Tavares Harrington carries the memory of his 7-year-old niece Heaven Sutton on his sleeve. Her name, tattooed in cursive, sits in front of a dove on his left forearm.
On June 27, 2012, as Heaven was playing outside while her mother sold candy and snow cones in front of their home in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, a 33-year-old man fired at least 10 shots. He struck a 19-year-old in the ankle. Heaven ran, but a stray bullet struck her back and killed her. Eight years later, the shooter was sentenced to 60 years in prison.
Every day, Harrington reflects on Heaven’s life, and how it was cut heartbreakingly short. She was a charismatic little girl who loved to sing and act. She often carried his infant children on her hip, like a big sister.
For Harrington, Heaven’s death wasn’t the first in his family caused by gun violence. His mother, Patricia Banks, was fatally shot in 1994, when he was just 15 years old. Since then, as an outreach supervisor for the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago in Austin, Harrington has noticed a change for the worse: Instead of adults wounding each other, young people are now carrying lethal weapons, shooting more bystanders. “You see kids dying now,” he said. “You see women dying now. You see old people dying now.”
While the overall number of people getting shot in Chicago has started to decrease, over the past 13 years, shootings have steadily become deadlier. As The Trace previously reported, the total number of people who died after being shot grew from 354 in 2010 to 559 in 2023. The likelihood of dying after being shot rose from almost 13 percent to 19 percent in the same time frame. Proportionally, fewer Chicagoans are surviving, especially within Black and brown communities in the city’s South and West Sides.
Every fatality represents a human life cut short, and, like Harrington, the people who loved them have to cope with their absence. Many are turning their grief into action by seeking ways to reduce Chicago’s lethality crisis.
About a dozen residents and violence prevention workers interviewed by The Trace said everyone, from the community to the government, needs to work together to provide more resources to areas affected by gun violence. More funding is necessary, they said, to provide young people with the tools to make them less likely to carry a gun. And urgent measures need to be taken to stem the supply of guns that are still coming in, despite Illinois’ relatively tough laws.
Young people need more opportunities
Violence prevention workers and others who work with young people said that people who lack guidance are at risk of becoming a product of their violent environment, where losing someone to gun violence can feel like the norm. These kids feel the need to have a gun because they see others have firearms, said Aaron White, who coordinates physical activities and teaches kids about fitness at Moore Park. “A lot of people can’t get past what they see,” White said. “They don’t know that there’s another life outside of that. I didn’t know that.”
When he was 20, White worked as an autopsy technician for the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office. He saw violence take the lives of his childhood friends. “It’s hard to see someone that you grew up with, played with, went to school with, to see them in that position,” White said.
Sometimes, during barbershop talk, he joins his other lifelong friends in reflecting on those losses. White grew up three blocks away from Harrington in Austin. Two years before Harrington lost his mother, when White was 14, his older brother was shot.
When shots rang out at Galewood Park that day, White thought he heard a toy gun. But when people started running, he and his 16-year-old brother did, too. When they got home, he saw that a bullet had struck his brother after piercing his pants. It was life-altering. “There was no longer any Supermans,” he said. “There was no longer any Spidermans.”
White said he would have benefited from counseling to better cope with that moment. Many kids, he added, lack guidance to get them through what is happening in their communities. Some, instead, choose to act on their own idea of justice.
In Austin, Harrington said, the makeup of the people committing gun violence has changed. The number of gangs in the neighborhood went from about nine to about 52 “cliques.” These small factions are often named after people who were shot and killed. Sometimes, they act to avenge their deaths. With only 16 outreach workers from Harrington’s organization covering such a large area, it can be hard to reach so many people seeking vengeance.
Violent rap music and video games also affect the way young people view firearms, said Maurice Williams, an outreach supervisor for the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago in Austin. “Some of these kids sit around the house and play that type of stuff and think real life is like a game,” he said. “Only thing is that you don’t learn that when you die, you’re really dead, you don’t get the chance to respawn.”
The internet, too, is rife with footage of violence. “Everything they do, they put it right on social media,” said Torrence Price, a Greater Grand Crossing site supervisor for Acclivus, a community health organization focused on violence prevention. Although social media helps people like Price intervene in arguments before teens escalate to violence, he thinks there should be regulations against making threatening and violent online posts.
Solutions from people on the ground
The people most affected by the lethality crisis are trying to help solve it — and they want officials to seek out their perspectives before making decisions that could change their lives. Trevon Bosley, 26, said that gun violence is often portrayed as a youth problem, but few officials regularly ask young people for their input. “A lot of times, I’m the youngest person in a room that’s a survivor,” said Bosley, an advocate against gun violence.
Violence prevention workers say they need funders, politicians, and the public to understand that making cities safer means hiring workers from the communities they serve. “The ones out there committing the violence are going to be able to relate to them,” said William Edwards, a program manager for Acclivus.
Often, these workers speak from experience. Many outreach staffers have been incarcerated, and they seek to help teens and young adults avoid repeating the mistakes that landed them behind bars.
In recent years, community violence intervention groups have received significantly more funding. Many new services, including street outreach, intervention, cognitive behavior therapy, employment opportunities, and trauma training, are available today. “What we’re building in Chicago is extraordinary,” said Teny Gross, chief executive officer for Nonviolence Chicago. “I’m stunned at the amount of commitment we have now, especially from the private sector.”
This work, he said, takes time to bear fruit — and can’t solve the crisis on its own. Other necessary components, Gross said, include police reform, toughening gun laws across the country, and funding alternative programming for young people.
“We always catch the little guys,” Gross said. But he added that law enforcement doesn’t always track crime guns to their suppliers. He also blames the gun manufacturers for creating and advertising these lethal weapons.
As an economist, Jens Ludwig, the director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, views the issue in terms of supply and demand.
On the supply side, he said, the government could better regulate high-capacity magazines and switches, devices that can make a semiautomatic weapon fire like one that’s fully automatic. On the demand side, he added, governments and organizations can use tools, like prosecution, to deter people from using these devices. This month, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to establish a taskforce that will assess the threat of emerging gun technology like conversion devices and 3D-printed guns.
Beyond preventing further violence, Bosley said, it’s important to make sure that the people living in its aftermath have the tools they need to cope. Not doing so, he added, can sometimes cause people to retaliate, especially when they feel justice has not been served.
Different survivors need different resources. When Harrington’s mother died, basketball kept him busy. While there were people who wanted to retaliate and avenge his mother’s death, the sport served as an outlet to defuse his anger. Ultimately, the lives taken away from him cemented his resolve to reduce gun violence. Now, as an outreach worker, he’s serving Austin, the neighborhood where he grew up. He aims to create spaces where young people can resolve their conflicts peacefully, and provide resources that deter them from criminal activity.
“People do better if they know better.”
