A violent year in Connecticut for kids: 23 children and teens shot in 4 cities to date this year
Sixteen-year-old Mark Mulongo was playing basketball with his friends when he was shot to death in New Haven earlier this year.
Less than two months later, another 16-year-old, Alondra Vega-Martinez, was in her Hartford home when intruders tied her up beside her teenage brother and shot her to death, just before she was set to start her senior year of high school and become captain of her volleyball team.
Barely a week later, two 14-year-old boys were shot in Hartford. And a week after that, a 13-year-old girl was dropped off at Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital after being shot while riding in a car in New Haven.
Se’Cret Pierce, 12, was killed April 20 when she was shot in the head during a drive-by quadruple shooting, according to police. She was an eighth-grade student at Milner Middle School in Hartford.
Experts say children and teens are not likely to be involved in gun violence, but can be caught in the crossfire of assailants. For youths who might be leaning toward the choices that can lead to violent encounters, activists, police and experts across the state provide intervention, life skills training and much more.
A violent year
Eight months into the year, at least 23 children and teens have been wounded by gunfire in four Connecticut cities: Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport and Waterbury, according to local police departments. Three of them died and a 17-year-old remained in critical condition in a hospital after being shot in the chest last Monday night in Waterbury, police said.
In Hartford, eight people under 18 had been shot by the end of July. In all of 2022, eight minors were injured by gunfire in the city, according to the Hartford Police Department.
In Waterbury, a total of eight teens were shot in all of 2022. Eight have been shot already in 2023, police said. In New Haven, another three teens, ages 13, 16 and 17, were wounded by bullets between January and July and one was killed, compared to a total of 21 in all of 2022, city officials said.
In Bridgeport, another three minors have been shot so far this year, including one incident of an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound. Last year, a total of five were shot all year.
Nationwide, the rates of children and teenagers injured by gunfire has skyrocketed. Across the country, 1,065 children under the age of 10 were shot in 2021, up 38% from the 665 shot five years earlier, according to the Gun Violence Archive, an independent data collection and research group that tracks gun violence across the United States.
The rate of teen shootings rose even more, with a 39% increase between 2016 and 2022 for teens ages 12 to 17. Last year, a startling 5,157 teenagers were wounded by gunfire in America, the GVA reported. In 2020, the CDC declared shootings to be the No. 1 cause of death for children in the United States.
So far in 2023, 2,895 children and teens had been injured by gun violence in the United States as of Aug. 4, according to the GVA. And 1,060 children have been killed so far this year.
‘Not the intended targets’
Leonard Jahad, executive director of the New Haven-based Connecticut Gun Violence Intervention Program, said that more often than not, children and teens injured or killed by shootings in Connecticut’s cities are not involved in violent activity. They’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“The kids aren’t really involved in violent crime, they’re out there when a lot of activity occurs and most of the time they are not the intended targets,” said Jahad, whose non-profit works with young people ages 13 to 24 in Greater New Haven who are impacted by or involved with violence.
Sometimes, Jahad said, what puts young people in the path of violence is as predictable as the weather. A heat wave, for example, will draw kids and teens out of their homes if they’re living in multi-floor apartment buildings without air conditioning, often in public housing in urban areas, he said.
“They’ll come outside and there will be no trespassing signs on the property, they’re looking for places they can congregate safely so they’re out in social settings,” he said.
“If kids are out at night when it’s cooler and they’re sleeping during the day, it makes this recipe,” he said. “They’re out late, it’s been hot and it makes a perfect storm for kids to be victims of violent crime.”
“The 8-second rule”
Those on the front lines of working with youths in communities where violence is prevalent say they also recognize that there can be factors that draw kids and older teens to make poor decisions. Working with these youths is an important part of helping them to make good choices to avoid violent encounters and think about consequences, the experts said.
To make it safer for young people, groups such as Jahad’s work to prevent youths from picking up guns and going down life paths that lead them to be young violent offenders or, eventually, adults wielding guns in Connecticut.
Jahad, who worked as a probation officer for years before retiring to start CTVIP, said he uses the same screening process he used in the state Department of Correction when identifying young New Haven residents who might be at high risk of becoming drivers of violence. The biggest indicators are usually the same across the board, he said: having a negative outlook on life, having a dysfunctional family, and socializing with a negative peer group.
To try to reach kids who live with these risk factors, Jahad’s program employs people from the community who often have been involved with criminal activity or incarcerated themselves, and works with young people to change the way they make decisions and interpret situations through cognitive behavioral therapy.
One of their most successful tools, Jahad said, is what they call the “8 second rule.”
“If you have an interaction that’s negative, take eight seconds to think about it, or even just look at (the other person),” said Jahad. In that time, a situation can rapidly deescalate.
In teaching this method, Jahad’s team starts by asking people what triggers their anger. The answer, he said, is usually feeling disrespected. They then ask kids to explain, and understand, what disrespect means to them and what their response options are.
“We ask them ‘What’s your riskiest response?’ and the answer is, ‘I can shoot them,’” said Jahad. “‘What’s the least risky response?’ they ask. They could ignore the person. Mentors play out those scenarios with the teens so they can understand the consequences of different responses.
Jahad said teens and young adults have reported back to their mentors that “they use that tool and it really empowers them in those eight seconds.”
At CTVIP, the goal is to reach kids in the community where they are — in neighborhoods, schools and on the streets — and create lasting positive relationships with adults who are good role models. The mentors they are paired with, Jahad said, stick with them as long as they can.
