Brandon McGinley: My son went to the park to play baseball. He ended up hiding from gunfire.

Brandon McGinley / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

My 10-year-old son didn’t think anything of the loud pop at Brookline Memorial Park on Monday evening. Cap guns are common there.

People running also wasn’t unusual, so he was inclined to keep eating nachos with his teammates before their 8 p.m. Little League game.

It was the screaming — the grown-ups’ screaming — that made it clear something was different, and very wrong.

The monster

The park was as busy as ever that evening, a Rockwellian portrait of Americana. Three or four dek hockey teams were playing or getting ready to play. Same with the baseball teams, including my son’s squad, waiting for their field to clear so they could practice.

Hundreds of people were there: players, siblings, parents, friends, guests from other parts of the city. Every amenity the park offers was in use, including the shabby but serviceable playground. These moments are one of the main reasons we live in the city, so our kids have the freedom to experience all this, just a walk away.

The gunshot shattered the peace, extinguished the joy, pierced the sanctuary.

My son and his teammates joined the frantic crowd running away from the noise. One of his coaches smartly opened a storage building and hustled the kids to the cramped second floor. The boys called it their bunker. One suggested barricading the door with baseball equipment, in case the shot was the first of a massacre.

It wasn’t, thank God. That this would be the boys’ first thought — that they immediately feared that this could be the time the monster of gun violence came to devour them — is a damning commentary on American society.

What actually happened was more stupid than evil. There was a fight between teenage boys over a girl. The girl’s father intervened in the fracas, then he went to his car and returned with a gun. He fired it, near the crowded playground. No one was hit. It could have been much worse.

More than murders

Allegheny County Controller Corey O’Connor raised this incident during Wednesday night’s KDKA-TV mayoral debate as evidence that the city isn’t as safe as Mayor Ed Gainey claims. As the pre-taped debate aired, in fact, Mr. O’Connor was visiting with my son’s coach and other Brookline Little League participants at the park, a welcomed gesture.

During the debate, Mr. Gainey responded vigorously, showing the spirit that inspired voters four years ago. He pounded his chest and said that no one cares more about gun violence than him — he lost his sister in a shooting in Homewood — and pleaded with Brookline residents to send tips about the incident. It turned out an arrest was made before the debate aired, but the mayor’s sentiment was surely well-taken.

It reminded me of a neighborhood meeting Mr. Gainey attended in Brookline three years ago after another shooting, this one a deadly drug-related attack. It was in the early, still-optimistic days of his administration, and I wrote of his remarks that they “developed to a crescendo, passionate and defiant and raw.”

The political problem now is that Mr. Gainey has claimed to have made Pittsburgh safer entirely on the basis of a decline in homicides. That decline is surely a good thing, but everyone who lives in the city, or experiences it regularly, understands that homicides don’t tell the whole story.

The gunshot in Brookline Park that sent dozens of children into hiding, fearing for their lives: It won’t appear in the homicide data. It won’t even appear in the assault data. But it wounded this community in a more lasting and serious way than even bloodier violence might have.

End of the innocence

The day after the shooting, there was to be another Little League game at Brookline Park. It ended up being rained out, but before that my 8-year-old daughter called me at work. She and her friends and older siblings typically walk to games by themselves. But this time, she said she didn’t want to go if I wasn’t with her.

The fear will fade over time, but our feeling of the park as a sanctuary will never fully return. For the kids who were there, and for many others in the neighborhood, the gunshot will be a core childhood memory, and an inflection point. It marks a too-early end to the time of innocence.

In the decade since we moved to the city, I’ve fielded much skepticism about that decision, and I’ve consistently brushed it off. But five months ago, I wrote here that for the first time I was experiencing doubts about the commitment we’ve made to this neighborhood. The most pressing question was this: “Will Brookline remain safe enough that our kids can roam and learn the independence and confidence and resiliency we value so much?”

Monday night’s bullet may not have pierced flesh, but it lacerated the community, and particularly the families who chose this community to raise their children. Healing will take time and a scar will remain, but we’re committed to that process. We’re not going anywhere.

But there’s also no going back to the time before the gunshot.

Brandon McGinley’s previous column was “Pittsburgh's looming fiscal crisis could spell the end of its middle class.”