Gun Violence Seen Through the Eyes of Children

This meticulously reported series offers a ground level, panoramic view of the devastating and profound impact of gun violence on children's lives. The results, at once harrowing and revelatory, provide a fresh and compelling look at one of the most pressing issues of our time. Judges called this package a "remarkable series spanning multiple events of violence, each examined with unflinching clarity and emotional rawness." Originally published by The Washington Post between April - December, 2017.

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For a second-grader, gunfire, school lockdowns, then the worst violence of all

‘Did your father die?’
For a second-grader, gunfire, school lockdowns, then the worst violence of all

By John Woodrow Cox, Originally published by The Washington Post on April 20, 2017

The boy was sitting in his favorite spot, atop his dad’s bed, playing their favorite game, “NBA 2K16” on the Xbox One, when he heard the sound. Pop, pop, pop, from just outside the second-floor window on that warm summer afternoon. Tyshaun McPhatter’s father burst through the open doorway, crouching. “Get down on the floor,” he screamed, and the 7-year-old knew what that meant: more gunshots.

Bullets, Tyshaun had learned by then, could break glass and rip through skin and bone. On his dad’s dresser was a reminder: a three-inch button inscribed with “Rest in Peace” that honored a family friend shot two blocks away. Tyshaun didn’t want to get hurt like that, so he dropped the Xbox controller and leapt down to the worn hardwood floor of their aging three-bedroom house in Southeast Washington. Chest throbbing, he hid behind the footboard and covered his head with his hands.

He was afraid, but not as much as he had been a year earlier when someone started shooting near a playground just as he skidded down a red plastic slide. Tyshaun figured all kids heard gunfire outside their homes, so he might as well learn to be brave, like his dad.

Tyshaun McPhatter with his father, Andrew McPhatter, a few years ago. 

“I’m not scared of nothing,” he started telling himself.

Tyshaun lived part time with his father, Andrew McPhatter, along a row of 70-year-old, red-brick duplexes in Congress Heights, just three miles from million-dollar townhouses and $14 cocktails. But on their side of the Anacostia River, where more than half of the city’s homicides occur and nearly every other child grows up in poverty, many boys and girls learn to navigate peril before they learn to read.

For kids in Tyshaun’s neighborhood, and millions of others in high-crime communities across the country, the unrelenting threat of violence shapes almost every aspect of their lives: The streets they walk down, the parks they visit, the pictures they draw, the nightmares they have, the number of parents they come home to.

Tyshaun’s mom, Donna Johnson, had worried since he was born about how that environment would affect her boy, who had both a deep well of compassion for people he sensed were suffering and a tendency to explode in anger, often with his fists, when he was being teased or challenged.

She wanted Tyshaun’s story told so people who live in far-safer places would understand his world. His mother, relatives, teachers and friends all agreed to talk about him.

As he prepared to start second grade in the weeks after the shooting outside his house, the danger around him only crept closer. He came home one day to discover that a bullet had punched a dime-sized hole in their steel front door — just below his eye level — before tearing into the back of the living-room TV. In November, five days before Tyshaun’s eighth birthday, another of his dad’s friends was killed, and one more died in January after being shot 500 feet from their house.

The bloodshed intensified in late February. Four people were wounded in one evening less than half a mile away, and another was hit four nights later.

Then, at 10:50 a.m. on the first day of March, someone raised a gun one block from Tyshaun’s home and a dozen steps from the front gate to his school, Eagle Academy Public Charter. But inside, Tyshaun couldn’t hear the five shots that would thrust the violence circling him for years into the center of his life.

Tyshaun in the bedroom he shared with his dad in Southeast Washington.

‘I hope my daddy’s okay’

Tyshaun was at lunch, trying to avoid the day’s free serving of beefaroni, when he overheard a teacher mention that the school had been locked down.

That didn’t bother him. Tyshaun was used to lockdowns. Eagle had been through one just a week earlier, so as class time approached, he headed out of the cafeteria, where a seven-foot-high red poster hung on the wall. “The Cat in the Hat,” it declared next to an image of the character, “does not like that violence.”

He didn’t think much more about the latest commotion in his neighborhood until he passed by the school’s front lobby. Through an expansive glass window, he saw yellow tape and police cars. Tyshaun’s eyes fixed on the red and blue flashing lights.

His house was in that direction, just beyond all of those officers.

“I hope my daddy’s okay,” he recalled thinking.

Tyshaun had last seen his father two days earlier, when he dropped the boy off at school after their weekend together. His parents had split up years earlier, and while his dad remained in Southeast, his mom moved two miles away to Oxon Hill, Md., in part to escape the chaos. Always, though, they had raised Tyshaun together.

His parents believed the best way to keep him safe was to keep him busy, so he was perpetually signed up for something: Cub Scouts, hockey, football. Tyshaun, at a wiry 4-foot-4, had decided to play linebacker for the Washington Redskins when he grew up.

Andrew, 28, had three sons, but people who’d known him as a child, before the dreadlocks, called Tyshaun his twin. They had the same chocolate eyes, strong chin, quiet smile. And both tended to cock their heads to the side in just the same way. Tyshaun used it for everything: tongue out when he wanted a laugh, eyes pleading when he wanted a treat, lips pursed when he wanted to look like a teenager.

He’d stay at the house his dad shared with his grandma and her fiance mostly on weekends, but often longer. They seldom went outside, because it was safer not to, so they spent hours in Andrew’s room, where father taught son multiplication tables and son taught father the moves to the rap song “Juju on That Beat.” Sometimes, his dad, who worked construction, tried to rub his smelly feet on Tyshaun as the boy ducked and dodged and giggled until his eyes watered.

They’d fixate on the Xbox well past his bedtime using Andrew’s screen name, “lilandy,” which Tyshaun thought was stupid because nothing about his 5-foot-9, thick-bearded father seemed little to him. He would even get to play “Grand Theft Auto V” and “Battlefield 4,” the violent games his mom didn’t like.

About real-life violence, though, he said his dad was firm: Never pick up a gun, but fight if you have to, because fighters live to fight again.

Now Tyshaun was back in his classroom, grappling with math problems, and the red and blue lights were still flashing outside, and he still didn’t know why.

He also didn’t know why he’d been told that his mom was picking him up early, only to be told later that she wasn’t. And he never did know that she had come but collapsed in the lobby, unable to face him.

Not until that evening did he see her, and that’s when he knew something was wrong.

“Mom, are you okay?” Tyshaun asked as they sat in the darkness in her gray Dodge Durango.

She pulled him onto her lap.

“Your dad was shot,” his mom said, but he was still alive, and that gave Tyshaun hope.

At school the next day, when a friend who knew about the shooting asked if he was all right, Tyshaun heard another classmate laugh. Furious, he shoved the boy.

LEFT: A note Tyshaun wrote to his wounded father. RIGHT: Tyshaun passes a bullet hole in the front door of his home in Southeast.

Tyshaun desperately wanted to see his father, but at his age, the hospital wouldn’t allow it, so he insisted on writing a letter. “Dad I hope you are ok,” he scribbled in black ink, promising to “give up any thing on my body for you.”

On Sunday, four days after the shooting, Tyshaun’s mom picked her son up from the home of friends who’d invited him for a sleepover.

“All right, Ty. I’ll see you next weekend,” one of them said.

“No you’re not. I’m going to be with my dad,” Tyshaun replied, and he thought of their last weekend together. They had seen “The LEGO Batman Movie” and eaten chicken-flavored instant ramen noodles, Tyshaun’s favorite. They had danced again to the rap song.

Six hours later, his mother got a call at home. When she hung up, she sat on the couch and held his hands as he stood in front of her. She looked him in the eyes.

“Your father, he died today,” she said, and without a word, Tyshaun slumped to the floor.

Tyshaun and his grandmother’s fiance, Carl Potts, walk by the area where the boy's father was shot in front of Eagle Academy Public Charter.

‘We want everybody to live’

“HOMICIDE VICTIM,” read each of the three police reward fliers with photos of three men, including Andrew. They were stacked atop a sign-in table in Tyshaun’s school the evening after his dad’s death. Dozens of parents, many with children, had passed by as they headed inside the cafeteria, converted into an emergency meeting room to discuss the surge in violence. Along Wheeler Road, which ran between Eagle Academy and Tyshaun’s home, six people had been shot in seven days.

Now, after nearly two hours of discussion, a 6-year-old with braids and a bright-pink backpack approached the microphone. Taylor Amoah was a grade behind Tyshaun and didn’t know him, but she cared about what had happened to her schoolmate’s family — what was happening to all of their families.

“Everybody’s got to live,” the first-grader said, her voice soft but tone purposeful. “They won’t be able to live. That’s not fair.”

Taylor still remembered the moment when gunfire erupted as she walked near the Big Chair, an Anacostia landmark, and her mother snatched her up and ran.

“People always shooting around this neighborhood,” Taylor said. “We want everybody to live.”

Behind her sat Tyshaun’s grandma, Jessica Jackson, who believed that her son, with no criminal record, was ambushed in his car simply because of who he knew. Police were investigating the case but had told her they didn’t know who killed him.

That night, the acting chief, city officials and community leaders had already delivered the same message they’d delivered at countless other meetings: Detectives needed help. Petty beefs, not money or drugs, were driving most of the carnage. The violence would lead to more trauma, and the trauma would lead to more violence.

On a nearby wall was a display illustrating that trauma: A question — “What makes you sad in your neighborhood?” — surrounded by 16 pictures children at the school had drawn in response.

“Bang, bang,” an 8-year-old printed next to a man firing three bullets toward another man shouting “NO!”

“Bang, bang. Bang, bang. Bang, bang,” a second 8-year-old wrote next to three people shooting at three other people down the street from a police car.

“Bang, bang, bang,” a 6-year-old scrawled next to two stick figures, smeared in red marker, lying near a set of gravestones inscribed with “RIP.”

The images, Eagle’s staff knew, hadn’t come from TV shows or video games. Almost all of their 700 students, who range from 3 to 9 years old, had witnessed violence or its aftermath.

There were the half-dozen who had needed counseling after passing a body near their bus stop. There was the third-grader who sobbed in class the day after a cousin was shot outside his front door. There was the kindergartner who told teachers how sad he was after his father’s killing on Halloween night.

Then there were the boys who hit girls, because that was what they saw at home, and the girls who got hit but said nothing, because that, too, was what they saw at home.

Eagle’s founders had opened the pre-k through third-grade public charter in 2012 because of the struggles in Congress Heights, not in spite of them. They knew what the growing body of research showed: Chronic exposure to violence could disrupt a child’s brain development and inflict profound mental and emotional damage. At Eagle, a place where so many of its students live in poverty that everyone gets three free meals a day, the staff doesn’t come to work just to teach lessons from books.

One day earlier this school year, Dawne Wilson’s pre-k class of 4- and 5-year-olds was on the playground when she heard gunshots from just beyond Eagle’s eight-foot-high black steel fence.

“Let’s play a game. Everybody get down,” Wilson calmly told them, aware of how important it was that she disguise her fear.

“Being in the middle of a war zone is crazy,” said Wilson, an educator for 29 years. “Some of these children have been through more in their young lives than I’ve been through in my adult life.”

At first, Tyshaun struggled to accept what he’d lost. He imagined creating a potion that would make his dad come back to life. He obsessed over building a time machine, traveling back and whispering in his father’s ear before he got into the car that morning: “Don’t go nowhere, dad.”

Then, one after another, the questions began to tumble out.

“Did my daddy do something to deserve this?” he asked his mom.

“Where was he shot at?”

“Where do guns come from?”

“Did they catch the person?”

“Is the person going to try to come and get me?”

Tyshaun watches TV in his room at his mom’s home in Oxon Hill, Md.

‘Killed y’all’

Neatly laid out atop Tyshaun’s Marvel superheroes bedsheet were his clothes for the funeral.

He’d seen a photo from Andrew’s eighth-grade prom and decided he wanted to look just like that at the service. So his mom had gone to a Kids for Less, and when she brought the outfit home, he arranged it on his lower bunk bed and insisted no one touch it. For three days, no one had.

He slipped on his black shirt and buttoned it up. Then came his silver vest, black pants, black socks and black size 3½ shoes. He snapped on a silver clip-on tie and tucked a matching handkerchief in his vest pocket.

Tyshaun looked down, contemplating why he had to wear what he was wearing.

“Whoever invented guns needs to stop,” he said.

His dad’s death had begun to make him angry, particularly because it remained unsolved and the gunman remained free.

“Police only stay for one week,” he’d told his mom. “They never find out who did it.”

She once overheard him announce to his half brother that he wanted someone to get the shooter — to pay the person back. It unsettled her. That was God’s job, she told him. Then she told him again.

All dressed, he picked up a video game controller and walked over to his dresser, reaching up to turn on his father’s old Xbox One.

“Where’s my daddy’s shirt?” he suddenly asked himself, whipping around to see that the purple Hugo Boss sweatshirt was on the bottom bunk. He had taken that from Andrew’s closet and slept with it every night since, demanding that his mom not wash it so he wouldn’t forget his father’s scent.

Tyshaun stood on the bed so he could peer over the edge of his dresser. On the TV, his character, a soldier armed with a machine gun, sprinted through a big-city downtown.

In an instant, blood splattered across the screen.

“Ah, they sniped me,” he said, before his character was reborn for another firefight.

“Stop playin’ with me,” he continued. “Killed y’all.”

Then he died again, and the leader board popped up. Tyshaun noticed his dad’s screen name, “lilandy.”

“I miss him,” he mumbled.

Tyshaun looks at his mom, Donna Johnson, as she reviews his schoolwork.

Donna, a 29-year-old State Department security officer, didn’t approve of the violent video games, but she understood they kept Tyshaun connected to his dad. And anytime the issue was raised, Tyshaun had an answer. “It’s not real,” he’d say. “It looks like cartoon pictures.”

He’d also begun to repeat the mantra of vigils and community meetings: “Too many black people is dying.”

Now it was almost time to leave for the funeral, but Tyshaun had switched to another game, “Grand Theft Auto.” His new character, a man with cornrows and a tan trench coat, was jogging down the street, shooting at passing cars.

“We got to be leaving,” a relative yelled from downstairs, but Tyshaun kept playing.

On the TV, he heard approaching sirens.

“People always got to call the police,” he said.

“Tyshaun,” someone shouted, and he didn’t answer.

He fired off a few more rounds at a truck.

“We’re leaving.”

“Coming,” Tyshaun shouted back.

Red and blue lights flashed across the screen. At a street corner, three armed policemen raised their guns.

He blew up the first one with a rocket launcher and killed the second with a machine gun.

The third shot him, and as the camera zoomed out, his character crumpled onto the pavement. A word appeared on the screen in red letters: “Wasted.”

Tyshaun leapt down to the worn gray-carpeted floor and turned off the game, then remembered his black T-shirt, the custom-made one that on the back said, “Rest in Peace Daddy.” He picked it up and rushed downstairs.

Tyshaun’s mom tries to bring him closer to his father's casket during the funeral service at East Washington Heights Baptist Church.

‘I can’t touch him’

Tyshaun waited in line next to his mom as they shuffled toward the front of East Washington Heights Baptist Church. At last, he rounded the final wooden pew, and his father’s body came into view.

The boy stopped. His mouth fell open, and his eyes widened. He shook his head.

“I don’t want to see that,” Tyshaun said, retreating up the center aisle.

His mom followed.

“You can be strong,” she said, leaning down and peering at him from behind her black wide-brim hat and matching sunglasses.

“I don’t want to.”

She held his right arm with both hands, easing her son back toward the glossy, gray casket. He stared down at a face that, to him, didn’t look at all like his father’s.

“I can’t touch him,” he whispered. “I can’t touch him.”

He took his seat in the front row, where his half brother, Zah’Kyi Bynum, joined him.

“You know they put makeup on him?” Tyshaun asked, and Zah’Kyi, also 8, nodded.

Their younger brother, 2-year-old Andrew McPhatter II, waddled toward them, and the boys hoisted him onto their laps.

“You okay?” Tyshaun asked the toddler, dressed in a pink button-down and black jacket. He didn’t respond, instead grinning as he whacked at his older brothers. And they let him.

Almost everyone had sat down when an older woman in a black cap passed by the front row.

“Family, last viewing before closing,” she said.

Eyes glassy, Tyshaun and Zah’Kyi looked at each other. They whispered. From their pockets, the boys both removed handkerchiefs.

“You want to do it?” Tyshaun asked.

“Yeah,” Zah’Kyi responded.

“Come on.”

The brothers stood, then approached the casket. Just before the lid was closed, they laid the squares of cloth atop their father’s body.

LEFT: Friends carry Andrew’s casket to a hearse after the service. RIGHT: Reward fliers are stacked on a table during the funeral.

“So he would remember us,” Tyshaun would say later.

The pastor welcomed the attendees and the choir sang as the boys looked through a collage of photographs in the program.

A deacon read letters from their father’s friends, the organist played “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” and community leaders pleaded for help to end the violence. But Tyshaun had stopped listening. He tried tossing a pencil into its holder in front of him, the wood clacking against the tile floor each time he missed.

Then, his cousins, ages 6 and 9, walked to the front to read “God’s Garden.”

“Come on. We about to go up there,” Tyshaun suddenly whispered to his brother, and they did, joining the girls behind the lectern. Each child read a section of the poem.

“He knew that you were suffering,” Tyshaun said into the microphone. “He knew that you were in pain.”

As the service continued, the boys moved to a pew toward the back, fidgeting and whispering about video games. Tyshaun took off his tie and hung the metal clip from his bottom lip.

A youth pastor, Kevin McGill, who had attended the same high school as Tyshaun’s dad, addressed the audience last. He, too, demanded change, describing his years of violence on the street. Things could get better, he said. People could make different choices. The cost not to, he told the crowd, was too great.

