Teens growing up under fire
‘ Around every turn, they’re taking our kids’: In an epidemic of shootings, smaller cities are bearing the brunt
When the shots rang out — “pop, pop, pop,” and then a thunder roll of gunfire — Maria Williams hit the floor.
The bullets sprayed through her front door and window, leaving perfectly cylindrical holes in the glass. They blasted clear across the nursery, where her 2year- old daughter’s toys were strewn on the carpet. They burrowed into the kitchen cabinetry — and hit her teenage son and daughter.
“All I could think of was, ‘ I’m not losing another child,’” Williams recalled.
Her 18- year- old stepson — William Rollins VI, known as Lil Bill — had been gunned down two years before.
An Associated Press and USA TODAY Network analysis of Gun Violence Archive data — gathered from media reports and police press releases, and covering a 31⁄ year period through June 2 of this year — reveals that Wilmington far and away leads the country in its rate of shootings among kids from ages 12 to 17.
“It’s non- stop, just non- stop,” said William Rollins V, father of the teenagers. “Around every turn, they’re taking our kids.”
Of the 10 cities with the highest rates of teen shootings, most had populations of less than 250,000 people. Among them were Savannah, Ga.; Trenton, N. J.; Syracuse, N. Y.; Fort Myers, Fla.; and Richmond, Va. Chicago was the lone large- population city high on the list.
Poverty and a sense of hopelessness in the most violent neighborhoods is a common thread. Syracuse, a university town that once cranked out air conditioners and televisions, now has a poverty rate of 35%.
Others, like Savannah, are deeply divided. While its antebellum mansions, gnarled live oaks and marble monu- ments to war heroes drew more than 13 million visitors last year, away from picture- postcard oasis of Southern charm the scenery here quickly shifts to decaying neighborhoods, abject poverty and deadly violence.
Size may play a role. In tightly packed neighborhoods, insults and perceived insults ricochet like shots in an echo chamber. One shooting inevitably leads to speculation about who will be targeted next.
“The streets remember,” said Mark Denney, a state prosecutor who is trying to end Wilmington’s retaliatory warfare.
Social media accelerates the threats, and the danger. Teenagers whose brains are years from fully maturing are roaming the streets with a gun in one pocket and a smartphone in the other.
“A juvenile with a gun is a heck of a lot more dangerous than a 24- or 25- yearold with a gun,” said James Durham, the acting U. S. attorney based in Savannah.
During a recent presentation, Chaz Mollins, coordinator of violence prevention programs for Christiana Care Health System in Wilmington, showed a group of teens a map of Wilmington studded with pushpins, each marking the location of a shooting: white for injuries, red for homicides.
The pins, clustered in a handful of high- poverty neighborhoods, showed the kind of pattern you might see in an outbreak of some infectious disease, like Zika or Ebola, Mollins said.
“So,” he said, “we are in the midst of an epidemic.”
The problem facing Wilmington and these other cities: How to stop the spread?
For Malik Walker, the best thing about turning 18 wasn’t the birthday party he threw for himself at a local hotel. It’s the fact that, as an adult, he can now legally buy a gun.
Malik was just 12 when he dodged his first shootout on Wilmington’s notorious west side. At 15, he was kneeling on a sidewalk, calling an ambulance as he pressed his shirt against his best friend’s bloody chest. The friend had been shot 13 times on the corner where Malik had just been standing.
“I’m scared to even tie my shoe, because I don’t know who might creep up behind me,” Malik said as a police car’s strobing red- and- blue lights illuminate the unfurnished room where he and several friends have gathered on a sticky, summer night.
“It makes me want to take these two eyes and make two more, and put them in the back of my head.”
For teens in the First State’s largest city, this is life.
In Wilmington, data from the Gun Violence Archive show that roughly 3 out of every 1,000 adolescents are injured or killed annually from gun violence. That is almost twice the rate reported from Chicago and just more than nine times the national average.
About 30 active street crews exist in Wilmington today, estimated David Kennedy, a national expert in criminology who has for years studied the city’s crime problem. Prosecutors say these crews, made up of roughly 20 people per group, are responsible for most of Wilmington’s crime. A yearlong investigation by The News
Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network, detailed a veritable war between two groups — Only My Brothers and Shoot to Kill.
A News Journal analysis found that a third of the shooting victims under age 21 during the first seven months of 2016 had links to the rivalry.
On Nov. 3, 2015, Rayquan Briscoe was walking down Maryland Avenue for an appointment with his probation officer on a drug conviction. He heard gunshots. Briscoe tried to run, but his legs failed him: He’d been struck in the back, just to the right of his spinal column. He was paralyzed from the waist down.
He was 17.