“These youth have been abandoned so much in their life,” said Jahad, who said he has seen young people be retraumatized after opening up to doctors, therapists, social workers or other adults who then move on to other cases. “It’s that cycle of abandonment that kids have, especially kids in urban communities many of whom have been abandoned by their fathers or lost their fathers.”
Marc Donald, executive director of the Regional Youth Adult Action Partnership in Greater Bridgeport, said young people who have fathers or older brothers who have been involved in violent crime or who have been incarcerated can be at high risk of becoming drivers of violence themselves.
The RYASAP program, which works with at-risk youth in the city who are living with poverty, trauma, substance use and other drivers of violence, employs credible messengers who grew up in the neighborhoods they’re serving. In many cases, their staff and volunteers know the families they work with, or are aware of their histories and better able to identify potential triggers.
Donald said that if a young adult is not on their radar, they can connect with them before they show markers of violent behavior by keeping track of what’s happening in their community and family.
If they know a young boy’s closest adult male is his uncle, for example, and that uncle goes to jail for violent behavior, they’ll reach out to that family right away to intervene before behaviors are repeated or developed because of the loss and trauma.
By connecting kids to people who grew up in their own neighborhoods and public housing systems, they’re connecting them to people “who know to flag these things before markers of violence pop up,” he said.
RYASAP is also piloting a new program where they work with middle school students, identifying behaviors such as fighting and involvement with peer groups that have been involved in violence. They offer direct mentoring so kids have a familiar face they can count on for mediation, and focus on social emotional learning tools that help kids understand how to process difficult emotions and persevere down a positive path.
Donald, who was a teacher and school administrator in South Bronx, New York and New Haven before working with RYASAP, said they’re trying to intervene at a group level before someone moves toward a violent path, not after they’re already on it.
“We’re trying to get them before they go down that path,” he said.
They work with young people to foster positive social interactions, gently steer them to more positive peer groups, and get them headed down a route to employment and education rather than gang activity.
Connecticut mother Scarlet Lewis, whose son Jesse Lewis was killed in the shooting at Sandy Hook, founded the Choose Love Movement with a focus on social emotional learning as a gun violence prevention tool.
The nonprofit’s goal is to build safer communities through character social emotional development programs that teaches things such as a willingness and ability to work through obstacles, mindful gratitude even in difficult times, choosing to forgive anger rather than seek revenge and the ability to act with compassion.
Through their work with more than 2 million children across the globe, Choose Love has reported that SEL skills help lead to lower incarceration rates, reduced anxiety and depression and lessen substance misuse.
‘We’re playing catch up’
RYASAP also recently launched focus groups with residents of public housing to “work with people who are often closest to the problems to try to identify ideas of how to help.” Preliminary conversations have suggested solutions such as better lighting in neighborhoods with higher crime rates and more summer employment opportunities for teenagers.
Donald said that RYASAP meets quarterly with folks from CTVIP and Hartford’s Youth Compass Collaborative and other groups doing similar work in other Connecticut cities to talk about what’s working where, what isn’t and why or why not. Jahad, of CTVIP, traveled to Baltimore last week to week to visit a similar program there to brainstorm new ideas and share advice and said he often followed trends in youth violence as they spread from coast to coast.
One thing he’s noticed, he said, is a lack of socialization and social accountability for kids and teens following the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There’s depression and loss, and subsequent trauma that’s occurred. People lost a lot of people during (the COVID-19 pandemic) and there was a lot of fear,” he said. Many kids lost formative years of socialization and now feel uncomfortable, or fearful, when they’re out in the community, he said.
Through their work on New Haven’s streets, Jahad said, the CTVIP team had developed a rapport with police officers, coaches, parents, siblings and people they worked with in the past, who would help them identify who might benefit from intervention or mediation. In many cases, he said, they were able to start working with kids before they got on their radar for violent activity.
But the pandemic, he said, put them 2 to 3 years behind. Now, when they hear about young people behaving violently, they often find themselves asking things that they used to know: “Where is this kid? Where is this negative behavior coming from? Who are they hanging out with?”
“Now we’re playing catch up,” he said. “We have never done as much mediation as we’re doing right now.”
Based on what he’s seeing at CTVIP, Jahad said he thinks the pandemic made young people less comfortable with in-person social interactions, made them more interested in gaining social media clout, and caused further trauma to kids who have likely already experienced a lot of traumatic events in their young lives.
William Carbone, executive director of Justice Programs and the Tow Youth Justice Institute at the University of New Haven, said trauma creates a cycle of fear for children and long term trauma can in turn lead to young people committing unlawful acts as a consequence to having untreated anxiety and depression.
“There is plenty of research that kids who are experiencing trauma have an increased risk of being involved in the juvenile justice system,” said Carbone.
That risk increases for kids who are living in neighborhoods where gun violence is a common occurrence, whether it directly impacts them or not.
For children with still-developing brains, said Carbone, multiple traumatic experiences compound and can have long lasting physical and mental health effects like increased risk of high blood pressure or anxiety. Trauma, even indirect, can affect school or work performance, which in turn impacts education and employment and housing security.
Trauma can also disrupt young people’s decision making abilities and impair social emotional development, which can lead to impulsive actions or negative peer relationships, Carbone said.
Programs like RYASAP and CTVIP work to recognize that family and friends of gun violence victims can benefit from immediate intervention and, to provide that as quickly as possible, they respond
While at the hospital, mentors connect with surviving victims if possible, to catch them when they may be at a point where they may seek change. But they also focus on creating relationships with traumatized and grieving family and friends, who may want to retaliate or may not be able to regulate their own emotional responses.
“There is no place in New Haven that is more dangerous than an emergency room after someone is hurt,” said Jahad.