“Twenty-three of my friends been killed,” McGill said, and now Tyshaun, his arm around his brother’s shoulder, was staring at the pulpit, listening to every word.

Tyshaun runs across a balance beam during recess at school.

‘Did your father die?’

Three days after his father’s casket was lowered into the ground, Tyshaun climbed out of his mom’s Durango outside Eagle Academy and slammed the door behind him.

“Ugh,” he groaned, livid that she’d refused to let him take a blue sticky toy into school with him. On most Mondays, Andrew had dropped his son off at school, and both Tyshaun and Donna knew he likely would have won that argument with his dad. But now he had just one parent, and in her prayers, she’d promised Andrew to do the best she could. She believed that her son, now as much as ever, needed discipline.

Tyshaun’s eyes welled as he stomped across the street.

“You all right, man? Who you mad at?” the crossing guard asked, but Tyshaun didn’t answer.

He joined the other students in the cafeteria, and soon they were in a line and on their way to class. In the back, Tyshaun dragged his feet and ran his hand across the wall.

Nikki Lee, his teacher, put her arm around him. “You’re getting frustrated again,” she said as they walked.

Tyshaun had struggled with controlling that exasperation before, but he’d made progress in second grade. In his electric-orange Adidas backpack was a sheet Lee used to rate students’ behavior from 0 to 6. “Great job,” Lee had written below a 5 a week before the shooting. He got a smiley face below another 5 two days before it and another 5 on the day it happened.

Whether his mood that morning related to his father’s death, she didn’t know, in part because he had never discussed it with her. But Lee understood how what her kids endured in their homes and neighborhoods could cripple their ability to succeed in school. On that day alone, she would manage a girl who stormed out in tears, a boy who slammed his chair against the floor and another who purposefully knocked his head against a desk as he muttered, “I’m going to hurt myself.”

Tyshaun did little more than lay his cheek against his forearm.

Now it was almost 11 a.m., lunchtime, and Lee asked if he could open the door, his official classroom job.

“Are you ready to fix it?” she said, and Tyshaun nodded that he was.

He held the door and the class marched down the hall, where he held another one. A girl approached him.

“Did your father die?” she asked, and he sensed a trap.

“Shut up,” he snapped.

Another boy laughed and motioned in his direction.

Tyshaun’s fist tightened into a ball.

“I’m going to smack you,” he said, but before he could, Lee intervened.

She called the other child over as Tyshaun explained what had happened.

“Tyshaun thinks you were laughing at his situation,” she said.

“I didn’t laugh at him,” the boy said, but Tyshaun didn’t believe that.

Fuming when he arrived at the cafeteria, he asked a woman at the door if he could see Mr. Murray, his favorite teacher. She told him he needed to wait. Tyshaun’s jaw clenched. He walked away, then turned back and screamed.

TOP: Tyshaun solves a math problem as his second-grade teacher, Nikki Lee, looks on during class. LEFT: Tyshaun looks up at behavioral specialist Robert Hagans during a talk after the boy disrupted his class. RIGHT: Tyshaun gets out of his mom’s SUV outside her home.

A woman in the kitchen spotted him.

“You look like you need a minute,” she said, placing her hand on his head.

And when he’d had one, she allowed him to leave. He walked down the hall and into a classroom, where he got a high-five from Curtis Murray, an assistant teacher in the special-education program.

Tyshaun sat on a miniature blue couch in the corner, opening a ninja game on an iPad and reaching into a bag of Goldfish. His shoulders relaxed. His eyes calmed.

He hadn’t talked about his dad’s death with any schoolmates, and Murray was just one of a couple adults at Eagle in whom he’d confided. Tyshaun had asked another, Ashley Watkins, a social worker, to explain the difference between heaven and hell, because he wanted to make sure his dad had gone to the right one.

Neither she nor Murray had ever seen him break down over the killing, and that worried her.

“My fear for him is that because he’s so kind of emotionally guarded, he will eventually internalize it,” said Watkins, who didn’t know how all of that held-in emotion might someday spill out.

Tyshaun left Murray’s room and returned to class, but his mind remained elsewhere, ignoring most of what Lee asked him to do. As his friends studied how to read clocks, he drew a picture of his father — a smiley face with dreadlocks — before furiously scratching it out because he thought it looked ugly.

At recess, he played football in the dirt and the grass, and it took four other boys to tackle him.

At gym, he noticed a classmate sitting alone on the floor by the wall, rubbing his eyes. Tyshaun sat down next to him. “You okay?” he asked, but before the boy could answer, a staff member led him out. Tyshaun looked disappointed. “I was trying to make him feel better,” he said.

That afternoon, he got his behavior sheet back. “Trouble following directions,” Lee wrote beneath his score, a 2. He crumpled up the paper later and left it on the floor so he wouldn’t have to show it to his mom.

At the end of the day, she waited for him in the lobby, smiling as he approached. Behind her was the expansive glass window, and there, across the street, a mobile police camera now stood on the corner next to where his father was shot five times. On top of it, red and blue lights flashed.

Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.

 
 

In tiny Townville, S.C., first-graders are haunted by what they survived — and lost — on a school playground

Twelve seconds of gunfire
In tiny Townville, S.C., first-graders are haunted by what they survived — and lost — on a school playground

By John Woodrow Cox, Originally published by The Washington Post on June 9, 2017

Ava Olsen, holding her cat, Autumn, in her room, alternated between bouts of solitude and anger after the shooting.

Recess had finally started, so Ava Olsen picked up her chocolate cupcake, then headed outside toward the swings. And that’s when the 7-year-old saw the gun.

It was black and in the hand of someone the first-graders on the playground would later describe as a thin, towering figure with wispy blond hair and angry eyes. Dressed in dark clothes and a baseball cap, he had just driven up in a Dodge Ram, jumping out of the pickup as it rolled into the chain-link fence that surrounded the play area. It was 1:41 on a balmy, blue-sky afternoon in late September, and Ava’s class was just emerging from an open door directly in front of him to join the other kids already outside. At first, a few of them assumed he had come to help with something or say hello.

Then he pulled the trigger.

“I hate my life,” the children heard him scream in the same moment he added Townville Elementary to the long list of American schools redefined by a shooting.

A round struck the shoulder of Ava’s teacher, who was standing at the green metal door, before she yanked it shut. But the shooter kept firing, shattering a glass window.

Near the cubbies inside, 6-year-old Collin Edwards felt his foot vibrate, then burn, as if he had stepped in a fire. A bullet had blown through the inside of his right ankle and popped out beneath his big toe, punching a hole in the sole of his Velcro-strapped sneaker. As his teachers pulled him away from the windows, Collin recalled later, he spotted a puddle of blood spreading across the gray wax tile floor in the hallway. Someone else, he realized, had been hurt, too.

Jacob Hall was the smallest child in first grade.

Outside, Ava had dropped her cupcake. The Daisy Scout remembered what her mom had said: If something doesn’t feel right, run. She sprinted toward the far side of the building, rounding a corner to safety. Nowhere in sight, though, was Jacob Hall, the tiny boy with oversize, thick-lensed glasses Ava had decided to marry when they grew up. He had been just a few steps behind her at the door, but she never saw him come out. Ava hoped he was okay.

Standing on the wood chips near a yellow tube slide, Siena Kibilko felt stunned. Until that moment, her most serious concern had been which “How to Train Your Dragon” toy she would get for her upcoming seventh birthday.

“Run!” Siena recalled a teacher shouting, and she did.

Karson Robinson, one of the biggest kids in class, hadn’t waited for instructions. At the initial sound of gunshots, he scrambled over a fence on the opposite side of the playground and briefly headed toward the baseball fields where, as a Townville Giant, he had gotten his first recreation league hit. Karson then turned back to the school and found his classmates banging on a door.

“Let us in,” Siena begged, and the kids were hustled inside.

The gunfire had stopped by then, and, in a room on the other side of the school, Collin had discovered the source of all that blood.

Sprawled on the floor was Jacob, the boy Ava adored. At 3½ feet tall, he was the smallest child in first grade — everyone’s kid brother. On the green swings at recess, Collin would call him “Little J” because that always made Jacob cackle in a way that made everyone else laugh, too. But now his eyes were closed, and Collin wondered if they would ever open again.

“Press, press, press,” an automated defibrillator repeated as the school nurse pushed on Jacob’s chest, trying to keep him alive. “Give breath. Give breath.”

“Look at me,” a teacher urged Collin, but the boy couldn’t stop staring at his friend.

After the shooter was apprehended, a school bus transported shaken students to a nearby church.

On a gray wall inside Townville Elementary’s front lobby hangs a framed dreamcatcher, and beneath its blue beads and brown feathers is a Native American phrase: “Let Us See Each Other Again.”

It was among hundreds of items — letters, ornaments, photos, posters, plush toys — that deluged the school of 290 students after the Sept. 28 attack. But the dreamcatcher held special meaning. It had been sent to four other schools ravaged by gun violence, and the names of each were listed on the back: Columbine High in Colorado, Red Lake High in Minnesota, Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, Marysville Pilchuck High in Washington state.

A dreamcatcher sent to Townville Elementary has made stops at other schools where students have suffered trauma, including Columbine High and Sandy Hook Elementary.

It is slated to travel next to North Park Elementary in San Bernardino, Calif., where in April a man killed his estranged wife, who was a teacher there, and fatally wounded an 8-year-old before taking his own life.

In each shooting’s wake, the children and adults who die and those who murder them become the focus of intense national attention. Often overlooked, though, are the students who survive the violence but are profoundly changed by it.

Beginning with Columbine 18 years ago, more than 135,000 students atten

ding at least 164 primary or secondary schools have experienced a shooting on campus, according to a Washington Post analysis of online archives, state enrollment figures and news stories. That doesn’t count dozens of suicides, accidents and after-school assaults that have also exposed children to gunfire.

“A meaningful number of those kids are going to have significant struggles,” said Bruce D. Perry, a psychiatrist who worked with families from Columbine and Sandy Hook. “It’s stunning how one event can have this echo that will impact so many more individuals than people realized.”

Every child reacts differently to violence at school, therapists have found. Some students, either immediately or later, suffer post-traumatic stress similar to combat veterans returning from war. Many grapple with recurring nightmares, are crippled by everyday noises, struggle to focus in classes and fear that the shooter will come after them again.

Because of the lasting damage, Townville’s teachers, administrators, first responders, counselors, pastors, parents and their children agreed to speak to The Post about what the community of 4,000 has endured over the past eight months.

They’d always felt safe in this swath of countryside, a place 40 miles southwest of Greenville that claims a single stoplight but at least six churches. Gable-roofed chicken houses stand among cow pastures and rolling fields of hay, wheat, corn and soybeans, and everyone shops at Dollar General, nicknamed the “Townville Target.”

Overwhelmingly white, it is home to families that have farmed for decades, retirees with lake houses, college-educated professionals who commute up the road to Clemson University and hundreds of people in mobile homes living from one paycheck to the next.

What connects them is a beloved two-story, red-brick school where generations of children have gathered to learn and play and grow up together.

Staff at Townville Elementary peered down at the teenage gunman through a second-floor window.

The gunman paced the sidewalk, a cellphone in his hand.

Moments earlier, as he had shifted his aim from the green metal door to the playground, his .40-caliber pistol jammed, ending his rampage 12 seconds after it began. Now Townville Principal Denise Fredericks and some of her staff congregated at the end of a second-floor hallway to keep track of him until help arrived. From behind a sign on a windowsill that read “Dream,” they peered down as he walked beside the school.

Then he looked up.

“That’s Jesse Osborne,” a teacher gasped.

He was 14 years old.

Jesse had attended Townville — walked its halls and romped on its playground — through fifth grade, before he transferred and was later home-schooled. Not once, Fredericks said, had his behavior prompted concern. He was quiet, earned good grades and almost never got into trouble. He played catcher in the recreation league. He got invited to birthday parties.

Jesse had called his grandmother, Patsy Osborne, just minutes before he’d driven to the school that afternoon. He was screaming, she said. She couldn’t understand him.

Patsy and her husband, Thomas, sped to his house, where they discovered their son — Jesse’s father — slumped on a couch, eyes still open. He’d been shot to death. And Jesse had disappeared.

Jesse Osborne shot a teacher and two students near the green metal door at left. Later, students sought shelter in cramped bathrooms.

Then Thomas’s phone rang.

It was his grandson.

“I told him not to,” he recalled the teenager saying. “I told him not to do that.”

His grandfather asked where he’d gone.

“I’m behind the school,” Jesse said.

Thomas pulled up moments after Jesse had been subdued by an armed volunteer firefighter, arriving in time to see his handcuffed grandson loaded into the back of a patrol car.

Inside the school, 300 children and teachers cowered in locked classrooms, bathrooms and storage closets. Siena remembered someone covering up windows with paper. Karson remembered playing with markers and magnets. Ava remembered a teacher reading a story about sunflowers. They all remembered the sound of weeping.

By then, Townville’s fire chief, Billy McAdams, had hurried through the first-grade door with the shot-out glass. In the classroom, he saw an alphabet rug soaked with blood.

Down the hallway, he found Jacob, whose femoral artery had been sliced by a bullet that struck his left leg. Eventually, the 6-year-old was loaded onto a gurney and taken to an awaiting helicopter, and Collin would never see his friend’s eyes open again.

Ava, 7, prays with her family — brother Cameron, 6; her father, David; and her mother, Mary — before dinner.

A week later, on a Wednesday morning in October, Jacob lay inside a miniature gray casket topped with yellow chrysanthemums and a Ninja Turtles figurine. He was dressed in a Batman costume.

Ava couldn’t bear to look at him, so she sat on her mother’s lap near the back of Oakdale Baptist Church and turned away.

She called him “Jakey.” He was the only boy she’d ever kissed.

Nineteen days before he was shot, she had written him a note.

“Come play with me please,” she scribbled in pencil. “You can play with my cats. Do you want to get married when you come? My mom will make us lunch.”

At the bottom of the page, she’d drawn herself in a pink dress standing next to a bespectacled Jacob, who appeared about half her height. “I love you!” she added beside a red heart.

After the shooting, Ava realized she’d forgotten to give Jacob the letter and crumpled it into a plastic bin in her bedroom. Now she was at his funeral.

“He’s not really dead, is he?” she whispered to her mother.

“Yes,” Mary Olsen told her. “He is.”

Jacob’s family had asked that people attending the service dress like superheroes because of the boy’s infatuation with them. Ava wore a Ninja Turtles top with a purple cape. Siena and Collin, who was still in a wheelchair, both dressed as Captain America.

Jacob, 6, loved superheroes, and mourners were asked to dress up for the funeral. His mother, Renae Hall, who dressed as Robin, watches her son, who wore a Batman costume, placed into the hearse.

Karson had also come, his shirt displaying a “J” within a Superman logo. But he’d hesitated in the parking lot.

“Mama, that looks like that boy’s truck. Is he here?” Karson had asked, motioning toward a dark pickup.

From their seats, the children listened to the same pastor who presided at the funeral for Jesse’s father three days earlier. They watched as, midway through the service, Jacob’s mom staggered to his casket, then collapsed to the floor. They stared as his body was wheeled up the center aisle at the end of the memorial.

Then, just hours after their friend’s funeral, they returned for the first time to the place he’d been shot.

The school, scheduled to resume classes the next day, hosted an open house that afternoon. No one knew how the kids would react, but Fredericks, the principal, believed the small step of a brief return might help with the big step of a permanent one. In Townville, where nearly 7 in 10 of the school’s students live in poverty, it wasn’t viable to construct a new building or bus them elsewhere.

They had to go back.

When they did that afternoon, some kids even returned to the playground. Collin rolled out on his light blue medical scooter. Siena climbed a play set.

But Ava lingered behind with her mom.

“Please don’t make me go out there again,” Ava said, before they eased onto the sidewalk, holding hands. With each step, the girl’s fingernails dug deeper into her mother’s skin.

Siena, 7, began carrying stuffed animals after the shooting as a form of protection. Loud noises frighten her.

“What if he gets out?” Siena asked her parents in the days after the shooting. Then she never stopped asking.

They explained that Jesse was in jail, that she was safe. But still, Siena obsessed over him coming for her again. Next to a sign beside her top bunk that read “Night, Night, Sweet Pea — Sweet Dreams,” she relived the shooting in her nightmares.

Fredericks and her staff did all they could think of to ease the kids’ dread on that first full day back, Oct. 6, when all but 10 students showed up for class. They were welcomed by uniformed officers, therapy dogs, volunteers in superhero costumes, more than 20 counselors, a line of signs — “Have a Great Day at School!” — in the parking lot.

For Siena, though, each morning included a negotiation with her parents.

“I don’t want to go to school today,” she would say. “I don’t feel good.”

At drop-off, she would search the parking lot for the cruiser of the police officer assigned to Townville Elementary after the shooting. She needed to know he was there.

One day, Siena announced to her mother, Marylea, that she couldn’t go to summer camp anymore: “They don’t have a police officer.”

Like many of her classmates, loud, unexpected sounds petrified her. Once, outside a Publix, a car backfired, and she dropped to the ground before dashing inside. Another time, after a balloon popped at a school dance, the entire gymnasium went silent as the principal rushed to turn the lights on. Fredericks later banned balloons at the spring festival.

“Noises are different now,” she said.

Siena and her friends began carrying stuffed animals as a form of protection. In those first days back at school, she would slip a tiny pink teddy bear named Lovie into her pocket and squeeze it when she walked onto the playground.

Even at home, she’d lost her sense of security. Siena, whose mom is earning a master’s degree at Clemson and whose dad runs a business, lives on a peaceful cul-de-sac in a two-story house that overlooks a lake.

Siena would deadbolt the front door when no one was looking, and at the sight of unfamiliar cars, she’d scurry inside.

