood.
She had just left a final exam and was joining friends at Harsh Park when a car pulled up and shot at the group.
Mickiael Ward mistook her for a rival gang member.
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She had performed with the King College Prep High School majorette squad at President Obama's second inauguration just a week before her death.
Her death became a national symbol of the gun violence epidemic in Chicago and the entire country.
Her family said they can only speculate who she would have become -- now 10 years later -- at 25.
Her parents said time has not diminished their loss. However, they have done their best to bring something positive out of senseless tragedy of her murder, taking on a role they never asked for.
"You live your life in a way that this shouldn't touch our family, but it did," said Pendleton's mom, Cleo Pendleton.
"I think when this happened to us, I just didn't want this to happen to no one else. It hurts," said the teen's father, Nate Pendleton.
Pendleton's brother was just 10-years-old when she was killed. He is now a 20-year-old man trying to find his place in the world without the big sister who always looked out for him.
"I still get flashbacks like it happened yesterday," he said.
While they have become familiar faces in the media as victims of senseless violence and also by starting the Wear Orange Campaign in her memory, Pendleton's parents remind us their story is not a made for TV. It is a heartbreaking tragedy they are still trying to come to grips with every day, a decade later.
"It's not a story. We are real people and this is real serious. It's been ten years but it feels like 10 minutes to us," Cleo said.
"We went to the cemetery this morning and visited Hadiya and I still cry like it's the first day," Nate said.
Cleo spoke with ABC7 in August about gun violence in Chicago and how she encouraged mothers who have also lost children that healing is personal and takes time.
"It's a process, and it's yours," she said. "If you need to walk and cry, you cry."
Her mother said she can only imagine who Pendleton might have become had she lived.
There are plans to plant a Garden in Hadiya Pendleton's honor at the future site of the Obama Presidential Center, which is now under construction in Jackson Park. It is meant to be a place where people can contemplate their unlimited potential -- potential that Pendleton never got to realize.
