For years, Elizabeth Ramirez has hosted a monthly support group for grieving mothers. It’s part of her work leading Parents for Peace and Justice, a violence prevention organization she co-founded after her son, Harry Rodriguez, was shot and killed at his surprise birthday party in 2011.
A few months ago, Ramirez invited the mothers’ partners and children to join the meetings. This choice ultimately led her to rethink her approach to addressing community violence.
At the first joint meeting, Ramirez noticed that many of the children were angry — not just about their loss, but also with their parents, who were caught in a haze of grief. Parents typically responded with defensiveness or excuses that undermined them. Ramirez thought of her own daughter, and how after she lost her brother, rage led her down an unhealthy path. It dawned on Ramirez how few spaces there are for Chicagoans who’ve lost siblings to connect with one another and work through their specific needs.
“I was the type of person that always said, “the mothers, the mothers,” but the siblings also need to be heard,” Ramirez said. “Their anger can cause harm.”
Violence prevention efforts and mainstream narratives about the gun crisis tend to center parent-child relationships. But in recent years, professionals have started to recognize a longstanding need: Losing a sibling brings about a unique set of consequences. In support groups and interviews with The Trace, more than 10 people who lost siblings described contending with both loneliness and shifting family dynamics. Some felt they needed to hide their grief to be “strong” for their parents, or sensed an added pressure to be “perfect” to avoid further disrupting their families’ lives.
“Losing a sibling is a very unique experience, [different] than maybe losing a significant other or a parent losing a child,” said Jaylynn Jones, a family support specialist with Chicago Survivors, an organization that helps crime victims. “For most people, their siblings are their first friend in life. You are not only losing a family member, but your companion, a person who has been there to experience life with you.”
But the city’s patchwork of services for victims of gun violence is typically housed under more general umbrellas like family or youth services. This means that there are few resources or spaces designed to meet the unique needs of people who’ve lost siblings to gun violence.
Some people are working to fill these gaps in Chicago. After the meeting where the kids lashed out, Ramirez split the wider family group in two. In one group, parents helped each other discover ways to be present for their living children while they grieve for the ones they’ve lost. The other one allowed siblings to freely express themselves without having to navigate the tricky dynamics that stem from having their parents in the room.
The sibling-focused group now meets every other month in Belmont Cragin. It’s become a place where kids share their emotions and learn to navigate their grief without harming other people or themselves. Ramirez hopes that hosting the separate groups will help families develop the skills they need to grieve together, rather than just alongside each other.
“They fall into a pattern of grieving individually, which naturally happens when it comes to families that have been impacted by homicide,” said Edwin Martinez, co-founder of Centro Sanar, a mental health nonprofit in Brighton Park. “They cry in the bathroom. They cry in their bedrooms. We can still hear each other, but nobody’s talking to each other. We may be together, but we’re not together.”
Jessica Brown knows this feeling well. Brown was 19 when her brother Rodney and sister Juanita were shot and killed in their home in 1996. Their deaths were devastating, especially to her mother. Their absence became an enduring but often ignored presence in the women’s relationship.
“We were like ships passing in the night,” Brown said. “We didn’t talk about it a lot.”
Losing her siblings reordered Brown’s life in ways big and small. She found herself buying her mother extra gifts on holidays to make up for what was lost. Routine tasks like getting home at night were no longer simple decisions about convenience, but existential questions about what would keep her safe for her parents’ sake. She confronted feelings of guilt when moving away from Chicago for school or work. Like many other children who’ve lost siblings to gun violence, she was diligent at being “as good of a daughter” as she could be.
“I don’t have any regrets about that part of my life,” Brown said. “My mother and I went to the movies all the time. We were just friends. We got along. I didn’t give her any grief.”
When Brown’s parents died, she was the sole surviving member of her immediate family, which meant she had to bury her parents alone. She’d scroll through the numbers in her phone, wondering whom to call for support. She wished for the chance to call one of her siblings — to grieve with them in ways only they would understand. It was one of many critical moments that her siblings’ killing stole from her life.
Juanita was a hairstylist who owned a salon. Brown longed for the lessons Juanita was supposed to teach her about womanhood and navigating adult life. She missed Rodney’s “annoying” but protective older brother nature.
“Your siblings are supposed to grow old together. When the world gets hard, you have this other person or persons who shared at least similar experiences and you don’t have to explain things to,” Brown said. “You lose safety, you lose companionship, you lose your friends. Your brother and your sister are your friends, even if they annoy you like my brother did. Making friends is hard, and as you get older, it gets harder. People don’t stick around. Your siblings, you assume, are people you’ll have all year round.”
Trevon “Tre” Bosley was 7 when his 18-year-old brother, Terrell, was shot and killed outside their church in 2006. Bosley struggled to wrap his head around the permanence of the loss. He expected his big brother to walk through the door again.
Losing a sibling is especially difficult for young people, Martinez said. It’s common for families who experience loss to homicide to respond by “tightening up.” Parents often limit going out, what their children wear, and who they hang out with, which can be confusing for kids and teens who are still forming their identities and making sense of the world. It’s also common for younger children to regress developmentally, according to Martinez. A kid may begin wetting the bed more or experience speech delays. And it’s even harder to find specific support for young siblings given the city’s limited mental health resources.
Not long after Terrell’s killing, Bosley found himself on the front lines of the violence prevention movement. Losing Terrell inspired the brothers’ parents, Pamela and Tommie Bosley, to create Purpose Over Pain, a survivor-led violence prevention group. Days the family once devoted to playing music for their church choir were now spent at peace marches and anti-violence rallies.
“It was pretty chaotic, honestly,” Bosley said. “We didn’t listen to music after my brother was killed because his main thing was music. We stopped celebrating holidays. We stopped going to church because my brother was killed at church. My whole world shifted.”
Growing up, Terrell had always seemed much older to Bosley. When Bosley turned 18 himself, he realized just how young Terrrell had been. How much life he still had ahead of him. “I was just realizing how I hadn’t done anything in life that I wanted to do yet. It started to make me think how he felt,” Bosley said. “That’s when it really hit me that he was gone. The experiences I’m having in life, these people I’m meeting, the places I’m traveling to, he would never see.”
Bosley, too, has become a leader in the violence prevention space. He’s shared his story with former President Barack Obama on CNN and introduced President Joe Biden at a White House event.
Now 26, he said that a lot has changed since Terrell’s death. He eventually processed the loss, something that took more than a decade because he couldn’t access mental health support at the time. Bosley bought a house and recently got engaged. But he still lives with the nagging feeling that something’s always missing. He catches himself shuffling through a mental list of “what ifs?” What if Terrell were still alive? Would he have a family? Would he be traveling the world, playing music? Would he be proud of the life Bosley has made for himself?
“Of course I believe that he’s seeing me from heaven, but I wish he was here,” Bosley said. “I’m always looking for a sense of, like, ‘you did a great job.’ But I’ll never get that from him.”
