The Violence Inside Us by Chris Murphy

Author:Chris Murphy [Murphy, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

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In Baltimore, whenever Corey Dodd left his family’s house, he knew what would be waiting for him when he came back. His three-year-old daughter, upon learning news of her dad’s pending arrival, would take up her post right inside the front door of their row house in Sandtown and greet her father with a big hug as he walked through the door. On the morning of Friday, January 18, shortly after Dodd dropped his twins off at school, he turned around to make the short drive back to his house. He parked his car, as always, right outside, and stepped outside his vehicle.

The familiar sound of gunshots wouldn’t have normally rattled Marissa, but these sounded too close for comfort. She rushed out the front door to find her beloved husband, the father of the couple’s four children, lying on the sidewalk, struggling to breathe. She frantically waved down a passing police officer, and an ambulance rushed to the scene. It was too late. Corey Dodd became the latest victim in one of the most violent Januaries in any Baltimore resident’s memory. He was the fourteenth homicide in eighteen January days, to go along with thirty-four nonfatal shootings in the barely begun new year of 2019. Over the course of the coming Martin Luther King, Jr., Day weekend, there would be thirteen more shootings in the city.

When I learned of Dodd’s death, I couldn’t stop thinking about those kids I left behind at Matthew A. Henson Elementary. I was there for only ninety minutes, and I experienced an active shooting within blocks of the school, and the victim was the father of two students. What must those kids go through, having to live in that neighborhood and go to that school every single day? My mind reeled knowing that there were two kids inside the school that day who were hours away from finding out that their father had been murdered. They would be the primary casualties inside Matthew A. Henson, but their father’s killing, just around the corner from their playground, no doubt created layers of trauma for the rest of the student body.

It was a reminder that the measure we keep of the urban gun violence epidemic is virtually useless. We catalog deaths and shootings—the numbers of people killed or injured. But studies show that each gun murder results in diagnosable trauma affecting more than twenty other people connected to the victim. The ripples of grief extend, endlessly, to the deceased’s mother, father, siblings, friends, and classmates. Janet Rice and Sam Saylor are simply not the same people they were before Shane’s death, nor will they ever be. And, of course, for that matter, neither are the families in Sandy Hook. If 299 people were killed by guns in Baltimore in 2017, then thousands more are dealing with the permanent health consequences of those deaths.

The most damage, though, is reserved for those kids in Sandtown, and millions of others who live in similarly violent neighborhoods all across America.

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