“Behind The Headlines,” hosted by Eric Barnes, CEO of The Daily Memphian, airs on WKNO Fridays at 7 p.m. and Sundays at 8:30 a.m. Watch the show now via the video link atop this article or listen to the podcast version of the show with extended discussion not included in the television version.

Many Memphians went to bed late Wednesday, Sept. 7, contemplating what they believed was a nighttime shooting spree that killed one person and wounded another.

For many, it could have been a restless sleep where a police warning to stay off the streets for several hours mixed with a lingering horror less than a week after the kidnapping and slaying of Eliza Fletcher, a pre-kindergarten teacher, as she went for a run near the University of Memphis.

They awoke Thursday to a much grimmer reality and greater human toll than what had profoundly roiled the city’s relative peace over a six-day period.

Ezekiel Kelly, according to police, started killing people before dawn Wednesday, pausing several hours between incidents that left three people dead and three people wounded in different parts of the city.

It wasn’t a high-speed race through a city already in mourning and questioning itself. It was almost 24 hours from the first killing to the midnight City Hall press conference.

The names and remembrances of the victims followed during the day. Organizers of a Friday predawn run for Fletcher prepared for a crowd of thousands, and Fletcher’s family set funeral plans for the weekend.

The names of other recent victims of violent crime just a few weeks earlier found their way into the reaction — official and unofficial, public and private, by social media and in face-to-face discussions.

“We feel the weight of this moment. We feel the hurt and the terror that comes with such violent actions,” Rev. Ayanna Watkins, director of MICAH (Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action and Hope), said on the WKNO Channel 10 program “Behind The Headlines.”

“For us, what we do is we feel. What we do is we go to the ground of who we say we are and we stand on that ground and we say we believe a better world is possible,” she said. “We believe that all people have dignity. We believe that every life is precious. We believe that there is a way forward from it. And then we get to work.”

The nature and timing of that work, however, depends on who you talk to in a community that just came off a contentious race for District Attorney General in the Aug. 4 county general elections.

The backdrop for Democrat Steve Mulroy’s upset of Republican incumbent prosecutor Amy Weirich was many of the issues about the criminal justice system now being debated with a more somber weight and different urgency behind them.

Memphis City Council member Chase Carlisle’s post reacting to Fletcher’s killing became something of a barometer or lightning rod on what the incident meant for the local discussion of crime and punishment — ahead of Wednesday’s four killings.

“The DA must deliver justice,” Carlisle posted Monday, Sept. 5, as part of a Twitter thread. “Capital murder demands the death penalty. A plea or lesser charge is an insult regardless of race, gender or social status.”

That specific part of the thread drew more than 100 likes up to Wednesday’s crime spree.

The comments, for the most part, were a different reaction.

“ ‘We are sad. Kill him!’ ” one response read. “What a terrible insensitive tweet.”

Another said given Carlisle’s elected position, it was “inexcusable, unprofessional and arguably unethical.”

Still another replied: “Trying to score political points off of the community’s anger and grief right now is pretty disgusting. As if we can’t see this tweet for what it is.”

The “Behind The Headlines” discussion included Josh Spickler, director of the criminal justice reform group “Just City.”

Spickler is part of Mulroy’s transition team, named as Mulroy took office Sept. 1. Even before that, Spickler had drawn the specific ire of Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland for his opposition to the state’s recently enacted “Truth in Sentencing” law.

“We are sitting here at the end of a week where there have been two of the more heinous and just emotionally overwhelming crimes that I can remember in my 25 years in this city,” Spickler said in the podcast version of the show.

“These are extreme cases,” he said. “There’s not a progressive prosecutor in the world that is not going to attack these with all the tools he or she has. And I believe that’s what Steve Mulroy will do as well.”

Even before Fletcher’s death, Democratic U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen of Memphis has recently been commenting on the city’s problem with violent crime in a departure from most of his posts about the Jan. 6 committee hearings and other Capitol-based issues.

After Wednesday’s violent crime spree, Cohen called the events of the week “harrowing and disturbing.”

And he called for a “summit” of local elected leaders for “a comprehensive approach involving the schools and the juvenile justice system to help reverse these disturbing trends.”

Cohen also wrote to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland seeking more federal grants from the Justice Department.

Republican U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee was on Fox News Thursday morning with a different reaction, specifically to the crimes of which Kelly is accused.

“If this criminal has served his full term, he would not have been out of the street creating and committing other crimes,” Blackburn said. “It is pretty simple. If you do the crime, you do the time.

“And we need to get back to this truth in sentencing — keeping people who are violent criminals locked up and off the streets,” she said. “You have to get away from this lenient sentencing and letting people out early on these violent crimes.”

Blackburn avoided assigning partisan blame.

She agreed with similar remarks by Strickland, who is a former local Democratic Party chairman.

Earlier in the day Thursday, Blackburn posted a video made in her office that blamed Democrats for not focusing enough on bringing inflation and crime down — blaming illegal immigration for the rise in crime far from the U.S. border with Mexico.

“The Democrats — we should have known it — they are focused on the wrong priorities,” she said.

Cardell Orrin, the Tennessee director of Stand For Children and part of the local Justice and Safety Alliance, disagreed fundamentally with the approaches of longer sentences, no early release and more police.

“I think that it’s mistaken to say that there are immediate solutions. And folks who are telling you that are not telling the truth,” he said during the BTH discussion.

“Those are things that have been proven that we know are not going to work,” he said. “Those are things we’ve been doing for the last few decades. So clearly they are not immediate solutions.”

Strickland and other critics of that viewpoint argue that the immediate solution is the person in jail for a longer time cannot harm people and threaten the public’s safety.

Kelly, the suspect in Wednesday’s crime spree, was sentenced to three years in prison on a plea deal that saw him plead guilty to aggravated assault after charges of attempted murder, firearms and reckless endangerment were dropped in the deal.

He was released after 11 months.

“It’s time for the majority of us to stop treating jail as out of sight, out of mind,” Watkins said.

“If the young man who was out shooting last night was in jail for 11 months, what happened in 11 months of incarceration that could have turned his thinking around,” she said. “If length made a difference, then the person who kidnapped Eliza Fletcher — the 20 years he spent in prison versus the 22 or 24 he was sentenced to — truth in sentencing should have kicked in in two decades. … Something should have happened.”

Dr. Jason Martin, the Democratic nominee for Tennessee governor, blamed the violence on Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s “radical, out-of-touch policies on firearms.”

“If Governor Bill Lee showed half the enthusiasm for smart gun policy and community safety that he does for regulating reproductive rights and school libraries, we would live in a safer Tennessee,” Martin said in an emailed statement.

Lee, who will be in Memphis Friday morning to address the violence, let the truth-in-sentencing law become law without his signature in a break with the Republican leadership of the state House and state Senate.

He also could have vetoed it but didn’t.

Lee said the measure will increase the cost of housing more inmates for longer and will not reduce crime.

“Widespread evidence suggests that this policy will result in more victims, higher recidivism, increased crime and prison overcrowding, all with an increased cost to taxpayers,” he said in May.