One afternoon, she stood in her bedroom as Marylea ran her fingers through the girl’s shoulder-length brown hair. Siena again thought of Jesse as her dark eyes fixed on a pink heart taped to the wall.

“Are they going to let him out?” she asked, her finger picking at the decoration.

“Nope,” her mother said.

“Ever?”

Marylea didn’t want to lie. She searched for the right response, still stroking her 7-year-old’s hair.

“Not any time when you’re still a kid.”

Karson, 7, wonders if he could have done more to protect his friend Jacob, who was half a foot shorter than he was.

A month had passed since the shooting, and Karson was beginning to sleep and eat normally again, but a sense of guilt still haunted him.

“Maybe I should have waited on Jacob,” he told his mother, Kayla Edmonds. “He could have jumped over the fence with me.”

She insisted that he couldn’t have saved Jacob’s life, but Karson wouldn’t be persuaded. He’d stood half a foot taller than his friend. The big kids were supposed to help the little ones.

The trauma had left him with intense separation anxiety — he’d follow his mother, who works at Subway, when she stepped out for a smoke — and profound grief. He’d known Jacob since they were toddlers. They’d bounced together for hours on a trampoline. They’d giggled together playing “Grand Theft Auto,” the video game with the bad words in it.

When Jacob died three days after the shooting, Karson’s mom didn’t tell him right away. It was his seventh birthday, and they were celebrating at Chuck E. Cheese’s. On their way home, he asked, yet again, if Jacob was getting better. In that moment, she told him his friend had gone to heaven, and Karson began to cry.

After that, he didn’t like it when people mentioned Jacob’s name. For Valentine’s Day, Karson wrote a card in his memory: “I loved him but he diyd but he is stil a life in my hart.”

Collin, now 7, can matter-of-factly discuss what happened on the day of the attack. He says the shooter's gun looked like a plastic, orange-tipped toy pistol in his room.

In the corner of his room, behind a bunk bed covered in Paw Patrol sheets, Collin rummaged through a blue plastic toy bin. His medical boot had come off months earlier, and the bullet wound had healed, leaving a dark, nickel-size splotch on his ankle. He could run again, too, though sometimes he had to take breaks because of the pain.

Now the boy picked past a T. rex figurine, a Burger King crown, a black Franklin baseball glove, the Captain America mask he wore to Jacob’s funeral.

Then Collin found what he was searching for and held up a plastic pistol with an orange cap on the barrel.

“His gun looked like that,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact as he explained how the Dollar General toy from China resembled the weapon that had nearly killed him.

Of all the children who survived that day, Collin seemed the most vulnerable to psychological damage in the eyes of many Townville parents and teachers. Before learning to tie his shoes, he’d been shot and seen his friend covered in blood. But he didn’t have nightmares, and he didn’t think much about Jesse. At school, as long as one of his stuffed animals was within reach, he felt fine.

His father, a 200-pound construction worker, broke down about what had happened more often than Collin did. It wasn’t that the boy didn’t care, because he did, especially for Jacob’s 4-year-old sister, Zoey, whom he’d often hug when he saw her at school.

But Collin, now 7, can discuss that day with clarity and composure.

About the bullet: “It was moving through the air super fast.”

About how much it hurt: “I didn’t even feel the exit hole. It was just the enter hole that had the most pain in it.”

About Jacob: “He wasn’t even moving.”

Researchers who have studied kids for years still aren’t certain why they react to trauma in such different ways.

Perhaps no one understands that better than Nelba Marquez-Greene, whose son survived the Sandy Hook massacre but whose daughter did not.

“That’s a factor you can’t predict — how your child is going to deal with it,” said Marquez-Greene, a family therapist for the past 13 years.

She warned, however, that parents can’t assume their kids have escaped the aftereffects, which sometimes don’t surface for years.

“We still have this tendency to want to say, ‘Okay, it’s done. He’s good. She’s good,’ ” Marquez-Greene said. “That’s not where the story ends.”

Ava gets a kiss as her dad arrives home from work. Months after the shooting, Ava still did not feel safe at school.

Ava sat on the edge of a brown exam table, her eyes on the floor. It was mid-February, five months after the shooting, and her pediatrician kept asking questions.

Did she still feel scared a lot?

“Yes,” Ava’s mother recalled her answering.

Did she feel safe at school?

“No.”

What did she not like about school?

Ava, clutching a stuffed Ninja Turtle that had once belonged to Jacob, didn’t answer.

Three weeks later, the doctor filled out a state form recommending that she be home-schooled. His diagnosis: “Severe PTSD/depression, exacerbated by school attendance.”

Ava — the only student pulled from Townville this school year because of the shooting — alternated between long stretches of quiet anguish and explosions of rage, her mother said. She started hitting herself and yanking out her eyelashes, and once clawed her nails so deep into her elbow that it became infected.

Ava had mastered a cartwheel days before the shooting but no longer talked about becoming a cheerleader. Instead, she began repeating what the shooter had screamed on the playground: “I hate my life.”

She stopped watching “Frozen” because Elsa’s parents die. She erupted when her mother took off the necklace with the vial of Jacob’s ashes his family had given them. She couldn’t look at the pistol her father, a former police officer, kept in the house. She snipped glittery green and red stickers into tiny pieces, then used them to cover up scary words in “Little House on the Prairie”: gun, fire, blood, kill.

Ava ducks to avoid seeing Townville Elementary as her brother, Cameron, is dropped off at school. She's now home-schooled, and she uses stickers to cover words in her books that she finds disturbing.

The shooting had lasted just 12 seconds. Ava’s parents worried it would torment their daughter for years.

They didn’t know what to do, in part because their son, Cameron — just 10 months younger — had also been on the playground that day, but he fared far better in the aftermath. They sent Ava to two therapists, took her to doctors who gave her medication for anxiety, encouraged her to record her thoughts in a leopard-print journal.

“I miss Jacob,” she wrote one day in March.

“I can’t stop feeling mad,” she scribbled one day in April.

“No one ever listens to me,” she confided a few days later.

“I hate guns,” she scrawled a week after that.

Ava had made progress, her parents thought, until the day before Easter, when she and her brother were playing “boat” in the bed of their dad’s Chevrolet pickup outside the family’s home. Suddenly, Cameron frightened her. She pushed him and he fell backward, hitting his head against a stone well. Blood trickled down the back of his neck.

“Oh my God,” she screamed.

Their parents loaded the kids into the car and rushed to the emergency room.

“I don’t want to die,” Cameron cried. Then Ava, fearing what she’d done to him, said:

“I’m just like Jesse.”

Jesse Osborne, now 14, sometimes had heated arguments with his father, seen in an undated photo. His mother, Tiffney, in a photo taken weeks before the shooting, says the violent day came as a shock.

Forty miles away, the 14-year-old at the center of it all sat inside a juvenile detention center on a recent evening and considered his future.

“I don’t want to go to hell,” he told Patsy, his grandmother.

Jesse, who hasn’t entered a plea but could serve decades in prison if he’s tried as an adult, spends most of his time reading, particularly about Mars, his family said. He wants to fly there one day.

They don’t dispute the accusations against him, but they’ve struggled to understand why their “baby,” who stands taller than 6 feet, would harm anyone.

His mother, Tiffney Osborne, remembers the wild rabbit he once rescued from the jaws of a family guard dog. Jesse kept it alive for five days in a cardboard box.

His grandmother remembers his reluctance to work with his father, Jeffrey, in their farm’s chicken houses because he didn’t like to break the birds’ necks.

His grandfather remembers camping trips to North Carolina and the day they saw “Frozen,” one of Jesse’s favorites.

Many of the 4,000 people who call Townville home say they've always felt safe in their one-stoplight community of farmers, retirees and college professionals.

The teen had handled guns since he was young, but so had many other kids in Townville. His family said he was enamored with Airsoft, a paintball-like game in which players shoot one another with pellets, and that he liked to fire pistols at hay bales with his dad — just as they did the weekend before the killing.

They’ve all heard the theory that he shot his father because he thought Jeffrey had killed a pet bunny, “Floppy.” Maybe, his grandfather said, that’s what Jesse meant in the call — “I told him not to do that.” But maybe he fired the gun for some other reason. Father and son, Tiffney said, sometimes had heated arguments.

Jesse, his mother said she’d learned, had retrieved the pistol from her husband’s nightstand and shot him from behind. After his arrest, he confided to her that he didn’t want his dad to suffer, so when Jesse realized Jeffrey was still moving after the first bullet, he kept firing.

The teen told the firefighter who restrained him that he’d lost faith in God and didn’t know what else to do, said McAdams, the fire chief. Jesse also told the firefighter that he was sorry.

His mother and grandparents insist they didn’t see that bloody day coming, but Jesse may have offered at least one sign he was capable of violence. In seventh grade, his family said, he was kicked out of school after bullies harassed him and he snapped. A fellow student, Patsy said, had spotted something frightening in his backpack: a hatchet.

The school playground, the scene of sudden violence last September, continues to be used by students today.

On another balmy, blue-sky afternoon, seven months to the minute after a stranger with angry eyes pulled up and pointed a gun, the first-graders rushed onto Townville Elementary’s playground.

Some kids headed to the swings and others to the play sets. Collin, wearing a black T-shirt with a green smiley face, talked to a friend at a picnic table near where the truck had careened into the chain-link fence, since replaced by a shiny new section. He held his stuffed turtle, Tortle.

A game of tag broke out, and Karson chased a friend, just as he used to when he played the Joker and Jacob played Batman.

Collin darted by the green swings where he used to call out “Little J” to make Jacob laugh.

Siena, gripping a stuffed purple cheetah named Glamour, wandered past a pink metal ladder with a hole, likely the result of rust, that she believed had come from a bullet.

Four miles away, Ava’s mother said, the girl lay in bed next to Jacob’s old Ninja Turtle, her eyes still watery from another outburst.

As recess neared its end, a half-dozen of the kids carefully placed their stuffed animals atop a green metal bench.

Siena leaned down and pointed at Glamour.

“Stay there,” the girl said, racing to the monkey bars to see who could swing the farthest.

A pair of teachers — each holding red bags packed with first-aid kits — watched while their students ran, jumped, climbed and laughed.

When it was time to go back to class, the playground grew quieter as the first-graders returned to the bench. Then they picked up the stuffed animals and disappeared inside their school.

Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.


He’d been shot at 15. Now, amid Chicago’s relentless gunfire, he had one goal: Stay alive.

‘Let this boy make it’
He’d been shot at 15. Now, amid Chicago’s relentless gunfire, he had one goal: Stay alive.

By John Woodrow Cox, Originally published by The Washington Post on August 11, 2017

Latee Smith, left, and his brother Daniel sit on a porch on Chicago’s West Side.

From his hospital bed, the eighth-grader was already plotting how to kill the kid who had put him there.

It had been a month since Latee Smith’s 15th birthday and a week since a bullet blew a hole through his right hip, tearing into muscle and bone and leaving him bleeding on a sidewalk, terrified he was about to become another dead teenager on another West Side street corner.

“Let this boy make it,” he remembered a woman praying over him amid the crowd that gathered after he and three friends, ages 11 to 16, were shot on the night of March 21, 2016.

“Squeeze my hand,” he remembered a paramedic telling him in the ambulance as he begged for something to take the pain away.

Latee had awakened from surgery in a baby-blue medical gown with a metal rod embedded in his femur. His first steps, braced by a walker, were so excruciating that he’d closed his eyes and bent his head back. He had barely eaten, losing pound after pound until the scale read 104. Then came the texts from fellow gang members who swore they knew who’d caused it all.

“I be back walking In 6 weeks,” Latee had promised on Facebook, and in response, a young man had posted three revolver emoji and vowed to help him exact retribution.

Now, in his bed, Latee could think of little else — “revenge, revenge, revenge.” He would borrow a pistol, steal a car and go at night. He would find the rival gang member who’d shot him, poke the gun out of the window and, for the first time in his life, pull a trigger.

Then, on the day he was being released, Dajuan Smith, the older brother of another teen who had been wounded, stopped by Latee’s room to say hello.

“I’m fixing to get back at them boys,” Latee told him.

Don’t, pleaded Smith, a 24-year-old high school basketball coach who had recently lost a young man he mentored to gunfire.

“Your life,” Smith said, “is worth more than you think it is.”

Latee couldn’t recall anyone ever telling him that before.

Latee shows his bullet wound from the March 2016 shooting.

The third youngest of his father’s 15 children, he had grown up amid perpetual chaos, bouncing from home to home in his earliest years and sometimes going weeks without seeing his mother as she struggled with drugs and alcohol. About age 8, he wound up with his dad, a Vietnam War veteran and construction worker who moved the family to a home they could afford in the West Side’s Austin neighborhood, one of the city’s most perilous.

Latee had been bloodied in fights, sold drugs on treacherous street corners and become so familiar with gunshots that he could sometimes recognize a weapon’s caliber by its sound. He had seen a friend die on the street and mourned many others who had been killed.

And none of it was remarkable.

Perhaps nowhere in the United States does violence ravage more childhoods than in Chicago. Since 2000, it has taken the lives of over 1,000 youths younger than 18, according to police data. That figure doesn’t count thousands more who were shot but didn’t die, including Latee, one of at least 300 kids wounded by gunfire in 2016 alone.

He knew no world but that one, with its tangle of gangs, entrenched culture of retaliation, and relentless cycle of carnage and incarceration that had left many children like him convinced they have no future, no way to escape.

But on that final day in the hospital, Latee wondered if he was wrong. What if he could somehow defy that fate?

“I was going to end up in jail or end up dead,” Latee decided, “so I had to do something.”

And what he had to do was change everything: Who he spoke and listened to. Where he went and when. What he did before, during and after school and on the weekends. How he approached almost every decision of every day.

Even if he did all of that, Latee understood that it might not keep him safe in a city where he would still have to navigate the threat of constant and often random shootings, of rival gang members who wouldn’t care whether he’d renounced his own affiliation, of pressure from friends who would want him with them, as he’d always been, on the streets.

“The old me is dead,” Latee began to tell people, and he hoped that would be enough.

“You know somebody just got popped?” announced a teenager sitting in the lobby of an Austin youth center just as Latee and two other boys walked inside.

More than a year had passed since Latee’s own shooting. He’d spent the morning at an orientation for the city’s summer jobs program, and the news had already reached him.

“Yeah, somebody got shot while we were in there. On A block,” said Latee, now 16, pointing at himself as he slurped a plastic pouch of fruit punch. “A block” meant West Adams Street, a half-mile away, where he used to sell drugs.

Latee was doing whatever he could think of to avoid that life. He stayed off his old street corners and learned to say no when his boys prodded him to hang out. Latee often bickered with his girlfriend, but he grew to depend on her. She insisted that he come see her more often because she figured at her house, watching a Wayans brothers’ movie on the couch, he was safe. She logged onto his Facebook page and erased his old street name, and he blocked the accounts of enemy gang members who wanted to add him as a friend only so they could make threats. He improved his grades, got counseling and started a paid apprenticeship that taught him and other wounded Chicago teens how to blow glass. He spent almost every afternoon at the youth center, alone if he had to, watching rap videos on YouTube.

Latee was popular — with long hair, high cheekbones and an endearing gaptoothed smile — but didn’t talk much. Nicknamed Peewee since infancy, Latee, at 5-foot-6, had always been one of the smallest kids in class, and yet, he’d become one of the most disciplined. Nearly dying had fueled his resolve to stay alive.

“I’m lucky I got shot,” he said. “The bullet made me more mature. Smarter.”

But the first week of summer had arrived, and Latee knew that when classes ended in Chicago, shootings often spiked in the long, hot, empty days that followed. June was already on its way to becoming the city’s deadliest month for children in more than 15 years, with one being killed, on average, every other day.

“Happens all the time. Nonstop,” said Martin Anguiano, a program manager for Broader Urban Involvement & Leadership Development, better known as BUILD Chicago. The organization runs the youth center and has worked with the city’s most at-risk kids since the late 1960s.

Teens, including Latee, signed a pledge to end violence in the Austin neighborhood.

Another BUILD staff member walked over to greet Latee and the other teens.

“I’m going to give you one of these,” Latee said, offering his elbow rather than his right hand, with its gashed and swollen knuckles.

Anguiano motioned to the bandage beneath Latee’s blackened right eye.

“How did that happen anyway?” he asked.

Latee shook his head, frustrated. Then he told the story.

Three days earlier, BUILD had hosted a neighborhood party. Latee and a few of the other guys who had been in a gang together hadn’t wanted to go at first. The gathering was being held at Columbus Park, in the heart of their old rival’s turf and just three blocks from where he’d been shot.

They shouldn’t worry, the youth center’s staff told them. The organization had arranged for security guards and armed police officers to come, too.

So, that morning, Latee put on a white T-shirt that featured an image of the sun behind the event’s title: “Summer of Opportunity.” He watched kids romp inside a bounce house. He marched in a “Parade for Peace.”

Latee and his friends had just finished their hot dogs when a boy from the other gang walked up from behind and swung. A melee ensued before police broke it up, and BUILD staffers rushed their kids out on a bus. Anguiano had heard the opposing gang planned to return with guns.

Now, at the youth center, gathered around a table near a wall plastered with “RESPECT LIFE” pledges the boys had all signed, their minds were once again on violence.

“Who got shot on Adams?” Latee asked.

“Dede and somebody else,” said a husky, round-faced 15-year-old.

“Dede?” Latee said, surprised.

“Yeah, Dede got shot again,” another kid added.

“He just got shot like a month ago,” Latee said.

He hadn’t yet taken geometry or gotten a driver’s license, but Latee had lost 10 people he knew to gunfire, none older than 22, and 11 more to prison, including four convicted of murder.

He didn’t view all of them as victims. Many had made bad choices, and so had he.

