Terrill Rickmon’s early life might sound like a stereotypical tale: a young Black man from an impoverished neighborhood who struggled with an absent father and went down the wrong path.
“I was alone, I felt unloved,” Rickmon said. He’d searched for and found affection on the blocks and corners of his Peoria, Illinois, neighborhood. “That’s what thrust me into the streets.”
Peoria’s sprawling South Side, where Rickmon grew up, has been neglected by the city for decades. Boarded-up houses were stripped of their copper pipes long ago; liquor stores are easy to spot, but groceries are few and far between. Gas stations and 24-hour food stands are hotspots for fist fights and shootouts.
This was the environment Rickmon entered as a pre-teen in 1999. He sold drugs, joined a gang, bought a gun, and shot at rivals. “I was a soldier,” Rickmon said. “Hurting people became my thing and it got me a lot of respect, a lot of notoriety, and I kind of built my reputation upon that.”
More than a decade of going in and out of prison, losing people close to him, and getting shot himself eventually changed Rickmon’s mindset, he said. When he was last released, in 2023, he volunteered as an outreach worker to provide support and resources to those actively involved in gun violence.
His estranged father, Terry Burnside, had done the same. In 2021, he established House of Hope, a community-based organization that took a public health approach to decreasing gun violence by tackling its root causes: mental health, poverty, and victimization. Thanks to a partnership grant from the Peoria Health Department and Cure Violence — a prominent violence intervention organization that operates in communities across the country — it received funding earlier this year to hire full-time violence interrupters and outreach workers. When Burnside approached his son to ask if he’d like to work with him, Rickmon jumped at the opportunity to follow in his father’s footsteps and help reclaim the community they were from.
But only a few weeks later, everything fell apart. House of Hope’s contract with the city was terminated, and a police investigation was launched to look into allegations of financial mismanagement, which Burnside vehemently denies. Burnside, Rickmon, and their colleagues were left without pay and the community was robbed of a city-supported violence prevention plan that would employ people with the credibility to de-escalate potentially violent conflicts and situations.
The collapse of the program shows the hurdles that such efforts can encounter, and how finger-pointing and lack of solidarity can doom initiatives to implement and sustain community violence prevention, particularly in small Midwestern cities like Peoria, which have smaller budgets and fewer administrative resources. That makes the distance in perspective between city leaders and gun violence survivors even more vast, as community members feel neglected. And those on the grassroots frontlines, like Burnside and Rickmon, are left questioning the city’s commitment to ending gun violence.
“They wanted somebody to take the fall,” Burnside said. “House of Hope is the lowest on the totem pole, so it’s easy to blame us for the failure.”
Though it’s much smaller, Peoria faces many of the same socioeconomic problems and segregation that drive gun crimes in cities like Chicago, 170 miles north. From 1999 to 2021, Peoria County — among the oldest urban areas in the state — had the third-highest rate of gun death per capita in Illinois. Since 1999, according to city data, firearm violence has been the leading cause of death among people ages 15 to 34 in Peoria County. Black people make up only 26 percent of the population, but according to police data, 88 percent of gunshot victims.
It took decades for the Peoria Health Department to identify gun violence as one of its strategic priorities, and in 2022 it contacted Cure Violence for an assessment to see if the program could be effective locally. The greatest need was to address gun violence on the individual level, said Monica Hendrickson, the department’s public health administrator.
Despite some pushback from the City Council that Cure Violence wasn’t financially worthwhile, the Health Department used $650,000 in American Rescue Plan Act funding to implement the program, which would focus on the East Bluff and South Side neighborhoods, where at least 40 percent of the city’s gun violence is concentrated. (In another example of the operational difficulty of these programs, the East Bluff portion was set to be run by another small nonprofit whose federal grant was not renewed, forcing it to shut down in November 2023.)
In early 2024, House of Hope received $282,000 of the federal funding to implement the Cure Violence model on the South Side. With these resources, they’d hire outreach workers to go out into the neighborhood, identify conflicts that could lead to violence, and try to resolve them with mediation before someone reached for a gun, or resorted to other forms of retaliatory violence. They would distribute informational pamphlets and T-shirts, identify survivors and victims who needed sustained support, and organize community programming.
But early in the process, Hendrickson and others in the Health Department started to think that House of Hope was overwhelmed and could not handle key aspects of administration, like coordinating interviews with prospective workers and meeting deadlines. “They did not have the infrastructure to handle a grant of this scale,” said Katy Endress, the department’s director of epidemiology and clinical services.
The contract was terminated in August, just seven months after it launched. Afterward, House of Hope’s independent fiscal agent, Denise Moore, said she noticed access to funds that was “not appropriate,” prompting her to report the organization to the police. Though she agreed that all money was accounted for, Moore declined to elaborate on specifics. The Peoria Police Department declined to comment for this story, citing an active investigation.
