People awakened Sunday morning to the shocking news that 19-year-old Latasha Roundtree died early Sunday morning from gunshot wounds she received Saturday night.

A 2012 graduate of Washington high school, Roundtree had been one of the top players on the girls’ basketball team. She was good enough to have earned a scholarship from William Penn University, although she apparently decided that college was not the right route for her and withdrew earlier this month.

It’s too bad it didn’t work out. Maybe she wouldn’t have found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time had she been in Oskaloosa rather than a house in southwest Cedar Rapids Saturday night. We’ll never know.

What we do know is that there has been a killing – a murder – and a young lady that by all accounts of her friends, coaches and teammates was a shining beacon of fun and excitement is gone.

We can lament the fact of her youth and promise displayed on basketball courts throughout eastern Iowa and say, “How dare someone do that to one of our young athletes?”

Or we can declare our outrage as a community and say “How dare someone do that.”

We do not know the circumstances of Tasha Roundtree’s death.  We do know the police are treating her death as a homicide – a murder. That is enough for us to know there is something terribly wrong in this city, so wrong that a deep cleansing needs to occur that no amount of tears can accomplish.

Godspeed Tasha Roundtree. May you be the last victim of this senseless violence.