The intersection at Cicero and Gladys avenues is one of the most dangerous in Austin.

Latee had joined a gang at age 10, shoplifting powdered doughnuts from gas stations and brawling with rival gangs, usually with fists but sometimes with two-by-fours. Then he began to swipe bikes and join joyrides in the back of stolen cars. Latee, who adopted the moniker “Lil Spazz” because it sounded more menacing than Peewee, had been caught and handcuffed, he said, but had never spent a night in jail or faced ­charges.

By the time he reached middle school, Latee began to notice neighborhood friends flashing wads of cash. They wore nice sneakers and bought new clothes for the first day of school. He wanted those things, too, so one summer morning just past dawn — at an age when he still sometimes watched the cartoon “Sid the Science Kid” — Latee nervously stepped out onto a street corner.

“Dubs,” he shouted on Adams, advertising $20 packets of marijuana just up the road from his home.

His gang trafficked primarily in two spots, and he called his the “good block” because most dealers there were children, which made drive-by shootings less likely. He could make as much as $150 in four hours, more money than he’d ever had in his life, enough to buy Nike Air Force 1s and groceries for his family.

Latee sold on and off, he said, until one day when he saw the body of another dealer who’d just been gunned down. The scene gave him nightmares, and he decided the money wasn’t worth it.

Even then, though, he didn’t abandon the streets.

Latee blamed himself for all of it — his run-ins with police, his shooting, his inability to play football again because of the rod in his leg. Now he was trying his best to do right, but in west Chicago, that often didn’t matter.

One day, Latee was walking down a street to play video games at a friend’s house. Suddenly, he heard a gun explode, then the ting, ting, ting of bullets, meant for someone else, striking a nearby fence. He fled, running for the first time since the night he was shot.

The high school auditorium’s brown cinderblock walls were covered in bright yellow motivational posters.

“Believe that there are no limitations, no barriers to your success.”

“The best way to change it is to do it, right?”

“Whatever your goal, you can get there if you’re willing to work.”

Latee passed them on his way to a training session for his city-sponsored summer job and slumped into a chair on the empty second row, hands in his pockets and a gray hoodie pulled low.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel had touted the jobs program, One Summer Chicago, as a “doorway of opportunity” that would lead “our children to realize their full potential and a brighter future tomorrow,” but Latee didn’t think of it that way. For him, the job was essential to his day-to-day survival strategy. It would keep him busy and, hopefully, safe, for 20 hours a week. Plus, he needed the money.

Like many of his friends, he had sold drugs for no other reason than that, and at times, he’d made close to $40 an hour doing it. Through the city, Latee would earn just $8.25 an hour to go along with the $10.50 an hour at the glass-blowing program and the $100 he got every few weeks for working odd jobs at the youth center.

“It’s worth it,” Latee said. He just wanted to be able to take his girlfriend on dates to IHOP for chocolate pancakes or buy himself a fresh set of $4 faux diamond earrings.

Latee laughs with his girlfriend, Thalia Smith, at her home in Chicago's West Side.

For Latee’s 16th birthday, Anguiano, from BUILD, gave him $14, and his girlfriend bought him a blue watch and a vanilla-frosted cake coated with sprinkles. He got nothing else but had saved enough cash to pay for an afternoon at Dave & Buster’s.

Latee’s street savvy and self-control often disguised that he was, in fact, still a kid. A kid who had never flown in an airplane. Who sometimes punctuated the “i” in his last name with a circle rather than a dot. Who hadn’t shaved in a year but still produced little more than a dark fuzz on his upper lip. Who shared juvenile, profane posts on Facebook and photos of himself flicking off the camera. Who, with his girlfriend, would invent silly characters and pretend they were in comedy shows together.

Latee hoped for more — to go to college and maybe become an engineer because he’d heard they needed to be good with their hands. But looking too far ahead, he thought, was dangerous.

“I’ve gotta take my time,” he would say. “I can’t be rushed.”

Latee didn’t know a single person from his circle who’d made it out of Chicago and succeeded, but sitting there in the auditorium, he did know that a 17-year-old friend of his had been shot in the knee down the street the night before, and he did know there was a metal detector in the school’s hallway because someone had bragged about bringing a gun to an earlier orientation session.

Now the room was full, and on the stage stood a woman in a dark pantsuit explaining the importance of looking professional and making a good first impression at a job interview.

“You guys have to be here because you believe that you deserve to be here,” said N. LaQuis Harkins, an actress who’d grown up in Chicago and attended Howard University.

She asked the 100 or so attendees to repeat after her, and most of them did.

“I am,” she said, then paused, “me.”

“I am ready.”

“I am smart.”

“I am deserving.”

Staring ahead from the second row, Latee didn’t say a word as Harkins told them all to stand and try the exercise again.

Worthy. Ready. Here. Deserving.

Latee remained silent.

Latee, black eye still visible, sits in his Bellwood living room.

He sat amid a cool breeze on the front steps of a two-story, red-brick house, and not once since coming outside that evening had Latee heard a siren wail or looked up from his phone to eye a passing car. At the park across the street, sprawling sycamores shaded clipped green grass and shiny blue play sets.

“Slow,” read a yellow sign on a pole. “Children.”

About eight months after Latee’s shooting, his family had left Austin for another West Side neighborhood two miles away. Then that new home caught fire, destroying almost everything the Smiths owned, so the insurance company had moved them just outside Chicago to the red-brick house in Bellwood, where the village motto is “Your Family is Our Future.”

“I wish we could stay,” Latee said. “Ain’t got to worry about too much.”

But even on this placid block in Bellwood, Latee couldn’t entirely escape the city’s chaos.

He thumbed through Facebook and found one boy who had bragged about attacking another kid on a bus. One talked of “war,” and one posted three “bang” emoji to represent gunfire. One tagged a rival and, next to a devil emoji, wrote, “Betta go to the hospital.” One added a photo of himself pointing a pistol at the camera. “Die,” wrote one, alongside the name of Latee’s old gang.

It was Facebook, in fact, that had led to his own shooting.

That March night, he’d run into a half-dozen friends who were headed toward another gang’s territory so they could take selfies to mock their rivals online. They asked him to come.

Latee hesitated, but the boys reassured him.

“We got a gun,” he recalled someone saying.

Minutes later, as Latee glanced at his phone, the shooting started.

Pow, pow, pow.

He froze. Then came a fourth shot and, just below his waistline, a pinch.

Latee dropped the phone and turned to run. He planted his left leg and then took one step with his right. It gave out, and he collapsed to the concrete.

Sprawled on his back, Latee heard a car pull up as blood soaked through his eighth-grade, navy blue school slacks.

It must have been a drive-by, he thought, and now the shooter had come to finish him. His three friends who’d also been hit — ages 11, 14 and 16 — had all gotten away.

He was alone.

Latee played dead, closing his eyes and covering his face with his arm. He held his breath. He prayed.

“We got one shot,” he heard a bystander tell a 911 operator on the phone, and at last, Latee exhaled.

Now, seven miles from where he’d expected to die, Latee reveled in these quiet summer moments that he knew would soon end. His family couldn’t afford to remain in the suburbs, but he was hopeful he could avoid trouble when they returned to their repaired West Side apartment building, on a street where the teen had no gang ties and had made no enemies. He could stay safe there, Latee told himself, even though two boys he knew, one 15 and the other 16, had just been killed three blocks away.

Latee and Clifton “Booney” McFowler talk outside the youth center.

The teenagers on West Gladys Avenue were going to get arrested or shot. Latee knew it, and so did his mentor, Clifton “Booney” McFowler, who had just driven by and seen them on the drug corner.

“Just about all them little dudes at one point I done grabbed them from somewhere, man, to try to stop them,” said McFowler, standing in the Austin youth center’s parking lot. “You know how I used to see you, ‘Man, Peewee, what you doing, man? Why you out here, man?’ ”

Latee nodded as he spun a football in his hands.

McFowler, who wore his long, graying dreadlocks beneath a reversed black baseball cap, was a legend in the neighborhood, an original member of the Cicero Undertaker Vice Lords. He had spent more than two decades in prison, serving his last stint for murder. Since his release in 2009, he had devoted his life to persuading Austin’s next generation to take a different path.

“But they don’t listen,” the 56-year-old continued. “They think they too far in where they can’t get out. But it ain’t like that, man. You can always get out.”

“They probably too scared to get out,” Latee suggested.

“You gotta want it, and they don’t want it, and I’m getting frustrated.”

McFowler had also spotted one of Latee’s childhood friends, and at the mention of his name, the teen paused.

“Darrion about the only one I really love, though, man. He understand,” Latee said. “The rest of them, they want me to stick around, but Darrion — like, I’ll tell Darrion, ‘I’m gone,’ and he’ll be like, ‘All right, shortie. Keep it real.’ The rest of them be like, ‘No, stick around, man.’ ”

“I’m glad he ain’t on Adams, though,” McFowler said of the street where Latee once dealt.

“That’s the worst one,” he agreed.

“It’s like everybody over there is doomed. In the middle you’ve got the young kids, y’all’s age, then at the corner you got the old group that done gave up,” McFowler said. “It’s doom all around, everywhere you turn.”

But here was Latee, who, for people working at the youth center, represented proof that change was possible. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t even a sophomore yet. Latee would make it out, they told him. He had to.

“I promise,” McFowler said, “I don’t worry about you no more.”

“Yeah,” Latee murmured.

“You notice I ain’t been in your ear or nothing no more. Because you got it.”

“You always used be in my ear, though.”

“But I ain’t got to,” McFowler said, pointing, his voice steeped in certainty. “Because you got it, man.”

“Yeah,” Latee said again, just above a whisper, his voice devoid of certainty.

Latee helps another teen, Marco Thrasher, roll hot glass at Project Fire.

Latee peered across the room into the blazing orange eye of a furnace. Amid the swelter in a gray-walled, high-ceilinged art studio that once served as a firehouse, he waited for his turn to slip the tip of a steel pipe into the flames.

It had been a year since he’d started at the glass-blowing program, Project Fire, and nine boys, including Latee, were working together for the summer. He hadn’t met them all before but knew what they had in common.

There was the lanky guy in the white tank top, his shoulder scarred from a bullet that blew through it when he was 13. There was the thickset former football star who, at 16, had nearly bled to death after being shot while waiting for a school bus. There was the stocky teen who had been hit twice, first in the back and again, a month ago, in the thigh. There was the one whose skull had been fractured with a crowbar and another whose rifle wound remained visible on his ankle and another, aided by a wooden cane, who still had a 9-millimeter round embedded near his spine. There were the two in wheelchairs, one who hoped to walk again and the other who never would because he no longer had legs.

Combined, they knew more than 120 people who had been killed in Chicago, but the boys weren’t talking about any of that now. The work in the studio demanded focus and, at least for a few hours, gave them an excuse to forget the desolation that had come to define their lives and their city.

It was Latee’s final shift of the week, and he’d planned something special.

“Yellow and black,” he told the teen with the bullet still stuck in his back, so the young man hobbled to a metal table and poured out two mounds of crushed glass, one in each color.

Latee walked over with a pipe, wrapped on one end with molten material, as the roaring heat from a 2,300-degree furnace washed over him. The fire used to unnerve Latee, but its intensity now centered him. He’d learned that the smallest error could shatter the glass, and that threat made sense to him, because he understood the steep cost of a mistake.

Latee pulled his pipe from the furnace, then rolled the glowing glob over the colored piles.

“You making a bowl, right?” someone asked.

“A cup,” said Latee, who planned to name it “Bumblebee.”

He used a spoon-shaped piece of wood to mold it, then sculpted the knob with wet newspaper until he brushed his hand on a searing hot pair of shears.

“Ah!” Latee yelped, yanking his arm back as a rap song pulsed through a nearby speaker.

“It’s a crisis in my city, people dying in my city, getting tortured in my city,” came the words, recorded by the young man with the ankle wound.

Latee tugged and sculpted, reheated and cooled, and soon his cup, among the trickiest pieces he’d ever tried, had begun to take shape. He smiled.

“Somebody gonna buy it,” Latee predicted from behind his clear protective lenses.

He needed to warm the material once more before finishing, so he headed back to the furnace. Then, just as Latee returned with the metal pipe to a work bench, his cup snapped off the end. It plummeted to the floor, crashing against a metal sheet.

Heads turned. His teacher stopped. Latee gasped.

“Damn,” he said.

From across the room rushed Pearl Dick, who co-founded the program. She leaned down with a thick pair of Kevlar mitts.

Dick turned the object in her hands, inspecting each side.

Not a single chip, she told Latee. His cup had survived.

Relieved, he poured himself a drink from a water cooler and took a seat by the open front door, away from the fire. His work for the day was done. Latee had made it through the first week of a Chicago summer. There were nine more left.

Steven Rich contributed to this report.


Almost two dozen kids are shot every day in the U.S. This 4-year-old was one of them.

Children under fire
Almost two dozen kids are shot every day in the U.S. This 4-year-old was one of them.

By John Woodrow Cox, Originally published by The Washington Post on September 15, 2017

The bullet exploded from the gun’s barrel, spiraling through cool night air toward a gray SUV’s back passenger-side window. Carter “Quis” Hill was perched in his car seat on the other side of the glass, and as it shattered all around him, the round burrowed into his head, an inch above the right temple. From the boy’s hand slipped a bright-red plastic Spider-Man mask he’d gotten for his 4th birthday, nine days earlier.

A white Pontiac blew past, disappearing into the distance. Carter’s mother, Cecelia Hill, knew it was the same car that had been chasing them for three miles before someone inside fired eight shots at her 2004 Volkswagen in what police would call an extraordinary act of road rage.

Now she shoved her foot against the brake, squealing to a stop in the middle of Interstate 90. In the back seat, her son and daughter snapped forward against their taut seat belts. Carter’s 7-year-old sister, Dahalia Bohles, looked over at him. Shards of glass speckled her dark hair, but she didn’t notice them at first.

“Mommy, Quis got blood on his head,” the second-grader said, then she reached over and began to wipe it away.

“Stop!” Hill screamed, turning to check on her son, who, just before midnight on Aug. 6, had become one of the nearly two dozen children shot — intentionally, accidentally or randomly — every day in the United States. What follows almost all of those incidents are frantic efforts to save the lives of kids wounded in homes and schools, on street corners and playgrounds, at movie theaters and shopping centers.

For Carter, his mother feared it might already be too late.

The bullet had driven through her boy’s skull and emerged from a hole in the center of his forehead. Blood trickled down over his eyes, along his nose, into his mouth.

“Mommy, Mommy,” he’d been shouting minutes earlier, as Hill had fled from the shooter, but now her irrepressible 36-pound preschooler, with his plum cheeks, button nose and deeply curious brown eyes, was silent. He stared at her.

She faced forward and punched the gas, pushing the speedometer past 100 mph. Hill veered off an exit, stopped and leapt out of the car. She rushed to the other side and unbuckled her son, then wrapped him in both arms and collapsed to her knees.

“Help,” he heard her yell into the night, over and over, until a passing driver pulled up and called 911.

“Please don’t let my son die,” prayed Hill, a 27-year-old housekeeper at a medical clinic who had raised her kids mostly alone. She squeezed Carter against her chest.

Hill wished he would cry or scream or speak, even one word, because when Carter was happy, he chattered without pause about the most important things in his life: bananas, or “nanas,” which he could eat for any meal of the day; growing up to be the Hulk, because smashing things sounded like the best job; his sister, who was Carter’s favorite friend, even though she wouldn’t let him play with her Barbies; fidget spinners, mostly because when his mom called them “finny” spinners, it made him laugh so hard that he would hold his stomach and fall to the floor.

But there, bleeding into Hill’s blue work shirt while sirens drew closer, he still hadn’t said anything.

“Is my baby going to be all right?” she asked the paramedics in the ambulance as it sped to the hospital, but they didn’t answer.

Carter's mother, Cecelia Hill, cleans his face with a washcloth.                                                                         

Carter was among the last children shot that day, a 24-hour stretch of gun violence that, according to police reports, left girls and boys from one coast to the other maimed or dead.

About 1:10 a.m., in Kansas City, Mo., 803 miles from Cleveland, Jedon Edmond found a gun in his parents’ apartment and pulled the trigger, accidentally firing a round into his face. Jedon, who died at a hospital, was 2.

Eighty minutes later, Damien Santoyo was standing on a porch in Chicago as a car drove by, and someone inside opened fire, striking the 14-year-old in the head. He died at the scene.

Less than two hours after that, at almost the exact same moment, a 15-year-old boy in Louisville was blasted in both legs outside a club, and a 16-year-old girl in Danville, Va., was fatally wounded on a street corner by a round meant for someone else.

Then, on a Metro car just outside the nation’s capital, an 18-year-old man accidentally shot his 14-year-old half brother in the stomach. Then, in Kansas City, Kan., three teenagers were shot inside a car, and two of them, one 16 and the other 17, were killed. Then, in a parking lot in High Point, N.C., a 14-year-old boy caught in crossfire was struck in the arm.

Finally, at 11:50 p.m. on an Ohio highway, 4-year-old Carter was stalked in his car seat.

Hill allowed The Washington Post to tell his story and to interview him, his family, and his nurses and doctors because she wanted people to understand all that he endured.

What led to his shooting, she said, began earlier that night. She was leaving her mother’s apartment complex with Carter and Dahalia when they came upon the white Pontiac blocking the road. She honked and waited, until finally the car backed out of the way. It followed her onto the interstate. Then came the gunfire.

On average, 23 children were shot each day in the United States in 2015, according to a Post review of the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. That’s at least one bullet striking a growing body every 63 minutes.

In total, an estimated 8,400 children were hit, and more died — 1,458 — than in any year since at least 2010. That death toll exceeds the entire number of U.S. military fatalities in Afghanistan this decade.

