You lost your son in 2012 and built a place so no one walks through it alone. Yesterday, Louisville walked with you.

Dear Mr. Forbes,

This is the third letter of Orange June, and it's the one that doesn't argue with anybody. Day one was five statistics. Day two was a stalled bill and a hard question for two senators. This one is just a man, a walk, and a thank-you — because the whole point of wearing orange is the people who already live inside the number, and you've spent fourteen years being one of them on purpose.

In 2012 your son was killed by gunfire. I'm not going to write a sentence pretending I know what that did to you, because I don't. What I can write is what you did with it. In 2016 you founded the Mothers of Murdered Sons and Daughters of Kentucky — a place for the people the news moves on from after the vigil. You run free grief-support groups twice a month, led by certified facilitators, and you put four words on the door of the whole thing: "No One Should Walk Through Grief Alone."

That isn't a slogan to you. It's a job description you wrote for yourself out of the worst day of your life, and you've shown up to it for a decade.

On June 6 your group held the End Gun Violence Awareness Walk through Louisville, and dozens of people came, put on orange, and walked. What you told the cameras was plain, and I'm keeping it exactly the way you said it: "I wanna make a difference, I wanna make a change." You said the walkers were "walking in unison in unity to try to send that clear message" — that this isn't acceptable, and that the people carrying it aren't carrying it by themselves.

That same day, Governor Beshear proclaimed it Gun Violence Awareness Day and the weekend Wear Orange Weekend across Kentucky. The orange you've been wearing for years became, for one official weekend, the whole Commonwealth's color. You didn't wait for the proclamation to start. The proclamation caught up to you.

One of the people who walked with you was AunDrea Anderson, and what she said belongs in this letter unedited, because it's the entire reason the walk exists: "My son and my nephew were killed by gun violence in 2021. It was Halloween, and they were at work when it happened." At work. On Halloween. A son and a nephew, in the same sentence.

And then she said the thing this whole month is built around: "We need people to realize that gun violence is prevalent, and it's not just today." She's right, Mr. Forbes. It is not just today. It's the twelve minutes between today's and tomorrow's. That's why your group doesn't close when the walk ends, and it's why I'm still writing these letters on the days nothing happens.

The Mothers of Murdered Sons and Daughters of Kentucky is a registered 501(c)(3), and it runs on almost nothing. A few dollars to them pays for the grief groups, the certified facilitators, and the year-round advocacy — the quiet, unglamorous work of making sure the next AunDrea Anderson doesn't sit in an empty room. If my five statistics made you angry and my stalled bill made you tired, here's the thing you can actually do tonight.

You should know who's thanking you, because it's a stranger. I run a small paper you've never heard of, on a four-dollar-a-day budget and a rule against taking anyone's check. I found you through a local news clip and a walk in a city I've never set foot in. I'm not from Louisville. I don't know your son's name, and I didn't ask, because that was never mine to print.

What I know is that you turned the worst thing that can happen to a parent into a standing invitation for other parents not to be alone — and that during the one month a year the country agrees to look, somebody outside Kentucky should say it back to you, out loud, with your own words in it.

Thank you, Mr. Forbes. For the walk, for the ten years, for the four words on the door. Louisville walked with you yesterday. Consider this the rest of us, in orange, a few states over, walking too.

— Michael

Spotlight Dispatch · Orange June · Day 3 · June 7, 2026

michael@spotlightdispatch.com