Small cities torn by teen violence
‘Around every turn, they’re taking our kids’: It’s those with populations under 250,000, not urban centers, where the suffering has spiraled out of control
When the shots rang out — “pop, pop, pop,” then a thunder roll of gunfire — Maria Williams hit the floor.
The bullets sprayed through her front door and window, leaving cylindrical holes in the glass. They blasted across the nursery, where her 2-year-old daughter’s toys were strewn — 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 had been gunned down two years before, another victim of Wilmington’s plague of teens shooting teens. His shooter was 17.
An Associated Press and USA TODAY Network analysis of Gun Violence Archive data — gathered
from news media reports and police news releases, and covering a
31⁄ 2- year period through June of this year — reveals that Wilmington far and away leads the country in its rate of shootings among kids 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 high-
est 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 are common threads. Syracuse, a university town that once cranked out air conditioners and televisions, has a poverty rate of 35%.
Others, such as Savannah, are deeply divided. Though its antebellum mansions, gnarled live oaks and marble monuments to war heroes drew more than 13 million visitors last year, away from the picture-postcard oasis of Southern charm, the scenery quickly shifts to decaying neighborhoods, abject poverty and 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 accelerate the threats — and the danger. Teenagers whose brains are years from fully maturing roam 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-year-old 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?
GANGS AT WAR
For Malik Walker, the best thing about turning 18 wasn’t the birthday party he threw for himself at a hotel. It’s the fact that, as an adult, he can 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 been standing.
Three years later, the tall, slender teenager with an easy smile shudders at the thought that, had he not stopped into a store for some juice, he could have been lying there, too.
“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 illuminated the unfurnished room where he and several friends 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 three out of every 1,000 adolescents are injured or killed annually from gun violence. That is almost twice the rate reported from Chicago and more than nine times the national average as reported for 2015 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The news organizations sought to measure teenage gun violence in America’s cities because it is something the federal government does not track on a regular and comprehensive basis.
Nearly a quarter of Wilmington’s residents live below the poverty line. Eighty-six percent of the city’s youth receive some form of state assistance.
Single-parent families live packed together in old-style housing projects or dilapidated brick row houses. Already separated from the more prosperous parts of town, Wilmington’s poor- er and largely black neighborhoods are divided physically by Interstate 95, which bisects the city, and by cliques that carve those neighborhoods into rival sections: Hilltop and West Center City; “The Hill” and “Down Bottom.”
About 30 active street crews exist in Wilmington, according to David Kennedy, a national expert in criminology who has studied the city’s crime problem for years.
Prosecutors said these crews, made up of roughly 20 people per group, are responsible for most of Wilmington’s crime.
A year-long 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 of court records, social media and the newspaper’s internal database found that a third of the shooting victims under age 21 during the first seven months of
2016 had links to the rivalry. The feud began in January
2015 with the death of 16-yearold Jordan Ellerbe, gunned down while listening to music with friends on a front porch in the city’s Hilltop neighborhood. The same home was targeted again two days later, leaving three mourners wounded.
The war escalated in the months that followed.
One gang member would shoot at a rival; weeks later, fire would be returned. In May 2016, 15year-old Brandon Wingo was killed on his way home from school.
A month later, three alleged members of Shoot to Kill were charged with the popular basketball player’s death. From July to September of 2016, officials arrested 28 alleged OMB members on charges of gang participation, carrying concealed guns, robbery and attempted assault. An additional teen was later charged as part of OMB, bringing the total to
29.
Wilmington’s new police chief, Robert Tracy, said the city needs to do more of this — identifying those committing crimes and getting them off the street. It’s a strategy employed in other cities.
“There’s a small percentage of individuals that are going back and forth causing this violence in the city,” Tracy, Chicago’s former top crime strategist, said this year during a vigil for a 6-year-old boy who had been shot. “And all the good people are tired of it, and they’re outraged.”
‘YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO DUCK’
Unlike larger, more organized criminal enterprises such as the Crips, the Bloods or the Mexican Mafia, feuds among teenage gangs in Wilmington don’t revolve around drugs, or territory, or even money. It’s about respect.
In the Internet age, bad blood can spring up and spread instantly online with the double tap of a thumb on a smartphone screen or a hastily tapped out Tweet. Teenagers in Wilmington don’t sport gang colors or uniforms but identify themselves with emojis and hashtags.
“Technology’s evolution has made it easier for criminals to get guns,” Deputy Attorney General Joseph Grubb said. “It also has made it easier for young people to get offended by something, causing them to go grab a gun and shoot up a block as opposed to, ‘Meet me in the school yard and let’s fistfight.’ ”
Every shooting opens the possibility for another as the thirst for retaliation creates a bloody game of back-and-forth: a life for a life for a life. According to CDC research, young men under the age of 34 who have been shot in Wilmington are 11 times more likely to commit gun violence in their lifetimes.
Mayor Mike Purzycki said some of the blame can be laid on a “fractured education system” that sends children on buses to schools in rival neighborhoods. Many fathers are either in prison or have convictions that make it hard for them to find jobs.
All of this leads to hopelessness and powerlessness, said the Rev. Derrick Johnson of the Joshua Harvest Church. “Pastor D,” as he’s known on the streets, understands that feeling, because he has been there. Johnson was a 17year-old drug dealer when he fatally shot a man.
Thanks to a rehabilitative program, he was pardoned after serv- ing 15 years.
One afternoon, Johnson strolled down the stairs of the William “Hicks” Anderson Community Center in the city’s troubled West Center City neighborhood. A group of little girls, licking Popsicles, stood on the landing, leaning against the railing and peering down at the pastor. He reached into his pocket and handed each child a dollar .
“What you be doing when they be shooting around here?” he asked the children.
“Running home,” said a girl with pigtails.
“You run?” the minister said, “you’re supposed to duck.”
“I learned that in school,” another girl shouted. “I duck my head, somewhere where they won’t find me.”
AN EPIDEMIC OF SHOOTINGS
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 years old.
“Bullets don’t have no names,” he said.
In December 2013, City Council President Hanifa Shabazz asked the CDC to investigate. It would be the agency’s first inquiry into gun violence as a public health epidemic. The agency found that from 2009 to 2014,
15% of the people arrested in Wilmington for a gun crime were under the age of 18.
The CDC recommended that agencies share information such as school truancy records, child welfare reports and emergency room visits to identify youth who need help earlier in life to avoid violence later. But after closing a
$400 million budget gap through a combination of tax hikes and spending cuts, Gov. John Carney said the state doesn’t have the money to execute the CDC’s plan.
“I’m scared to even tie my shoe, because I don’t know who might creep up behind me. It makes me want to take these two eyes and make two more and put them in the back of my head.”
Malik Walker