Many incidents, though, never become public because they happen in small towns or the injuries aren’t deemed newsworthy or the triggers are pulled by teens committing suicide.

Caring for children wounded by gunfire comes with a substantial price tag. Ted Miller, an economist who has studied the topic for nearly 30 years, estimated that the medical and mental health costs for just the 2015 victims will exceed $290 million.

None of those figures feels abstract to Denise Dowd. The emergency room doctor at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Missouri has treated at least 500 pediatric gunshot victims in a four-decade medical career that began as a nurse in Detroit. She’s written extensively for the American Academy of Pediatrics and several national medical journals, both about how to prevent children from falling victim to gun violence and, when they do, how it affects them, emotionally and physically.

Dowd can rattle off number after number to illustrate the country’s crisis, but few are more jarring than a study of 2010 World Health Organization data published in the American Journal of Medicine last year: Among high-income nations, 91 percent of children younger than 15 who were killed by gunfire lived in the United States.

Like so many others who have pushed for gun-violence prevention, Dowd saw an opportunity in the aftermath of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, which left 20 students and six staff members dead.

She and her colleagues contacted close to two dozen schools and civic organizations in their Midwest community, offering to give presentations about how to protect kids from finding the weapons and harming themselves or someone else.

Then, just as lawmakers in Washington rejected efforts to expand background checks on people buying firearms and dozens of state legislatures continued to ignore pleas that they require guns to be safely locked away, Dowd got her first and only response, from a PTA group. Exactly three women showed up for her speech.

“People just don’t want to talk about it,” said Dowd, who wishes those people understood what bullets do to kids’ bodies.

How rounds react upon impact can be random and chaotic. Their size, direction and velocity, which routinely exceeds 1,500 mph, all affect the path of destruction within a child. Some bullets tumble inside the body after puncturing the skin, deflecting off bone before exiting at unpredictable angles that first-responders often struggle to quickly identify. Other bullets are designed to expand, creating a widening cavity as they shred through organs and arteries.

Dowd has seen the results in her young patients: lost fingers, toes, eyes and limbs, and mangled spleens, livers, kidneys, lungs and hearts.

What she has seldom seen, though, are children who live through rounds to the head.

Carter, his forehead scarred by a bullet, stands for a portrait.                                                                         

When the pediatric trauma bay’s door slid open, Carter, at 3-foot-3, looked tiny atop the adult-size gurney, appearing smaller still as he was wheeled into the swarm of adults and bright lights and blinking machines towering over him.

Eyes panicked and neck braced with a miniature cervical collar, he screamed through the oxygen mask strapped to his mouth, but the nurses and doctors at UH Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital later said they took that as a good sign: His airway remained intact.

Still, his odds seemed grim. According to the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, just 1 in 10 people who sustain a gunshot wound to the head survive it.

The emergency room staff checked Carter’s breathing and blood pressure. They sliced off his clothes with shears, then slid an IV into his left arm and strapped three stickers on his chest to monitor vital signs. Nearby, an orange-and-white cooler was packed with four liters of O-negative blood.

“One, two, three,” they counted up, then rolled him onto his side and scanned every inch of his body, looking for cuts or bumps or more punctures. They pressed on his spine to make sure it hadn’t been severed.

As the morphine began to take effect, he was hustled down the hall to a dim room with a CT scanner.

At 12:46 a.m., the images arrived on the cellphone of Efrem Cox, a 34-year-old neurosurgeon. The doctor’s pulse pounded, he recalled. The damage to Carter’s head was obvious. The bullet had struck the side of his skull, creating a nickel-sized crater in the bone before traveling 2.3 inches through the right frontal lobe and leaving an exit wound as big as a quarter. A fracture ran from one hole to the other.

Cox, who was at home, headed to his car. The boy, he knew, needed immediate surgery.

By then, Carter had returned to the trauma bay.

“Please, God,” his mother said, pacing next to him as his grandmother, Annette Hill, hurried inside.

They had worked so hard to prevent something like this from happening to him. Carter wasn’t allowed to play with toy firearms, and even when he pretended that his grandmother’s back-scratcher was a rifle, she scolded him. The family hated guns for a reason.

Efrem Cox, left, and Nicholas Bambakidis, Carter's neurosurgeons, talk in an operating room at UH Rainbow Babies -- Children's Hospital in Cleveland. The 3D images at top show the bullet's devastating damage to Carter's skull. The CT images below reveal the bullet's entry and exit wounds as well as a number of bone fragments. (Scan courtesy of Efrem Cox)                       

As a 7-year-old, Annette’s brother had been riding on the back of a bicycle when he was shot in the head. He had lived, but at 54, he still had a bullet in his brain and four decades of seizures in his past. Annette had never forgotten those times she’d wrapped cloth around a spoon and pressed it into her brother’s mouth so he wouldn’t bite off his tongue.

If her grandson survived, would that be his future, too?

“Gumma,” the boy murmured, using his nickname for her, so she walked over and sang him the “Barney” theme — “I love you, you love me” — as she had so many nights before.

“Boop,” Annette whispered at the end, gently bumping her finger against his ribs.

Now Operating Room 6 was prepped, and the neurosurgeons had arrived.

Carter was taken up the elevator to the second floor, where Cox saw him for the first time. Bits of brain, the doctor remembered, were visible along the side of the boy’s head, as blood and teardrops converged on his cheeks.

Carter’s eyes darted around the chilly operating room, searching masked faces for one that looked familiar. He found none. Terrified, he wet the blanket underneath him.

“It’s okay,” Cox told him, pausing to rub the boy’s arm.

The surgeon understood the stakes every time he worked on a child. He was still grieving for his own son, who had suffered from a devastating form of juvenile arthritis. The 2-year-old had died of respiratory failure in this hospital eight months earlier.

There was nothing the doctors could do.

“Put that aside,” Cox would tell himself before surgeries. He had treated at least 30 children struck by gunfire in his career, including a 17-year-old who had been shot clean through the back of his head on Cox’s first night as a neurosurgery intern in 2011. He had wrapped the fatal wound in dressing so the teenager’s mother wouldn’t see it. When the blood soaked through, the surgeon applied two more pads and wrapped it again.

“There’s nothing we can do,” he had told the distraught woman that night, but now, with Carter on the table in front of him, there was something he could do.

For so many reasons, that was remarkable.

If the bullet had been a higher caliber, it would have created a larger blast effect — like the ripple in a lake from the splash of a baseball vs. a marble — and ruptured blood vessels throughout his head. If it had struck a cerebral artery, he could have suffered a fatal hemorrhage before doctors ever saw him. If it had been designed to splinter on contact, his brain might have been pulverized. If it had pierced his left frontal lobe rather than his right, he may have been left unable to speak. If its trajectory had changed by just 30 degrees, it would have crossed over the brain’s midline and, likely, killed him.

Somehow, none of those things had happened. So, at 2:12 a.m., with Carter sedated and covered in blue drapes everywhere but on the front of his head, Cox pressed a scalpel into the apex of his small patient’s scalp. He needed to clean Carter’s wound to ward off infection, repair the cracked bone in the boy’s head and make sure there wasn’t more severe damage to his brain.

“It’s going to be okay, Mommy,” Carter’s sister, Dahalia, was saying in a room downstairs as she rubbed her mother’s back.

Across the top of the boy’s head, Cox said, he ran a foot-long incision from one ear to the other. The doctor peeled the skin down to just above the eyebrows and, with a drill, cut out a section of skull the size of a Zippo lighter. The surgeons washed out the opening and picked away four slivers of bone, none larger than half a Tic Tac.

With the bleeding and swelling under control, Cox slid the slab of skull back in place and screwed it secure with star-shaped titanium plates covering each hole.

By 3:05 a.m., Carter’s incision was sewn shut.

He would live.

Carter runs in circles at the hotel where his family was placed after the surgery.                                                                         

In his white Spider-Man underwear, Carter sat cross-legged on the floor, bouncing a plastic toy horse across the hotel room’s brown carpet. For a moment, he didn’t think about the scary men who chased him or how cold it was in the place with the masked people or why he looked so different now than he used to.

On his left arm, where the nurses had stuck the needle he hated, was a Daffy Duck bandage, and over the horizontal slice on the center of his forehead, where the bullet had popped out, was a white strip of medical tape. The hair on the front half of his head that the surgeons clipped had begun to grow back. And there, at the crest of his scalp, was the surgical scar: a jagged, elevated ridge, shaped like an upside-down crescent moon and held together by a faintly visible coil of clear, dissolvable sutures.

Carter and his sister, Dahalia Bohles, a few weeks after the shooting.

It had been exactly one week since Carter’s surgery. Two men, both 21 with criminal histories, had been charged in the shooting, but Hill feared retaliation, so a victim advocates group had moved her and the kids to a hotel across town until they could figure out where to go next.

Carter and his sister hadn’t asked many questions, but both vividly remembered what had happened that day, which began with a visit to their grandmother’s home.

He had stood on a neighbor’s shoulders and dunked a basketball in a hoop. Dahalia had climbed on the playground until she saw a spider near the slide. In the apartment, they ate pork and greens and watched an “Avengers” movie, and when it was time to go, they all loaded into Hill’s SUV.

Then, the kids and their mom got stuck in the road because of the white Pontiac.

Dahalia: “She was beeping her horn, and she was scooting up.”

Carter: “Mommy said, ‘Move.’ ”

Dahalia: “We got on the freeway, and that’s when they was following us.”

Carter: “They keep on getting up and getting up and getting up.”

Dahalia: “I looked over and saw a man pull up a gun.”

Carter: “It sounded like” — pausing, to raise his voice — “BOW, BOW, BOW.”

Dahalia: “They shoot the whole car up.”

Carter, on what the bullet felt like: “Hurt.”

Dahalia, on seeing her brother bleeding: “I was scared he was about to die.”

Carter, shrugging and slumping his head to one side, on why he was shot: “I don’t know.”

The boy already had woken up from his first nightmare, trembling. His doctors couldn’t predict whether he would suffer from seizures or developmental problems because of the injury, but his early progress had given them hope.

Hill was deeply thankful he had survived, but she so wanted to erase that night, to go back to the way things had been, before she’d talked to a social worker about finding the children counselors.

She saw glimpses of that old life, too, even in their cramped, temporary home.

“Can I play with her Barbies?” he’d started asking again about his sister.

Carter’s mother had tried to explain to him why, for now, he shouldn’t do front rolls on the carpet or attempt a handstand against the walls, but he mostly ignored her, and in a way that felt good because it felt normal.

When Dahalia pinned him to the bed and wouldn’t let him go unless he kissed her, Carter squirmed and laughed, but still refused.

Hill would soon buy her son a white wool cap to hide his scars. It made Carter, with those plum cheeks and brown eyes, look no different than he once did, at least on the outside.

That afternoon, as his mom sat on a bed scrolling through her phone, Carter, still only in his Spider-Man underwear, climbed up over the edge to join her. He picked up a remote and turned on the TV.

On CNN, two men in suits were talking about the violence in a place named Charlottesville. None of that made sense to Carter, so he changed the channel, to HLN and a show called “Forensic Files.”

The camera zoomed in on a black pistol, its barrel turned toward the TV.

Carter’s eyes widened, and his mouth slipped open. He stood on the bed, pointed at the screen and announced: “That’s the gun where I got shoot in my head.”

Steven Rich, Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Alice Crites contributed to this report.


For six teens at a Las Vegas high school, homecoming week started with a country music concert.

The wounds they carry
For six teens at a Las Vegas high school, homecoming week started with a country music concert. 

By John Woodrow Cox, Originally published by The Washington Post on November 30, 2017

Clockwise from bottom left: Summer Stadtlander, Marie Langer, Gianna and Natalia Baca, Shae Turner and Delaney Sylvester. 

Chapter 1

The varsity cheerleaders had just finished practice when Natalia Baca stepped out into the school parking lot and spotted a tall, dark-haired teenager holding a bouquet of multi­colored sunflowers.

“Will you go to homecoming with me?” he said as she approached with her identical twin, Gianna, who had helped orchestrate the moment. Natalia pressed both hands against her cheeks and grinned, because no one had ever asked her to the dance before.

“Yes,” Natalia answered, already imagining what she would look like in her open-back, iridescent white dress that flashed shades of pink and blue in the sunlight. They hugged and talked for a few minutes before she and Gianna had to go.

The seniors, age 17, were running late for a country music concert.

The Las Vegas sun had long faded beneath a distant mountain range on that first day in October, so the twins hurried back inside Faith Lutheran High to change clothes. Jason Aldean, Natalia’s favorite singer, was scheduled to perform the final set at that weekend’s Route 91 Harvest festival.

It was a Sunday, a school night, so most people in the crowd of 22,000 would be adults, but some kids would be there, too, including 10 students from Faith, a private Christian academy in an affluent community of gated neighborhoods nine miles west of the Strip.

And in that evening’s earliest moments, before the gunman high above them pulled the trigger, the twins and their classmates were eager for the week ahead — first the music, then the homecoming dress-up days, the silly lip-sync competition, the pep rally, the football game and, at last, on Saturday, the dance.

About the time Natalia said yes in the parking lot, Faith juniors Shae Turner and Delaney Sylvester settled in 50 yards from the stage, right of the catwalk, on the side nearest Las Vegas Boulevard and the Mandalay Bay Resort.

The teens pose for pictures earlier in the weekend: From left, Summer Stadtlander and Marie Langer; Gianna and Natalia Baca; Delaney Sylvester and Shae Turner.

The morning before, Shae had posted a photo to Instagram from Friday night. In it, the two girls each posed with one hand positioned on a hip so their purple festival bracelets, that weekend’s status symbol, would be in view. The best friends, both in brown cowboy boots, stood with their backs to the neon-lit stage, eyes bright and smiles radiant. They’d each turned 17 just weeks before. Beneath the image, Shae wrote a caption: “country music makes us happy #route91.”

For seven months, she had looked forward to this weekend.

“Happy early Birthday present,” her mom had texted March 3 with an image of the ticket confirmation.

“OMG I LOVE YOU SO MUCH!!” Shae wrote back, with four heart emoji. “I’m freaking out... like on the verge of tears thank you!”

The girls planned for weeks what they would wear to the festival and during homecoming week.

Shae — the daughter of two FBI agents who had inherited her parents’ attention to detail — narrowed her Route 91 outfit options to seven before she texted photos to Delaney and they cut it down to three. They went to Forever 21 in a mall on the Strip to pick up yellow skirts and shirts for the school’s “Color Day” — “Nobody owns yellow,” Shae, the junior class treasurer, had unsuccessfully argued to her fellow student council members. At Delaney’s prodding, Shae picked a pair of four-inch floral Steve Madden heels for the dance that, by the time they headed to the register, she adored.

For the festival weekend, Shae’s mom, Elena Turner, rented a room and stayed with the girls through Sunday morning at the Delano hotel, next to Mandalay Bay, so they wouldn’t have to drive home after each evening’s performances. In the lobby, before they headed to Route 91’s opening night, Elena gave them one last reminder.

“If there’s an active shooter in the crowd,” she began, and Shae knew what came next. She’d been hearing that speech from her parents, who had met during their FBI training, for at least five years, ever since a movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colo., left 12 people dead.

“Run until you can’t run,” Elena continued. “Hide until you can’t hide. Fight until you can’t fight.”

Her daughter smiled.

“Mom, don’t worry,” Shae said. “Everything will be fine.”

Marie Langer’s mother, Susan, assumed everything would be fine, too. It was, after all, a country music festival, filled with people who’d come to take a break from their problems, not start any. Her daughter, also a Faith junior, had raved all weekend about how friendly the other concertgoers were.

Determined to see Aldean up close, Marie had valeted her 2016 white Ford Mustang at Mandalay Bay at 2:30 that Sunday afternoon and walked over to the festival site a half-hour before the first band went on the main stage. She and a classmate, Summer Stadtlander, both 16, were so giddy that, on their way, they’d skipped together up Las Vegas Boulevard.

Summer had texted Marie that morning, saying she’d just listened to “so much jason aldean and I’m so excited now.”

“ME TOO,” Marie responded. Then: “IM EXCITED TO BE FRONT ROW.” Then: “AND TOUCH HIM.”

Marie, an accomplished equestrian show jumper, had twice traveled to Europe and was a veteran of superstar concerts — Rihanna, Drake, Nicki Minaj — but something about Aldean’s simple, Georgia-bred twang always made her feel good. She had followed his tour schedule for two years, hoping to hear him in person, before her chance finally came that Sunday.

The 15-acre venue was mostly empty when the girls arrived, giving them their choice of places to stand along a railing that lined the catwalk.

“Should we go on the right side today?” Marie asked, but Summer suggested they stick with the left, near where the friends had stood both previous nights.

They normally did homework on Sundays but wanted no distractions on this one. Before they got there, Marie had already finished her American Revolution reading guides and Summer her Algebra II assignment.

A billboard advertising the Route 91 Harvest festival overlooks the Las Vegas Strip.

At 4:50 p.m., Marie — whose fingernails were painted paisley and plaid, because that was the most country design she could think of — sent her mom a photo of a guitar pick she’d caught when a member of the Josh Abbott Band tossed it out.

Not long after, a stagehand gave her a copy of Big & Rich’s set list.

“Oh my gosh,” Marie shrieked, bouncing up and down.

At 7:51, her mom texted to ask who was playing.

“Waiting for Jake Owen then Jason aldean,” Marie responded.

“Be safe. We luv u tons.”

“Luv u.”

At 9:30, her mom sent a final message: “Call house phone uf emergency. Cell phone going off.”

Then the lights went dark and the crowd roared as Marie pointed her phone’s camera to record Aldean’s entrance. His introduction video, a collage of mud, pickups and cowboy hats, appeared on a massive screen behind the stage.

“The suspense right now is insane,” Marie told a girl standing next to her.

