At all hours of the night, Metra Bell scrolls endlessly through her 19-year-old son’s Facebook page to watch his videos.
“Just so I can see him,” she said. “Just so I can hear his voice.”
She cherishes one video that shows her son, Darrell Mitchell, giving his sneakers to a homeless man, whose own shoes were falling apart.
Two days after giving away his shoes, on Aug. 8, Mitchell was shot and killed in broad daylight — the second teenager to die of gunshot wounds that day in Denver, a city where gun violence is claiming the lives of an increasing number of young people.
In 2018 and the first eight and a half months of 2019, 15 teenagers and children have been shot and killed in Denver — more than in the previous three years combined. Even as the number of homicides in Denver grew over the past four years, so has the proportion of victims ages 19 and younger, Denver Post analysis shows.
The deadly trend is also reflected in statewide data. The number of people 17 years old and younger killed by guns in Colorado has trended upward since 2014, when six kids in that age range were victims of murder by gun. In 2018, 12 young people were killed.
Denver law enforcement, community members and health officials point to a variety of factors they see as reasons for the uptick: a change in gang structures, easy access to firearms, violent video games, socioeconomic inequality, hopelessness and an online culture that glorifies gun possession.
“We’re trying to take a wholehearted worldview of what’s causing the problem,” said Denver Police Department Deputy Chief Barb Archer.
Parents, siblings and friends grieving the deaths are left wondering who the young people could have become. Mitchell had just graduated from high school in May and was planning to move to Texas, where a sister lived, his family said. Instead, he died alone in a hospital room.
“I know for sure it wasn’t his time to go,” Bell said. “They stole his life. They took my baby. Life will never be the same.”
“It’s stunning”
The number of youths killed by guns so far this year already exceeds the number killed each year in 2017, 2016 and 2015. And, with four months left 2019, the number shot to death is coming close to the 2018 total.
Six teenagers and one 11-year-old girl died as a result of a gun homicide. Last year, eight teens were killed in shootings, up from five in 2016 and four in 2017.
As the number of homicides has risen in the city, young people have become a higher proportion of those killed during the past five years.
In 2015, teenagers fatally shot represented 4% of the city’s 50 homicide victims. So far this year, juveniles represent approximately 17% of the 42 homicide victims.
Denver police data shows gangs were not connected to six of the seven youth homicides this year. Information on the most recent youth homicide on Sept. 4 was not available.
While a growing number of young people died in gun violence, there also are cases where kids are shot but survived.
This year, there have been 24 nonfatal shootings of people 19 and younger, according to Denver police data. Of those, about 40% were tied to gang involvement. The youngest victim shot and wounded was 13.
If not tied to gangs, many shootings are connected to a fight or other illicit activity such as drugs or botched robberies, Archer said.
“That’s been pretty consistent over the years,” she said.
Data also shows that the impacts of gun violence are felt almost entirely by black and Latino youths.
Sixty-three of the 67 teenagers and kids who have been shot and wounded in Denver from Jan. 1, 2018, through August of this year were black or Latino. A report released last week by Denver Public Health attributed some of the racial disparities to socioeconomic inequalities and lack of opportunity for teens of color.
“People who live in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage are more likely to witness or experience violence than those who live in neighborhoods without concentrated disadvantage,” the report states. “Because African American and Latino residents are more likely to live in such neighborhoods, they are more likely to experience and be the victims of violence.”
As the number of teenage victims grows, so does the number of teens suspected in shootings and of possessing guns.
“We are seeing a very disturbing increase in the handguns cases that we are filing that is reflecting a disturbing trend of juveniles with guns in our communities,” said Denver District Attorney Beth McCann.
In 2015, the prosecutor’s office filed 50 cases against teenagers caught with guns. Last year, that number jumped to 107 and this year’s numbers are on pace to meet or exceed that number, she said.
The number of juveniles in Denver charged with first-degree murder grew to eight in 2018 from three in 2015.
“It’s stunning,” she said.
Statewide, the number of teenagers charged with murder more than doubled between 2014 and 2018, statistics from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation show.
Mitchell likely was a victim of other teens. Denver police arrested two 17-year-old boys in connection to his killing, but said they can’t release further information because of the suspects’ age.
Mitchell’s mother is furious at the teens who killed her son. She returns often to the site where he died. She hopes that maybe she will learn something new.
“These juveniles are using these guns like a toy,” she said. “They don’t understand the pain. They don’t understand what it does.”
“They don’t understand what it’s like to still be here. To be left here, can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t do anything.”