Though it remains unclear who is responsible for the missteps that led to the program shutting down, Corine Barnes, a part-time site manager for House of Hope who helped implement it, said all transactions were legitimate. Barnes explained that the organization often had to cover out-of-pocket expenses and then retroactively invoice the fiscal agent, Moore, for reimbursement. It was unsustainable, Barnes said; the pace of their on-the-ground work wasn’t being matched by the administrators of the multipronged financial process. “House of Hope is a small entity,” Barnes said, “and we were waiting months for invoices.”
The budgetary exclusion of community pop-up events, mental health resources, and other tools to support House of Hope with its outreach efforts also struck her as disingenuous. “It wasn’t a budget for a violence intervention type of organization.”
Just weeks after the Health Department dismantled the program, a 10-year-old boy, Torres Johnson II, was shot and killed by a stray bullet as he played outside the CityScape apartments on the South Side. The boy’s father, Torres Johnson, believes the dismantling of the Cure Violence program is one of many examples of the city’s failure to protect kids from getting shot. “If a Black man kills another Black man, they don’t care,” he said.
Violence intervention is not a perfect science. Criminal justice experts point to the need for much more qualitative analysis of intervention programs across the country, and a lack of sustained investment.
But community activists in Peoria say the collapse of this particular program signifies the hands-off attitude city officials have toward gun violence.
The desperate situation forced violence interrupters like Gyrune Linwood to leave the organization and do the work on his own. Despite the risks, no pay, and no support from the city, Linwood has no intention of stepping aside as violence in the city persists. “They don’t live in this community,” Linwood said of the administrators. “We live here. We see what’s happening.”
DeVone Boggan, who founded the first Office of Violence Prevention in 2007, in Richmond, California, said the fight for nonpolicing strategies isn’t always about finances. “It’s much more of an intellectual hurdle, and that is getting city leaders to actually believe that we can end gun violence and that we can do it beyond law enforcement,” said Boggan. He now runs a national organization, Advance Peace, which works with other cities to build viable violence intervention ecosystems.
Boggan points out that, even in smaller cities, officials will find the money to invest in the police. “You’re spending money on public safety, so resources are there financially,” he said, “but you’ve decided to spend them all [on law enforcement].”
It’s not lost on community activists that it was a constant battle to get less than $1 million for a violence intervention program, while the Police Department accounts for around 21 percent of the city’s budget. In 2025, the department’s proposed budget is just north of $58 million.
And though the comparison is imperfect, Burnside also advocates for a partnership between police and programming like the kind they tried to implement at House of Hope. “I’m not trying to stop the police, I’m trying to help them.” He was never officially contacted about the police investigation into House of Hope and is unclear about the status of the investigation.
Yolanda Wallace, a local activist whose son was shot and killed in Peoria in 2006, said the failure was unsurprising. “The city views people who are ex-offenders and relatives of victims as below them,” she said. “They’ll only work with groups that are college-educated. People from our side of the tracks are left out.” In 17 years of activism in Peoria, Wallace has received only $4,000 from the city, which she got this year through a grant provided to her Mothers War On Violence organization, which provides support for the mothers of gun violence victims.
Elected leaders often voice concern, Boggan said, about hiring and employing people who used to be involved in gun violence, or spent time in prison. For hiring formerly incarcerated people to be city employees, “I was accused of bringing criminality into city government.”
Burnside believes that mindset contributed to what happened between House of Hope and the Health Department. “Someone on the City Council said to me, ‘Why should we have to pay convicted felons to address this problem,’” he recalled.
Hendrickson, at the Health Department, said she understands why community members are questioning her department’s commitment, but said that, regardless of direct programming in these neighborhoods, “we do a lot of work in terms of supporting other social determinants of health.”
The Cure Violence shutdown hasn’t stopped Rickmon and his father, who are still operating House of Hope with funding from Live Free USA, a national organization dedicated to ending gun violence and mass incarceration. They’ve also partnered with the Peoria Community Healing Resource Center, which provides outreach, education, and trauma-informed care to those involved in gun violence. With his own money, Burnside also purchased Rickmon’s old elementary school, which closed in 2009, and is converting it into a community center. They do this work while keeping full-time jobs.
The conflict between the city and the community is nothing new to Rickmon. When he was a gang member, clashing came with the territory, and it usually took the form of a rivalry. “With me and him, it was on sight,” Rickmon said, remembering a man whom he once considered his sworn enemy. “If I had seen him at a McDonald’s drive-through, I’m trying to kill him. It was that deep.”
But when he was in prison in 2013, that man ran into Rickmon’s mom and told her he wanted to talk to her son. When they got on the phone, they both explained how they were trying to change their lives and agreed on a truce. “I got the biggest name in my hood, you got the biggest name in your hood,” Rickmon recalled saying. “If we can join together under a peace treaty, that would be big for the whole entire city.”
The truce went on for a while, until his former enemy was murdered in 2020 and one of Rickmon’s associates was shot, all while Rickmon was back in prison for a parole violation. “My whole hood, my whole projects was ready to retaliate. I had to call them and tell them to stand down,” Rickmon said. He’d drawn a lesson from his father, who, years earlier, shook hands with the man who killed his brother.
“If I have the strength to move past my [issues] on the street,” Burnside said, “why can’t the city work with people they have differences with?”