In the crowd behind them, about 30 yards back and to the right, Natalia felt the same.

She’d gotten a ticket for Sunday just hours earlier, delighting her not only because of Aldean but because Gianna would be there, too. She and her twin did almost everything together. It had been that way from the beginning, when the girls were born eight weeks premature and began their lives fighting to keep them. They’d never spent more than 48 hours apart.

Now the sisters were sharing the first music festival they’d gone to without a parent, and Aldean was on stage, crooning about people tougher than they look.

“They ain’t seen the blood, sweat and tears it took to live their dreams,” Natalia sang along as she danced with friends, and Gianna, a dozen feet away, did the same with her boyfriend.

About 15 minutes into the set, a few others in their group told Natalia that they were heading to the bathrooms, in the back of the venue, and asked if she needed to go, too. She did, but refused to miss a single song.

“I’ll just wait,” she said. “It’s okay.”

She stayed, swaying and laughing until 10:05 p.m., when the sound of pops from somewhere faraway cut through the music.

“Did you hear that?” she asked a friend.

Maybe, she thought, someone had set off fireworks. Natalia peered up above the stage and into the night sky, searching for bursts of light. All she saw was darkness.

Chapter 2

‘Get down!” someone in the crowd shouted as Natalia watched Aldean rush offstage amid a second barrage.

She dropped to her knees and covered her head. A friend, Kaitlyn Burton, 19, huddled alongside, clutching Natalia’s hands.

“What’s happening?” Natalia asked, unaware that, just in front of where she was hunkered, a half dozen people had already collapsed to the turf, struck by bullets fired from Mandalay Bay’s 32nd floor, 400 yards away.

Natalia looked up, trembling as she searched for Gianna in the chaotic, howling mass of bodies crouched and crawling around her.

Her twin was nowhere in sight.

“God, please help us,” she prayed, but now the wails grew louder, and the crackle drew closer.

Then, suddenly, what felt like a steel medicine ball slammed into her right shoulder blade, striking with such force that she was shoved to the left, losing her grip on Kaitlyn’s hand. Natalia’s back stung, as though it had been lit ablaze.

“Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!” she cried.

The impact jolted her friend, too. Even before Kaitlyn saw the blood, she knew what that meant.

“Natalia’s been shot,” she yelled at her boyfriend, Riley Van Buskirk, who until then had remained standing, frozen in shock.

He stared down at the hole in Natalia’s back, then stripped off his long-sleeved denim Wrangler shirt and wrapped it diagonally around her chest and back, hoping it would apply enough pressure to slow the bleeding. As he helped her up, Riley felt the cracked bones along Natalia’s shoulders grind against each other.

He feared what the bullet had done inside her.

Overwhelmed, Natalia couldn’t process what was happening — the words that Kaitlyn had spoken or the burn now spreading from her back to her chest.

And as she staggered to her feet, Natalia still didn’t see Gianna.

Had her twin been shot, too?

Then came more gunfire.

“Run!” Kaitlyn hollered.

At that moment, Shae, the daughter of the FBI agents, was already sprinting with her friend Delaney toward a row of outdoor beer vendors. When they reached them, the girls dove to the ground, cowering just beneath a purple billboard that overlooked Las Vegas Boulevard. “LIVE MUSIC,” it advertised, with an arrow pointing back toward the ongoing massacre behind them.

Shae, who suspected it was gunfire as soon as she heard it, had immediately grabbed her friend’s arm and begun pushing through the crowd. She decided that fleeing toward the venue’s rear or east-side exits, along with thousands of other people, would leave the girls too exposed. Instead, Shae headed toward the nearest cover on the venue’s western edge.

Now, with bullets spraying overhead, they were trapped.

Shae pressed her cellphone against her ear.

“Mom,” she said, “someone is shooting into the crowd.”

“Are you sure?” asked Elena, who was in her bedroom, about to go to sleep.

“Yes, I’m sure.”

Then, what sounded to Elena’s trained ear like machine-gun fire exploded through the phone’s speaker.

Stay calm, her mom told her. Stay calm.

Elena, voice quavering, asked whether they could make it to Shae’s car, parked over the fence and across the street at Mandalay Bay.

No, Shae said, because she thought the shots might be coming from that direction.

The girls knew they had to make a choice: Stay put and risk a gunman finding them, or move and risk being sniped out in the open.

Hands clutched, each promised to stay with the other, before Delaney, in a pause between salvos, suggested they keep going.

The beer vendors were arranged in a semicircle that jutted out into the venue, so between bursts, they crept farther along, terrified of running into the end of a barrel around every bend. When they reached the far side, the girls realized that they were, again, trapped. A gate along the fence in front of them remained shut, and behind them, in the festival’s center, was nothing but uncovered space.

“We can’t get out,” Shae told her mom. “There’s no exit.”

Another blast of gunshots erupted.

They looked for somewhere to hide, but this time, the space beneath the nearest canopy was already full. They couldn’t get in. The girls were exposed.

“What do we even do?” asked Delaney, who’d begun to cry.

It was then that a bald man who looked to be in his late 40s scrambled over, blanketing their bodies with his own.

“Stay down,” the stranger said, as he placed his hand on Delaney’s head, pressing the American flag on her camouflage baseball cap against the pavement.

And when that volley had subsided and the man had left, Delaney glanced back toward the fence.

“Shae,” she said, “a gate opened up.”

 

 

Up next to the stage, Marie and Summer, the other pair of Faith juniors, stood from where they’d ducked behind the catwalk, opposite Mandalay Bay, and darted toward an east exit.

The girls, who’d both taken videos of the chaos by then, didn’t understand the moment’s gravity until they saw — sprawled across a bloodied landscape of plastic cups, crushed beer cans and trampled cowboy hats — the wounded and the dead.

Marie’s eyes stayed on her cellphone as they rushed past. She didn’t have her home number saved, and as she tried to dial it, her hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

“Marie, what’s wrong?” answered her mother, Susan.

“There’s a shooting. There’s a shooting. Shooter, shooter,” she blurted, barely able to pronounce the words.

“You have to stop. What are you saying?” Susan asked.

Still on the phone with her mom, she and Summer escaped the venue and hurried across Giles Street, where they reached the edge of a church parking lot enclosed by a seven-foot-high wrought-iron fence.

“What do we do?” the 16-year-olds asked a pair of police officers on the other side, strapping on what looked like riot gear.

“You need to get over here right now,” one of them said.

Marie set her phone down on the fence’s brick base, then put her cowboy boot on the edge and hiked up her floor-length lime-green dress. She and Summer gripped the metal bars and pulled themselves up and over, bruising the backs of their legs on spikes that lined the top.

The girls leapt into the parking lot. Marie reached back for her cell.

“My phone’s at 4 percent,” she told her mom. “I have to go.”

Across the road, on the festival grounds, Riley and Kaitlyn had just helped Natalia into a white medical tent where the injured were being brought for treatment.

She slumped onto a plastic chair.

A passing medic asked how she was doing. Okay, Natalia said, even though she wasn’t. For years, the teenager had wanted to be a nurse, to help people who were worse off than she was. And there they were, screaming and staggering all around her.

Go to the others, she told the medic.

A man sitting next to Natalia was pressing his palms together, as if in prayer, because the fingers on one of his hands had been blown off. She recognized a guy she’d known for years lying on a cot nearby. He’d been shot in the stomach. “I need help,” he said, and Riley called out for it, but no one came, because everyone needed help.

On the pavement, where blood had begun to pool, Natalia saw a man to her right with a bullet wound on the back of his neck. She watched a small group crowd around him, pressing over and over on his chest. He didn’t move.

“We lost him,” she heard someone say, and they left him alone.

Now Natalia began to feel lightheaded, and Kaitlyn noticed her lips turning purple.

“You need to stay with me,” her friend said.

A medic suggested Natalia might need sugar. Riley grabbed her a Coke, and she sipped on it, struggling to keep her eyes open.

Then the police arrived and, with the tent filling, they ordered anyone who wasn’t hurt to leave.

Before she did, Kaitlyn leaned down, pressed both hands against her friend’s face and reminded Natalia of her twin.

“Think about Gianna,” she pleaded. “She’s been with you her entire life. She couldn’t do anything without you.”

The gunfire sounded louder — closer — than before, and now Marie was trembling, sobbing, hyperventilating.

She and Summer had inched down the fence line and taken refuge with six or seven others behind a dark Ford pickup near the church parking lot’s entrance. The police continued to order people in their direction, north up Giles Street, which left both girls convinced that a gunman was on foot, making his way toward them.

A short, blond woman held them both in her arms, trying to calm Marie. “What’s your name?” she asked. “Where do you go to school?” Marie, though, could barely speak.

Out in the road, pickup after pickup pulled up as victims were piled into the beds.

“Where’s the nearest hospital?” the girls heard people yell.

The injured who didn’t reach the trucks were brought to paramedics gathering behind the 16-year-olds in the parking lot.

“Honey, don’t look over there,” the woman told them. “Don’t do that to yourself.”

A group brought over another woman, who was wearing only pants and a blood-soaked bra. Her face ashen, she didn’t say a word.

“Her husband was shot,” one of the men explained.

The relentless sights of carnage only intensified Marie’s fear that here, huddled behind a truck, her life could end. She peered back down the road, still waiting for a man with a rifle to appear in the night.

Concertgoers scramble for shelter as a gunman fires down on the crowd from Mandalay Bay. 

One block west, in the pyramid-shaped Luxor Hotel on the other side of the festival grounds, Shae and Delaney hid in a bathroom, worried about the same thing. Shae’s parents were in their car, speeding toward the Strip, but they had remained on the phone with her. Their siren blaring in the background, she could hear them coordinating with other investigators already responding to the rampage.

“If it’s a male shooter, he’s not going to go into the women’s restroom,” Shae’s dad had told her, so when they raced into the Luxor, the girls found one on the first floor and locked themselves in a handicapped stall.

Shae sat with her back against the wall, leaning down to watch the door.

A woman burst through, shrieking.

Shae’s heart pounded. Had someone chased the woman there? Was the shooter in the hotel? She waited, hoping a man’s feet wouldn’t follow.

None did, but she feared that the woman’s hysterics could draw a gunman’s attention.

“Should I try to calm her down?” she asked her dad.

“You can try,” he said.

Shae opened the stall door and told the woman, who had been separated from a sister and a friend, that her parents worked for the FBI. The best thing for all of them to do, Shae said, was to stay calm.

The woman stopped screaming.

“It’s going to be okay,” Shae said, and the teenager hoped that was true.

Back in the white tent, a medic, hands quivering, struggled unsuccessfully to insert an IV into Natalia’s right arm.

Her friends were gone, but still lingering in her mind were Kaitlyn’s last words about Gianna, her missing twin. The girls looked so much alike that, for years, most people could only tell them apart by the scar on Natalia’s knee from a bicycle accident. “Mirror images,” their parents called them, because Natalia was right-handed and Gianna was left-handed.

Her sister had to be all right, Natalia thought. She had to be.

Then a man in shorts, a white T-shirt and a reversed baseball cap walked up.

Dean McAuley, a 46-year-old firefighter down from Washington state for the festival, had just helped carry a young woman about Natalia’s age into the tent, but the pulse he’d detected when he found her on the ground had already disappeared.

McAuley couldn’t bring her back. Maybe, though, he could do something for Natalia.

He took a torn piece of blue shirt and tied it around her forearm, revealing a vein for the IV.

He asked where she’d been shot.

On her back shoulder, she told him.

McAuley searched for an exit wound but couldn’t find one. His stomach knotted. The risk of severe internal bleeding, McAuley knew, was enormous.

He checked her heartbeat and felt it racing. Her body was compensating for the shock, he suspected, but what would happen when that wore off?

Ten minutes — that’s how long McAuley thought he had to save her life.

“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Keep your eyes on me.”

The firefighter found someone coordinating care in the tent. Just outside, McAuley was told, ambulances had gathered to take people to the hospital.

He returned to Natalia and asked if she could stand. Yes, she said. He held her hand with one of his and her IV bag with the other.

“There will be an ambulance waiting for us,” he told Natalia.

When they got outside, none remained.

The sound of gunshots had subsided by then, but McAuley could still hear frantic chatter blaring over first responders’ radios.

“Active shooter.”

“Multiple shooters.”

He helped Natalia shuffle across Giles Street and into the same parking lot where Marie and Summer were sheltering. McAuley lowered her onto a lawn chair behind a white SUV.

Concertgoers tend to a shooting victim behind a fence minutes after the rampage began. (David Becker/Getty Images)

“What can I do for you?” he asked, taking a knee in front of her.

“I want to call my parents,” Natalia said.

He dialed. Her dad, Mike Baca, picked up.

McAuley explained who he was and that he was with his daughter, who had been shot.

“Is she alive?” Mike asked.

McAuley gave her the phone.

She said she couldn’t feel her legs.

“Just breathe,” Mike told her, before he and his wife headed for their car.

After hanging up, McAuley saw an older man jogging toward an Audi parked behind them. Reluctantly, he agreed to take them to a hospital. McAuley helped Natalia inside.

He ordered the driver to turn on his hazard lights, find an ambulance and chase it. The man did, blowing through red lights along the way.

In the back seat, Natalia told McAuley that her left arm had gone numb. She was struggling to breathe.

“Do you have dogs?” he asked.

Natalia said she had two, Kosmo and Vdara, both Boston terriers.

He took out his phone and showed her a picture of Molly, his 100-pound Great Pyrenees. McAuley’s other hand moved to her wrist. At any second, he knew, Natalia’s pulse could plummet.

He scrolled through photos of his wife and 5-year-old son.

“You have a beautiful family,” she said.

He asked about hers. Did she have any siblings?

A twin, she said, who’d also been at the concert.

“Do you know where she is?”

“No,” Natalia said.

At last, they pulled up to Sunrise Hospital. McAuley found a wheelchair and eased her into it, and then began pushing it up a driveway toward the trauma bay.

They could already hear the moans.

“Close your eyes,” he told her. “Don’t look around.”

Natalia stared down, and on the ground she saw an American flag bandanna, spotted with blood.

Nearing the brightly lit entrance, Natalia raised her head. She saw doctors and nurses desperately trying to triage maimed, wailing arrivals being unloaded along the curb. She saw bodies in the beds of pickup trucks.

“Please help,” came the cries. “Please help.”

McAuley wheeled her past the sliding doors and through a wide corridor that staff members later called “the sea of blood.”

She’d been shot in the back, McAuley explained to a nurse. She had no exit wound, he said, but appeared to be stable, at least for now.

He looked at Natalia.

“You’ll be fine,” McAuley said. “I’ll see you later.”

She forced a smile.

“Thank you,” she told him, before the firefighter ran back outside to help others.

A nurse changed her IV and wrote something in marker — vital signs, she thought — on her forehead.

“It’s really hard to breathe,” she said, but in a hospital that would treat 199 patients from the festival that night, nobody had time to care for her yet.

One victim after another sped by atop gurneys, their wheels streaking a tile floor that had transformed from beige to red. The air smelled of iron.

“Watch out. Watch out,” she heard.

“Cardiac arrest,” she heard.

Natalia thought about her sister.

It was in this hospital where their lives had begun. Where Gianna had been born first, crying, and Natalia had come out a minute later, making no noise at all. Where the doctors had been forced to resuscitate her because she wasn’t breathing. Where the girls had gone home, together, after just four days in recovery, stronger than anyone expected.

Natalia closed her eyes.

“Talia!” she heard a voice call.

She looked up, and there, atop another gurney, was her twin.

“What happened?” asked Gianna, her left thigh bleeding from a bullet that had passed straight through it.

Natalia motioned to her shoulder.

“I love you,” Gianna said.

“I love you,” her sister responded.

Chapter 3

The Monday morning sunlight leaked through the shades and into hospital room 272, where Natalia had spent the night in intensive care.

A brace was wrapped around her neck, and on her face, a clear tube fed oxygen into both nostrils. Hours earlier, another tube that drained air and blood seeping from her punctured lung had been shoved between two ribs as Natalia, screaming, clenched a nurse’s hand.

The bullet, she would learn, had traveled the distance of four football fields, pierced her right shoulder blade and fragmented. Slivers of metal had scattered throughout her chest cavity, slitting the lung, but missing her arteries, her trachea, her heart. A larger chunk of shrapnel, however, had veered to the left after impact, burrowing beneath her skin and over her spine before it struck Natalia’s opposite shoulder blade, fracturing that one, too.

A change in the bullet’s trajectory of just centimeters might have killed her, but here she was with her sister, who was lying on a recliner nearby, gauze wrapped around her left thigh.

Now Natalia just wanted to sleep, so she closed her eyes. Then came a sound so clear in her mind that, for a moment, she swore it had to be real: gunshots.

Before he killed himself in Room 32135 at Mandalay Bay, Stephen Paddock fired more than 1,100 rounds, injuring at least 450 people for reasons that remain unknown. But the wounds from the worst mass shooting in modern American history weren’t only physical.

Among the most traumatized was Marie. Even after she and Summer left the church parking lot and made it to the safety of their homes, Marie couldn’t shake a debilitating sense of dread. Too distraught to sleep alone, she asked her mother to lie in bed with her until morning.

At 7:15, the 16-year-old’s phone buzzed with a text from Summer, who had just learned about the enormity of what they survived: “Omfg 50+ dead. I can’t believe this.”

“Oh my god summer. I woke up crying so many times,” Marie texted back, unable to imagine going to school that day.

But Shae, who’d gotten home at 4 a.m., had never considered not going. She knew her parents would work on the investigation all day, and she didn’t want to stay home alone. She’d be fine, Shae told herself.

She put on leggings beneath a pink nightgown, because it was “Pajama Day” at Faith, and headed to school, where she walked into her first class and approached her British literature teacher.