Gun culture
Jonathan McMillan has worked in youth violence and gang intervention in Denver for more than 20 years. The past few years have been especially difficult, he said, because multiple youths he had interacted with were killed or arrested in connection to killings. Some of the dead teenagers he had known since they were in elementary school.
“I was in a state of depression,” he said. “I felt like I was losing the battle.”
The exact cause of the increased killings is difficult to pinpoint, law enforcement and community activists said.
McMillan pointed to unequal opportunity for employment, education and income that many young men of color face. Violence often goes hand in hand with those situations, he said.
“Everybody from young kids to elders are repeatedly exposed to gun violence and it can become part of the larger culture,” he said. “They become traumatized over and over and over.”
McMillan and longtime anti-gang activist the Rev. Leon Kelly also said the structure of gangs has shifted. Adult gang members are increasingly arming younger recruits to carry out violence because teenagers face less prison time if caught. There is less discipline, fewer rules, Kelly said. Some gangs have been in the Denver area for three generations now, he said, and kids seem more lost than ever.
“A lot of these kids are just renegades,” he said.
Without role models, many teens look to social media, where guns are glorified, McMillan said.
“There’s a mythology around what it means to be a gang member and what it means to be a young person hard in the streets,” McMillan said.
Gentrification and displacement of long-standing communities also plays a role, Kelly said. Close-knit neighborhoods are being broken up and relationships disrupted as people are pushed out by rising living costs in Denver.
“Kids say they’ll die for their ‘hood,” he said. “I say, ‘You ain’t got no ‘hood.'”
After more than 30 years in the field, Kelly said this year has been particularly hard, in part because of the number of younger kids who have been killed. The issue of gang violence also seems to have fallen from the city’s focus, he said. For years, youth gang violence was a priority. Now, attention has shifted elsewhere, he said.
“It’s almost like a Band-Aid still,” he said. “Some kids tear off the Band-Aid. Others bleed through.”
Often youth gun violence is portrayed as solely a gang issue, or due to individual bad choices, said Maritza Valenzuela, youth health manager at Denver Public Health. But teenagers deserve to be safe, no matter what, she said.
“None of our youth deserve to experience gun violence, no matter what they’re involved in or if they’re going down the wrong path,” she said.
The increasing number of teens carrying guns also means that confrontations can more easily flare into deadly incidents, McCann said. Teens and kids get guns from parents’ homes, theft or from other gang members if the teen is gang-involved. Gun culture has become the mainstream, she said.
“You can go on Facebook pages and see these kids displaying their guns,” she said. “It’s a cool thing in their mind to have a rifle, an assault rifle or a shotgun.”
But many kids are carrying guns because they feel unsafe, a 2017 Denver Health report found. About 11% of high school students the organization surveyed regularly carried a weapon for personal safety.
In the months before he died, Mitchell made multiple comments on his Facebook page about how he needed a gun to be safe. He posted pictures of himself wearing a bulletproof vest.
“Where I from it ain’t safe boii … keep a gun cause I gotta survive,” he wrote this year.
“There’s hope”
The increasing number of teenagers affected by gun violence has caused leaders from all walks of life to join together. Public health officials, emergency room doctors, city leaders, police, schools, prosecutors, community members have to work together to be part of the solution to make a change, they said.
“There’s an understandable fatalism and sometimes cynicism about gun violence,” said Dr. William Burman, director of Denver Public Health. “But there’s hope.”
Over the past few years, officials have moved to treat youth gun violence as a public health problem instead of a strictly law enforcement issue, Valenzuela said. The authors of the Denver Public Health report recommended that more resources be devoted to addressing trauma from gun violence, improve quality of life for the city’s young people and increase job opportunities and promote more use of safe gun storage.
Doctors at Denver Health help hundreds of young people every year who end up in the hospital because of gunshots, stabbings or other intentional injuries. Each victim is connected to a caseworker who guides them through the health care system and helps them find resources they need, such as a job or counseling. The caseworkers also help victims process trauma in the hope that it will decrease the desire for revenge.
The hospital is a good setting for such intervention because the victims are often scared, vulnerable and questioning their life choices, said Dr. Katherine Bakes, who founded the program in 2010.
“It’s where people who are at risk of violent injuries become visible,” she said.
Denver police have pivoted to more community-level work in attempts to address the root causes of violence, said Archer, the deputy chief. Officers or members of the department’s community outreach team meet with families in their homes and help them get what they need, such as food or resources for school.
But there is no single solution to the long-standing problem, McMillan said.
“It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” he said.
But all of those efforts mean little for Mitchell’s grieving family.
Bell prayed for her children’s safety every day of her life. That was her duty as a mom, she said. But prayers weren’t enough.
“We’re left here in a bed of pain,” she said.
