‘IT TAKES A LOT OF STRENGTH’
For those left behind, gun violence leaves never-ending sorrow
Melvin Harris and Iroquois Alston are just two of the names on the tragic roll call of gun homicides over the last decade in Connecticut.
For strangers, their violent and still-unsolved deaths were brief headlines and, for the state, permanent statistics.
But their surviving loved ones — Harris’ widow, Shanda Hyman-Harris of New Haven, and Alston’s mother, April Barron of Bridgeport —
have heart-wrenching stories to share about what happened to them and their families as the rest of the world moved on.
“People need to hear this. They need to hear this,” Hyman-Harris told Hearst Connecticut Media. “Oh God. Oh man. It takes a lot of strength. It takes a lot out of you.”
According to data from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner obtained by Hearst Connecticut Media, from 2010 to mid-2020, 2,056 people died by guns in the state. Of that total, 850 were homicides.
Kendell Coker, an associate professor of psychology with the University of New Haven, said while there have been plenty of studies conducted on the emotional impact of such violence, the data may fail to fully capture what those whose lives are shattered by the loss of a loved one go through.
“I think there’s some things that are just not as easily quantifiable. Sometimes we’ll try to use these crude metrics to come up with a number. A ‘depression scale.’ An ‘anxiety scale,’” Coker said. “But that doesn’t tell you the depth of feeling. ... That doesn’t tell you the whole story about what I’m feeling and experiencing about that pain.”
Melvin Harris of New Haven, who was 41 at the time, was shot during a home invasion robbery on June 20, 2019. He later died in the hospital from his injuries.
The trauma is still so fresh for Hyman-Harris that she was in tears for much of her interview as she explained how she, her son and daughter — all of whom were home at the time of the break-in and shooting — have struggled to adapt over the last 16 months.
“It’s hard. It’s hard. Daily living is so hard,” Hyman-Harris said. “He was everything to us. He wasn’t even their father. He was with me for seven years. We were married for three. He was an awesome man. He didn’t deserve that.”
Hyman-Harris, who currently works as a home health aide, was newly employed at a group home at the time of the home invasion and said she had to return to work about three weeks later. “They terminated me because I was always crying,” she added.
She said she sometimes hears her daughter, 22, weeping in the morning.
“She was in the shower yesterday and yelled, ‘Ma, I miss Mel’,” Hyman Harris recalled, sobbing: “I can’t bring him back.”
Hyman-Harris said she and her children never returned to their house, where they had resided for a decade, following the crime, and instead moved in with other relatives before finding a new home. But she tries to keep their address private: “Since that happened I just don’t trust anybody.”
Hyman-Harris, who has sought therapy, admitted she had contemplated taking her own life.
“I can’t do that,” she said. “This man would not have wanted me to give up at all. This man loved me with everything in him and me, as well, him.”
She said her faith and her family have also been “the reasons I get up every day and continue to move on in my life.
“Never give up. I’m not alone,” Hyman-Harris said. “I’m not alone. Never give up.”
Every victim was someone’s baby
Alston, Barron’s son, was shot and killed in Norwalk in 2011. He was 27. Even after nine years, Barron said, “Some days it’s like it just happened. It’s crazy.”
“It just hits you. You understand,” Barron continued. “Sometimes I’m having a great day and ‘boom’. It don’t have to be a picture or something that reminds me of him. Just hits you.”
“Nine months you carried this baby. Nine months. This came out of you,” Barron said.
Barron too received therapy and learned to count backwards if she experiences a sudden wave of grief.
“If it hits hard, I separate myself from people, count to ten backwards or pray,” Barron said. “Praying and counting backwards.”
Alston died on a Saturday, so Barron, who works as a live-in nurse and for years has volunteered to help the homeless, tries to keep herself particularly busy on that day of the week.
“I do not stay still on Saturday,” Barron said. “It’s been like this for nine years since he died.”
Barron said her two daughters — Alston was the middle child — coped very differently with their brother’s sudden death.
The oldest purchased a gun: “It makes her feel protected.”
Meanwhile Barron bought the younger daughter a dog that she still owns.
“(She was) always sad and crying. The dog became her best friend,” Barron said. “The dog really worked. Really, really saved her life.”
Like Hyman-Harris, Barron said she too at one point “wanted to commit suicide.”
Her family — including the two grandchildren Alston left behind — her volunteerism and her faith have helped her to keep going.
She also frequently finds peace at Seaside Park in Bridgeport, which was one of her son’s favorite places.
“I said, ‘Why you go to Seaside so much?’” Barron recalled. “He said it clears his mind. He thinks different.”
Barron continued: “He used to say, ‘Ma, if you just sit by the water and you can hear, the water talks to you.’ And I started doing that and in the midst of going there and sitting and walking I started praying. ... The more you asked questions, the more you hear the deep waves and the water and it just felt different, like there’s no worries in the world.”
The ripple effect
Coker has treated people impacted by gun violence and said his cousin and a close friend were both shot and killed.
“So from a research perspective, clinical and personal perspective, it’s informed my work,” he said.
Coker contrasted the loss of a loved one from natural causes with a homicide.
“It’s not that someone passed away. It’s that they were taken from you by the hands of someone else,” he said. “When we lose people there’s (an effort) of sometimes trying to make sense out of the loss. ‘Why does this person have to get sick?’ And now magnify that by this senseless act — a violent form of death you’re trying to make sense out of, and you may likely never get an answer to, even when you hear a reason why it happened.”
He said the “natural order of things” can be “flipped” when a parent winds up burying their murdered child or a young sibling experiences the similar sudden loss of a brother or sister and is confronted with mortality at an early age.
“This awareness. This realization that life is finite, but you learn it at a point maybe sooner than you should have,” he said. “That can start to shape your perspectives of the present as well as the future in how you start to live your life (and) cause you to see the future in a bleak way. There’s a sense of certainty that’s gone.”
Coker referred to the “compound effects” such tragedies have on the survivors.
“It shakes your sense of security and safety,” he said. “It can affect your sleeping. It can affect just your future orientation as well as the ability to focus on the task at hand. And it can turn into an ongoing fear.”
Fear, for example, of “additional loss,” Coker said.
“And that’s distracting because it can take away from your moments of joy,” Coker said. “If I’m smiling and laughing with my children and siblings ... there’s this lingering potential fear of losing someone else. So it can impact your ability to even be in the moment.”
Others, Coker said, may “just tough it out. Grit it out. And that’s also taxing.
“What sometimes I don’t think people really fully grasp is how it also has a rippling effect on communities,” Coker said. “When people show you data — when you see those numbers of how many homicides — that only tells you part of the story.”
He continued: “If you see there were 13 homicides, what that number doesn’t tell you is how many people have been affected by that. How many siblings. How many witnessed it. Heard about it. You magnify that 13 by unknown numbers.”
Barron hoped that sharing her personal tragedy would “enlighten” people, but also believes that the only those who have had a similar experience can truly relate to hers.
“For them to get a really good understanding you have to go through it,” she said. “Pain is pain. It’s a different pain. ... This is my son. I carried him. I raised him.”