“I don’t have my homework because it’s in my car,” Shae said, explaining that it was still parked at the crime scene.

“I’m really surprised that you’re even here,” her teacher replied.

Shae joined her classmates in the high school gym for an impromptu assembly.

“It’s not the ideal way to start homecoming week,” Dan Buikema, Faith’s guidance director, told the 1,100 students, who listened in silence.

He updated them on Natalia and Gianna but said he knew the massacre’s impact on Faith would extend well beyond the twins. The school was still trying to determine the number of students who had attended the concert, eventually counting 10. The youngest, an eighth-grader, had tripped on a body while fleeing with her mother and was left covered in blood.

There were at least 17 more Faith students who had family or nonschool friends at the festival, and several were close to someone hurt or killed.

“We’ve seen this kind of stuff happen around the world,” Buikema continued. “We’ve not seen this happen in our community.”

Their community was Summerlin, a 35-square-mile collection of palm-tree-lined golf courses, $600,000-plus homes and augustly named neighborhoods: Reverence and the Summit, Affinity and Chardonnay.

“The Summerlin Bubble,” people sometimes called it, and at the center was Faith, one of Nevada’s most highly regarded schools.

At nearly $12,000 a year, Faith Lutheran Middle School and High School offered sixth- to 12th-graders the opportunity to pursue an array of interests, from programming drones to producing films to climbing rock faces. Its campus of red-brick buildings, which included two gymnasiums and a 772-seat performing arts center, looked like a university.

Every 2017 graduate, the school advertised, had gone on to attend college.

Faith didn’t try to shelter its students from people who were suffering — groups traveled on mission trips every year — but they knew that theirs was a world of privilege and comfort.

Now, in the gym, a teacher played guitar, leading the assembly in a hymn.

“All the earth rejoice. He wraps Himself in light, and darkness tries to hide,” sang students sitting on the bleachers around Shae, who wanted to join but just couldn’t get the words out.

It struck Shae in her next class that, somehow, she’d never cleaned the scrapes on her knees from the night before. She went to the nurse’s office, raising her nightgown and leggings to wipe away bits of asphalt embedded in her shins.

Marie does schoolwork at her family’s home a week after the rampage.

Marie pulled into Faith’s parking lot Tuesday morning and saw what she’d seen every morning for years: other kids, walking, talking, laughing.

She began to sob.

Marie used to be one of them, she thought, doing and saying normal things, believing everything was okay. But now nothing felt okay.

Marie hurried to her first class, AP English, and immediately had to leave.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Marie texted her mother. A day earlier, the teenager had spent hours at home watching news coverage of the shooting on TV.

In her next class, the teacher, who hadn’t been told that Marie was at the festival, asked whether she could stay after school to take a test she’d missed.

Suddenly, Marie was stricken with the sense that everything she’d cared about most — grades, the SAT, admittance into a top-tier college with an equestrian program — didn’t matter.

“No,” she said. “I can’t take it after school.”

Later, in a hallway, she and Summer talked about what was happening to them.

“It feels so weird walking around,” Marie said.

“It feels like we’re different,” Summer said.

Nothing left the girls more convinced of that than how they reacted to noises.

The roar of a motorcycle sent Summer sprinting to her front door.

“What’s wrong?” her mother asked.

“I don’t know,” Summer responded.

Marie couldn’t stand a classmate zipping an eraser stick in and out, and in her living room on Tuesday night, the sound of a slamming door terrified her.

Marie’s ears rang. She shrieked.

Her mother, Susan, rushed in from the kitchen. For 15 minutes, she watched her daughter weep.

Later that evening, Marie noticed someone parked across the street in their cul-de-sac. She checked every lock and closed every shutter. She set the alarm. When she got up to her bedroom, though, Marie realized her phone charger was still downstairs.

She woke up her mom.

“I need you to come with me,” Marie said.

When they walked back down, the car was gone. She didn’t understand. If it had pulled away, she would have heard it. Marie insisted she had seen someone.

But now came a more unsettling possibility. Maybe, Marie thought, it had all been in her mind.

Faith Lutheran High School Principal Scott Fogo comforts Summer, left, and Marie.

Shae sat on the ground outside her class, considering the right words to say as a camera was positioned in front of her.

She’d been asked to describe her experience for a video the school planned to show during that week’s chapel services. Shae wore a long-sleeve plaid shirt and her hair in braided pigtails because it was Faith’s “Wilderness Explorer Day” in honor of the Disney movie “Up,” the theme for homecoming.

“I know that I got out of that situation because God was with us, and I definitely know that He’s still with me now,” she said in the interview. “I have moments in the day that I really just feel a struggle, and I just feel like I can’t — like I just want to hole up in myself and not deal with any of it, but I know that I can’t do that.”

Shae had never not dealt with things. She was an honor-roll regular and editor in chief of the Crusader Chronicle, Faith’s student newspaper. In third grade, her mother recalled, Shae came home one day complaining that the other kids didn’t take their assignments seriously enough.

She labored to stay composed all week and tried to help Delaney, who’d hidden with her in the Luxor restroom, do the same.

When she was asked to write a first-person account for the Chronicle about their escape, Shae gave it this headline: “I’m not a victim, I’m a survivor.”

She couldn’t bear to watch, though, when a teacher played a TV interview with Natalia and Gianna in class that included clips of the bloodshed. As Shae looked down at her desk, she noticed classmates staring.

“Shae, stop reliving it,” whispered a friend sitting next to her.

In a chapel service, when a student yelled at the speaker, she clutched the arms on her chair and sat up, panicked. “I need to get out of here,” Shae thought, before a friend told her that it was part of the presentation.

She left school early one afternoon to be with her mother, who had worked on the investigation most of the week but wanted to take Shae to get a manicure. Elena sat on their couch, and Shae laid her head on her mom’s lap for a few minutes before they headed to the nail salon.

“How are you?” Elena asked in the car.

“Everyone keeps telling me that I’m so strong,” she said, “but I just don’t feel strong right now.”

​Elena told her there was nothing wrong with that, and then they went inside the salon and Shae got her fingernails painted periwinkle blue to match a homecoming dress she no longer wanted to wear.

Natalia recovers in her bed at Sunrise Hospital a few days after the shooting. 

It was Friday morning, the beginning of Natalia’s fifth day in the hospital, and a doctor had just pulled the chest tube out from between her ribs.

All week, she and Gianna had been the focus of unrelenting attention. The twins had done interviews on “Good Morning America” and “Inside Edition.” They’d heard from producers for “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” and “Dr. Phil.” ABC’s “20/20” had even flown Dean McAuley, the firefighter who had helped Natalia get to the hospital, back from Seattle to orchestrate an emotional on-camera reunion between the two.

Amid all of it — the hundreds of messages on Facebook, the stream of well-wishers, the repeated questions about what it felt like to witness and face death — the twins remained unflinchingly positive.

The online conspiracy theorists fixated on their smiles, insisting it was evidence that their stories weren’t true. But Natalia had been that way — “#keepsmiling,” she’d written next to a photo of herself in the hospital — since she was little. Her outlook was born of a compassion so deep that when she returned from a ninth-grade mission trip to Mexico, she announced to her parents that she wanted to become a traveling nurse, move to Africa and treat victims of Ebola.

Twenty-two hours after being shot, still in the intensive care unit, Natalia wrote on Instagram: “I am so blessed to be alive at this moment of time.”

Now, though, on Friday, the last of the TV cameras had left, and with them went the distractions. Natalia finally had time to consider what she might miss during her last homecoming weekend before graduation.

With the chest tube out, she had only one question for her doctor: “Can I go to the football game tonight?”

Two hours later, her sister rolled on an electric scooter through a tunnel of ­pompom-shaking cheerleaders and into the gymnasium, where hundreds of students gathered for a pep rally stood to applaud.

“We would like to dedicate this assembly and the rest of our cheer season to Gianna and Natalia Baca,” a girl announced on a microphone.

Then the cheer team performed, and the lip-sync competition began. The freshmen went first, followed by the sophomores and juniors and, at last, the seniors.

Between songs, the narrators recounted highlights of “our Faith Lutheran adventure”: the first dances and dates, cars and crushes.

Natalia knew the entire lip-sync routine and had so looked forward to performing with her classmates one more time, to hitting her mark as the seniors romped to the final song, “We’re All in This Together.”

Instead, she watched on FaceTime from her hospital room, blowing into a deep-breathing device, hoping that her lung wouldn’t collapse so that, maybe, she could make the football game.

Chapter 4

The prayer had been said and the moment of silence had been held, and now, between the stadium’s bleachers, teenagers lining a pathway held up their phones, ready to record.

Faith’s high school principal, Scott Fogo, waved up at the public-address booth and then pointed at who was behind him: Gianna, driving her scooter, and Natalia, less than five hours removed from the hospital, in a wheelchair being pushed by their dad.

“Ladies and gentlemen, will you direct your attention to the 35-yard line,” the announcer said over the loudspeaker, his voice rising. “Welcome back Natalia and Gianna Baca.”

The crowd stood and clapped as Faith’s cheerleaders surrounded the girls.

“We love you, Bacas!” they chanted in unison.

Gianna, left center, and Natalia are surrounded by their fellow cheerleaders at Faith’s homecoming game. 

The principal, eyes watery, watched from a few feet away. He wore a maroon T-shirt that on the front showed an image of the girls above the hashtag ­“#BacaStrong” and on the back included a verse from 2 Corinthians about God’s comfort in times of trouble.

Fogo, bald, bespectacled and known among students for his reassuring hugs, had given out more of them that week than any other in his career. He and his staff had done all they could think of — bringing in comfort dogs, calling traumatized students at home when they missed classes, prepping teachers for the inevitable questions and breakdowns, arranging for three counselors to attend the dance, just in case.

“I don’t know what I say to my kid,” parents had told Fogo, so he helped set up a meeting for them with a Harvard-trained psychiatrist.

He had even researched the aftermath of the Columbine High School rampage and discovered that a student who’d witnessed the violence hanged himself a year later.

By Friday, he and Faith’s counselors had already begun to work on a plan for the months ahead, when they knew things would return to normal for many in the community but might not — then, or ever — for at least 10 of their kids.

Fogo waited as Natalia’s dad parked her wheelchair next to Gianna. The twins faced the cheer team they co-captained, and in front of Natalia were the personalized black boxes that the girls stood on during games. Neatly stacked on top of hers was a megaphone and two gold pompoms. “Natalia,” it read. “Varsity Cheer 2018.”

A tear tumbled down her cheek, and when the local TV journalists noticed it, they crept closer and pointed their lenses. Then out came the microphones, and back came her smile.

“I haven’t seen a big crowd in, like, a week, so it was very overwhelming,” she told the reporters. “This school is family to me, so I didn’t want to miss it.”

They backed away, and she eased out of the wheelchair.

“Go, Crusaders! Go!” her teammates shouted.

She leaned against the fence behind her, lightly bouncing one foot to the rhythm and tapping her hands together. Natalia knew she would never cheer at another football game.

“Go, Crusaders. Go,” she mouthed in silence as her smile disappeared.

Beyond the end zone, Shae and Delaney had just come into the stadium, both wearing #BacaStrong shirts. They walked toward the far side of the field to watch friends on the dance team, the two of them holding hands, just as the girls had done five nights earlier when they fled the concert.

“I just don’t want to lose her in the crowd,” Delaney said.

A dark-haired classmate in a polo shirt stopped to give Shae a hug. He’d heard she was at the festival.

“That’s crazy. You’re okay, though, right?” the teen asked Shae, who, to him, looked no different.

“Yeah,” she said and nodded, because the real answer was too hard to explain.

Shae and Delaney spotted Summer. She’d come without Marie, who had finally made it through a day of classes but decided not to attend the game or any of the homecoming weekend activities.

The girls compared how they were feeling.

“I’m actually good today because I didn’t go to school,” Summer said.

Delaney thought she’d made progress, too.

“I only cried once,” she said.

“Guys, I took off my bracelet,” Summer told them, referring to the purple Route 91 Harvest band.

“I need to take mine off,” Shae responded.

“I’m leaving it on,” Delaney said.

“Even for tomorrow?” Summer asked, referring to the dance. “It’s kind of a constant reminder.”

“It’s just like a — I’m lucky. I was lucky,” Delaney said. “It doesn’t make me sad anymore.”

Shae, glancing down at her left wrist, said nothing.

Delaney, left center, holds best friend Shae’s hand at the homecoming game.

Natalia limped over the curb onto the sidewalk, and as the fading sunlight cut through the palm trees on Saturday evening, her iridescent white dress flashed shades of pink and blue, just as she’d imagined.

But Natalia, one hand holding Gianna’s and the other squeezing her phone, didn’t seem to notice.

It was just past 5 p.m., and they were waiting on the sprawling lawn outside the JW Marriott to get their homecoming photos taken, along with dozens of other Faith teens. Two local stylists had done their hair for free at home, and a friend had bought them flats, because neither twin could stand in heels.

The sisters had already decided to skip the dance.

“There’s loud music. I don’t want to go,” Natalia had told her mom, and Gianna agreed. Still, both girls wanted pictures.

Now Natalia checked her phone for the third time. Parker, the teen who’d asked her to homecoming, was running late.

“Where’s your date?” asked Gianna’s boyfriend.

“He’s coming at 5:30,” she said, but at 5:30, he still hadn’t arrived.

Another parent walked over to say hello.

“Both of you are here?” she said to the girls, surprised. “Where are your dates?”

“Parker’s coming,” Natalia said.

She checked her phone again.

“He’s got 2 minutes,” someone announced at 5:43.

One minute later, he made it.

She grinned, and they shared a gentle embrace. He slipped a white rose corsage on her left wrist, and she held the matching boutonniere up to his navy blue lapel.

“I’m just going to act like I’m doing it,” she said, laughing.

Now they needed to get a portrait, so she motioned for him to shift to her left.

“I can move this arm,” Natalia said.

From the camera’s view, she looked like any other girl, hair curled, eyelashes long, makeup pristine. The dress’s open back, though, revealed a patch of ivory bandages, the only evidence that the bones in her shoulders were fractured, that her chest was littered with bullet fragments.

Parker put his arm around her, smiling as he searched for a spot to rest his hand. They posed with Gianna and her boyfriend and, later, a few other classmates.

Then Natalia hugged her date goodbye and shuffled toward an awaiting truck.

“Six o’clock. Take your pill,” a family friend said, because it was time for her painkiller.

The woman helped her into the back seat, and 51 minutes after it began, Natalia’s homecoming ended.

Top: Natalia, left center, and Gianna pose with their dates; Bottom Left:Natalia waits to have homecoming photos taken at the JW Marriott as her date has a boutonniere pinned to his lapel; Bottom Right: Gianna and Natalia mingle with friends and family. 

Across town, Shae was at Delaney’s house, struggling to find the right expression for their pictures. None of them felt quite right.

“What’s wrong with us?” Shae asked, especially frustrated because 2016’s homecoming had cemented their friendship. Both had just come out of serious relationships and bonded over silly, ­finger-on-their-chin poses and a long night on the dance floor.

When Brevin, the boy taking Shae, arrived, the girls got into the back of his family’s Ford Mustang. With their dates up front, Shae and Delaney took selfies together, and the night finally started to feel the way it was supposed to. The four of them had gone out in the same car, with the top down, on the night Brevin asked Shae to the dance. On the way, the girls had begged him to play country music, and he’d refused, and they’d all laughed about it ever since.

Now, on the way to homecoming, he asked if they wanted to hear country music.

Not tonight, the girls told him.

They pulled up to the school and spotted Fogo, who was welcoming students. Shae and Delaney walked straight to the principal and hugged him, together.

At a table in the cafeteria, the girls ate chicken and salad with their dates and talked about the decorations inside the gym. Shae had helped set up everything until midnight Friday and then again Saturday morning.

“Wait till you see it,” she told Delaney. “It’s really pretty.”

Shae had worried all week that she and her classmates wouldn’t enjoy the dance, but she’d invested so much of herself to make sure they did — covering the bleachers in black tarp, assembling light towers wrapped in linen, putting together a gazebo threaded in faux ivy around the dessert table, painting a miniature house that looked just like the one that floats away in the movie “Up.”

On their way out of the cafeteria, the girls ran into Summer and exchanged hugs and compliments about their dresses.

“I’m just going to warn you guys, there are a lot of balloons in there,” said Shae, who knew that, a day earlier, one had popped just as Delaney walked into the gym and she’d ducked to cover her head.

But her best friend was too excited to worry about that, so Shae, Delaney and their dates headed across the courtyard.

Shae, center, is joined by friends at Faith’s homecoming dance. 

The rap song “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” thudded from the speakers as they walked through the gym’s double doors, where hundreds of students were bouncing in the dark beneath white ceiling drapes. The four of them passed white-clothed tables decorated with white rose petals and Mason jars filled with white lights that looked like fireflies.

They sat on a bench along the side of the gym, and Shae took off her floral Steve Madden heels. Hand in hand, the girls approached the dance floor, maneuvering along the edge, outside the scrum. They found friends near the front, below the DJ booth, and began to dance. “Stanky Legg” came on, and the students roared. Delaney, beaming, let go of Shae’s hand.

The bass boomed louder. The crowd grew larger.

Shae felt her chest tighten.

“I’ll be back,” she told a friend standing next to her.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, I just need a minute,” she said, slipping away before Delaney could notice.

Natalia finished her strawberry ice cream with gummy bears and watched an episode of “Grey’s Anatomy” before she headed to her bedroom.

Crumpled in the corner was the poster Parker had brought to the school parking lot when he asked her to the dance, just before she and Gianna left for Route 91.

“HOMECOMING,” it read.

He’d gone that evening without her.

She lay down and closed her eyes. Natalia normally slept in complete darkness but couldn’t do that anymore, so she left the door open and the lights above her mirror on.

