"Since Parkland" project profiles 1,200 children killed by gun violence
The Parkland, Florida school shooting one year ago left 14 students dead. Since that day, nearly 1,200 more children across America have been killed by gun violence. A new reporting project tells their stories.
The website "Since Parkland," which launched two days before the Parkland anniversary, features profiles of each of those young people whose lives were cut short by a bullet. The project — a collaboration between the Miami Herald, McClatchy, the Gun Violence Archive and the nonprofit The Trace — enlisted more than 200 teen reporters to document the toll of school shootings as well as other homicides, domestic violence, deadly gun accidents and stray bullets.
The reporters who put the project together said it showed that any school, any community and any life can be destroyed by a gun.
"There's a lot of people who have been killed by gun violence whose stories aren't even told on the news," said Madison Hahamy, a teenager in Illinois who was a senior reporter on the project. "Kids who were riding their bicycles, kids who were shot in their homes, kids who were just going out to a restaurant to eat, and we don't hear their stories. But there's thousands of them, and there's a couple every single day who were alive today who won't be alive tomorrow because of a gun."
The Parkland shooting, which also left three educators at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School dead, happened in a city that had been recognized as the safest in Florida. "Since Parkland" provides 1,200 more reminders that gun violence tears through every community in America. Some of these tragedies happen in towns as safe as Parkland. Others are from areas where children have learned to expect gun violence every day.
Its profiles include Trevaun Romero Holloway, a 16-year-old student in Mattheson, Illinois, who had a 4.0 GPA. He was shot dead while driving. There is Luis Flores-Bravo, a 16-year-old in Wilson, North Carolina, who recently had a baby daughter wanted to join the military. He was killed in a convenience store robbery. There is Izabella Marie Helem of Lebanon, Indiana, whose brother accidentally shot and killed her in their grandparents' home. She was 4. He was 3.
"These are situations that happen to everybody," Amy Driscoll, an editor at the Miami Herald, told CBSN. "We're all going out there, we're all doing these things. And yet you really don't feel safe in a lot of places. That's what the kids have been telling us."
Meanwhile, she said, the parents of these children suffered a different kind of shock. "Many of them hadn't thought about guns and gun violence in particular about their children. They thought that was something that happened to other people."