As she began to fall asleep, Natalia knew what was coming. A sound so clear that, each night, she had to tell herself it wasn’t real: gunshots.

Shae went to the principal.

“It’s a little overwhelming,” she said, and he told her to take a break if she needed to.

Shae picked up her phone and rushed toward the doors, fleeing beneath an arch of rainbow-colored balloons on her way out.

On the far side of the courtyard, she stood barefoot along the edge of the sidewalk, her pink toenails buried in the grass. A string of lights between two poles hung overhead, illuminating the scrapes on her legs that still hadn’t healed.

She called her dad.

“I just can’t have fun,” Shae told him, her voice faltering. “I want to, but I can’t.”

When he’d finished assuring her that it was going to be okay and they’d hung up, she stepped away from the light. Then Shae sat down and wept.

Standing alone outside Faith’s gym, Shae talks on the phone with her father.


At 15, Ruben Urbina couldn’t bear his depression and anxiety anymore. So he called police with a chilling threat.

‘I want it to stop’
At 15, Ruben Urbina couldn’t bear his depression and anxiety anymore. So he called police with a chilling threat.

By John Woodrow Cox, Originally published by The Washington Post on December 27, 2017

Jessica Newburn saw his text appear just as she turned on her phone that fall morning at 5:54, and with the message came relief. Her best friend was still alive.

“I don’t know whether I should thank you or hate you for getting my brother,” wrote Ruben Urbina, a floppy-haired honor-roll student who, at 15, was so slight that he looked more like a middle-schooler.

The night before, on Sept. 14, Ruben had attempted to hang himself, and now he was trying to describe it to Jessica.

“I’m just more worried about the experience I felt before I was about to pass out,” he continued. “I never felt anything like that. I was in the most panicked state ever.”

Ruben Urbina.

The two lived in the same Northern Virginia townhouse complex, just 12 doors down from each other. They’d met two years earlier attending PACE West, a Prince William County school that helps kids with emotional disabilities, and they’d bonded over the torment that led them there: anxiety, depression, self-harm. At a time when American teenagers are killing themselves at historic rates — with nooses, pills and, increasingly, guns — they became essential to each other’s survival.

Ruben, a sophomore, had especially struggled in the three weeks since their return to school from summer break. Jessica, a junior, spotted cuts on his arm and confronted him, but he wouldn’t talk about it.

Right before he tried to hang himself, they had a fight and he lashed out, insisting in a series of texts that he didn’t want to see her anymore. Amid the anger, though, he also voiced his despair.

“I’ve had all these thoughts pile up in my head now that I can’t even think anymore,” Ruben wrote. “I want it to stop.”

“Are you okay?” responded Jessica, 16, because she knew where those thoughts could take him. He had nearly ended his own life with pills several weeks earlier.

“Don’t do anything stupid.”

She sent him a silly meme of a fat guy sitting on a bench next to the title “Breaking Benches,” a play on the TV show “Breaking Bad.” She’d used it before to make him feel better when he needed it most, but this time, it didn’t work.

“I’m just glad I finally have the balls to kill myself,” he wrote. “See ya :).”

“Yo wtf,” she responded, before texting his older brother, Oscar, that Ruben needed help. She messaged Oscar’s girlfriend, too.

“Stop him. Call the cops for endangerment of himself or something,” Jessica wrote her. “Just don’t let him kill himself.”

Ruben’s 18-year-old sibling rushed home and sprinted upstairs, screaming and slamming on his brother’s locked door until the boy opened it, crying. Oscar, whose girlfriend assured Jessica that they’d made it in time, couldn’t find whatever Ruben had strung around his throat.

“I’m too scared to experience that again,” Ruben texted Jessica the next morning.

“What all happened,” she responded as she got ready for school and headed to the bus.

“I’m not going to talk about it now.”

“Okay.”

“Why couldn’t you just do nothing about it,” he asked.

“Because I’m a human being and I have sympathy.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he continued. “I’ll try again some other day.”

She was still mad at him for the hurtful things he’d messaged the night before, and she told him so.

“I’m not sure if I should get some serious help or if I should leave it be,” he texted.

“Get help,” she pleaded.

“I just have a f---ed up brain.”

He apologized.

“I don’t know how to explain what happened. Can we please talk after school,” wrote Ruben, who had decided to skip that day.

“Sure.”

Jessica Newburn, Ruben’s 16-year-old best friend, in her bedroom in Haymarket.

Her bus pulled up at PACE and she told him goodbye, then turned her phone off.

She understood his suffering because Jessica — who, with her father’s permission, talked about her relationship with Ruben and shared hundreds of their texts with The Washington Post — had already endured what she hoped was her worst moment. The teen had once spent three days in a hospital after slicing open her thighs and swallowing more than 40 Benadryl, but she’d come a long way since then, proof in her mind that Ruben could, too.

“I’ve gotten better,” she would tell him. “You can get better.”

And Jessica would tell him again that afternoon, she thought. When either of them felt sad or overwhelmed or just bored, the friends would take walks together, often to a favorite spot in the woods of suburban Haymarket, where they’d sit on a bench and stare out across a pond. So, Jessica figured, they’d go on another one of their walks after school, make each other laugh. He’d call her Jess, she’d call him Wooben, and they’d fall back into their version of normal.

But at the end of the day, when her bus pulled into their neighborhood, she saw police cars lining the streets.

Her father and stepmother were waiting in their SUV.

“Daddy, what’s going on?” Jessica asked.

An officer, he told her, had shot someone at Ruben’s home.

At first, they thought it was his older brother, but when she called Ruben’s phone, he didn’t answer. When she texted that she was sorry, he didn’t respond.

It was then that Jessica noticed the messages he’d sent her earlier, when she’d been at school with her phone turned off.

In one: “I’m just some kid who has major depression disorder and severe anxiety who’s probably bipolar too.”

And after that: “Just look at the people that do stupid s--- like me and don’t follow in their footsteps.”

And finally: “Emotions are only temporary. Don’t let it take over you like it did to me.”

An hour later, Jessica heard something on TV that she didn’t want to believe.

“The news is saying a 15 year old was shot and killed,” she messaged her best friend. “Please don’t be you. Please.”

Photographs and mementos of Ruben at his home.  

Just before 11 that morning of Sept. 15, Oscar had woken up to his mother’s screams.

Ruben was outside, she said. He had a knife.

By then, he’d already dialed 911.

Calmly, police said, Ruben told the Prince William County operator that he had a bomb strapped to his chest, even though he didn’t. He insisted he was holding his mother hostage, even though he wasn’t. He warned he had blades and suggested he might get a gun, even though he couldn’t.

He claimed, investigators said, that “he did not want to live anymore.”

Then he hung up.

Moments later, Oscar and his girlfriend found Ruben in the garage, wielding a three-foot-long crowbar.

“I called the police,” Ruben said, “so they can kill me.”

The ligature marks on his neck from the night before were still raw.

Police cars line the streets in Ruben’s townhouse community.

“Everything’s okay,” Oscar said, trying to convince his brother that whatever he was feeling would pass, just as it had before.

Both boys, the family said in interviews, had long contended with suicidal thoughts, undergoing years of therapy and taking antidepressants. It was Oscar, though, who had always been the violent one, getting into bloody fights, even serving time in jail. Ruben had once been hospitalized after trying to overdose on Zoloft, but he was never aggressive. Intensely shy at times, he liked to skateboard and play video games, study the history of the Soviet Union and read the work of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. He made A’s and B’s. He wanted to become a graphic designer when he grew up.

Oscar could see little of that gentle kid in the dark, anguished eyes of the boy standing before him. He considered tackling Ruben, just 5-foot-2 and 120 pounds, but his brother threatened him with the crowbar.

“Get away from me,” he told Oscar and his girlfriend.

Ruben moved outside, in front of their home, just as police drew near. At 10:58 a.m., two officers parked down the street, aware of the bomb threat. It was a balmy 75 degrees, but Ruben still wore a heavy gray North Face jacket, making it hard to tell whether he’d concealed something inside.

Oscar ran toward the police, trying to intervene, but they told him to back away.

Just then, Ruben swung the crowbar at Oscar’s girlfriend, striking her on the back. He turned and headed toward the officers, passing an American flag mounted beside the family’s front door.

Ruben, still 10 months shy of being eligible for a driver’s license, raised the crowbar with both hands, according to police. They said one of the officers ordered him to drop it. He told him to stop.

Ruben kept coming.

The officer fired two rounds, and the teenager collapsed.

From left, Oscar Urbina, his older son, Oscar, and his wife, Rosaura, grieve during services for Ruben at a Northern Virginia cemetery in September.  

The mourners filed toward the funeral home’s white double doors, some of them in black suits or dresses and others in orange T-shirts, because that was Ruben’s favorite color.

As they passed, a woman handed out copies of an open letter that Ruben’s father, Oscar Urbina, had written to Officer Robert Choyce, the seven-year veteran of the police force who shot his son.

“A Letter Of Forgiveness,” it was titled, but most of what came next was laced with fury.

“Regardless of the circumstances surrounding my child death....he didn’t do anything wrong...you did,” wrote Urbina, who’d been traveling when Ruben was killed. “The difference between you and us is that...you are GUILTY. Our baby is innocent.”

Urbina contended that the officer, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, should have used a Taser or pepper spray to stop Ruben. His older boy, Oscar, agreed, but he also believed the encounter ended exactly the way his brother intended it to.

Already, Prince William County Commonwealth’s Attorney Paul B. Ebert had concluded the shooting was justified because, he said, Ruben “was ready, willing and able to inflict death or serious bodily harm upon the responding officers.” Ebert said he considered it a classic “suicide by cop,” the only one involving a juvenile he could remember in his 52-year career as a prosecutor.

“You wouldn’t think a young person would want to commit suicide by cop,” Ebert said. “He had to be thoughtful, extremely premeditated.”

Ruben’s death wasn’t officially counted as a suicide, because he didn’t pull the trigger, but its unusual and public nature drew national headlines — and rare attention to one teenager’s apparent effort to end his own life.

On average, one child under the age of 18 committed suicide every six hours last year, according to a Post review of new data released Dec. 21 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nearly half of those children died from hanging, strangulation or suffocation, while 41 percent used guns. The total number — 1,533 — was the largest in at least a decade, nearly doubling over that period.

Seven of them were 9 years old.

Those who study youth suicide, and seek to curb its continued surge, focus on prevention. Evidence shows, according to the CDC, that teenagers are more likely to act on impulse if they have quick access to “lethal means,” particularly powerful drugs or loaded firearms. Just as important, experts say, is effectively treating kids’ underlying mental illness, and it was this point that had lingered in the mind of Ruben’s mother, Rosaura Urbina, after he was killed. Her son had already tried and failed to overdose and to hang himself, and they didn’t have a gun in their home. But Ruben, she realized, had devised a different way to access lethal means.

She believed the officer used unnecessary force, but Rosaura also couldn’t grasp what made “my beloved Ruben,” as she called him in Spanish at the funeral, want to die. Decades ago, she and her husband had both immigrated to this country from Mexico. They’d each come with nothing, but the couple, now U.S. citizens, said they’d done the best they could for their troubled American-born teens. Oscar, 55, worked as a Verizon technician and Rosaura, 43, as a McDonald’s manager, and together, they saved enough money to move from a mobile home in Fairfax County to their own neatly furnished, three-bedroom townhouse in Haymarket.

After Ruben’s killing, though, Rosaura couldn’t help but question the choices they’d made.

He had never showed signs of depression before the move, so what if they had never left? What if they’d let him stop taking his antipsychotic medication after he’d complained that it disrupted his moods? Were his exemplary grades a false indicator that his mind had finally quieted? Should they have taken him to the hospital that night, after he tried to hang himself, instead of waiting?

She’d woken up early the next morning and called Ruben’s psychiatrist for guidance. Someone in the doctor’s office said they couldn’t get her son in that day, so she should take him to the emergency room.

And that was her plan, even after Ruben had come downstairs and shared fried eggs and bacon with her.

“Are you okay?” she’d asked.

“I’m fine,” he’d said.

Minutes later, after he got the knife, she learned that he’d called the police. Rosaura was relieved. They would calm him down, she thought. With the officers en route, and her older son trying to comfort Ruben in the garage, she dashed back inside to get ready to take him to the hospital.

Then, as Rosaura changed clothes in her bedroom, she heard two pops.

A police spokesman declined to discuss what Rosaura said happened next, when she ran outside to find Ruben dead on the ground. She asked Choyce why he’d shot her son, and this, she recalled, was the officer’s response: “Because he asked me for it.”

Jessica hangs out at a neighborhood playground in Haymarket after Ruben’s death.  

Jessica stood in the shade of a tall granite slab, just behind a maroon tent where dozens of people had crowded around Ruben’s urn at the cemetery.

She clutched a box of tissues in her hands, and from a string around her neck hung a beaded bracelet Ruben had brought her back from his summer trip to Mexico. She dressed in an orange T-shirt, for him, and on her left wrist she wore an orange band.

“We are Ruben,” read an inscription along the outside. When a teacher had given it to her at school that morning, Jessica sunk to the hallway floor and wept.

Amid the swell of grief, guilt had also begun to flicker in her mind. Jessica knew Ruben had a crush on her, and the teen wondered if maybe she could have said something to him that would have changed the course he took. But she knew, too, that there wasn’t always an answer — that sometimes people her age, or any age, wanted to die for inexplicable reasons.

Jessica never could articulate why she’d attempted suicide that one night in eighth grade, or why she’d felt so unhappy in the months before it. Her life was great, she said. She had friends, loving parents, good grades, but none of it seemed to matter at the time.

Only after weathering months of failed group therapy and ineffective medications, damaging misdiagnoses and an unaccommodating insurer, did she at last begin to find a sense of calm. The move in ninth grade to PACE, with its small classrooms and patient approach, had also helped.

And so had Ruben.

He knew how to soothe her when she had panic attacks. It’s just in your head, he would say until she believed him.

He also knew how to make her laugh, especially the time he posted a picture of himself on Instagram, posing just like a female friend of theirs always did, eyes closed, head cocked, hand beneath his chin, a crown of digital flowers wrapped around his head.

He tried, repeatedly, to teach her how to play one of his favorite video games, “Call of Duty,” so they could enjoy it together.

“There’s so many buttons on the controller,” she’d complain.

Most of all, Jessica cherished their walks — the one when, after a rainstorm, he gave her a piggyback ride through the mud and nearly dropped her; and after that, when they came upon a big black snake and she screamed, and he thought it was hilarious; and in June, when they found a baby bird on the ground and brought it back, warmed it with a heating pad and fed it mushy dog treats, then took it to a wildlife center and ended their perfect day with burritos from Moe’s Southwest Grill.

Even after she knew Ruben was dead, Jessica texted his number.

She messaged once that she was releasing an orange balloon into the sky for him. Later, she sent a collection of his favorite emoji: a taco, a hammer and sickle, an Easter Island head.

“I miss you,” she wrote. “I wish you were here.”

Jessica shows the final text messages she sent Ruben before, and after, he was shot.  

One after another, the local TV reporters had knocked at the Urbina family’s front door, asking for comment, so again and again Ruben’s father went outside and gave them one.

“We just don’t know how we’re going to survive this,” he said.

“My kid was taken from us for no reason at all,” he said.

Urbina still didn’t know the precise details, because he couldn’t stand to hear them, but he remained convinced that his son should still be alive.

In their living room, he and 18-year-old Oscar talked of how it had come to this.

“You and I know the medicine is not an issue,” Urbina said, referring to Ruben’s antipsychotics.

“The thing is, I don’t know that,” Oscar said.

His father couldn’t be swayed.

“It’s irrelevant whether he was in a state of mind,” Urbina said, arguing that the officer should have simply subdued Ruben. The teen, he believed, was too small to pose a real threat.

For Oscar, the answer wasn’t that simple.

“I can’t help but, you know, try to find someone to blame,” he said. “Should I blame me? Should I blame my parents? Should I blame the officer? I don’t know who, because I just feel like so many things went wrong that we could have done better.”

He struggled to understand what had incited Ruben that morning, most of all because his younger brother had sent him a funny video game meme of Mario’s head atop a futuristic warrior’s body just 81 minutes before the shooting.

Oscar told his dad he knew the family didn’t want to focus on Ruben’s depression.

“That’s not the issue,” Urbina said.

“But you have to realize, that is the issue, because that’s why that happened.”

“No, the issue is the decision that the guy made,” Urbina said of the officer.

Left: Oscar Urbina grieves for his younger son, Ruben. He and others wore orange T-shirts because that was Ruben’s favorite color; Right: Jessica and Ruben’s brother, Oscar, 18, embrace during a memorial for Ruben.  

Something good, though, needed to come from Ruben’s death, his brother maintained. People needed to pay more attention to kids struggling with mental illness, and maybe this would help.

“Although somebody may seem like they’re doing good — I know you don’t want it to be about that,” Oscar said, “but no matter how good they may —.”

“It’s totally irrelevant,” his dad interjected. “Because whatever the case, we were — he had the help.”

“I know he had the help, but no matter how much help, how many rehabs have I — how many places have I been?”

“I know —,” Urbina began. Oscar cut him off.

“Let me talk. I’ve had help. I’ve been okay. Some points I’ve had where I’ve been okay for a long time,” he said, then pointed at his head. “But that doesn’t change what’s up here.”

Ruben had used almost those same words the night he’d tried to hang himself.

He couldn’t bear the anxiety anymore, Ruben told his brother. The unyielding depression.

“It’s too much.”

Ruben’s urn at a cemetery in Northern Virginia in September.

Steven Rich and Gabriel Florit contributed to this report.

To reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, call 1-800-273-TALK (8255). You can also text a crisis counselor by messaging 741741.