On the night of February 8, Sherman Carrothers Jr. returned home from visiting his mother and interrupted burglars robbing his house. The burglars opened fire, killing Carrothers, a 42-year-old father of seven and grandfather of four. He is also survived by three brothers and his mother, L’Tonya. No arrests have been made in Carrothers’ murder.

That particular night, my son was at my house. We live directly around the corner from each other. We laughed and talked about football, as usual, and food. He ate dinner with me. He got there about quarter of eight, and he left exactly at 10 after nine. 9:32, he was dead.

He walked into his house, and I don’t think the burglars had any lights on. As he got inside, he went to lock the door up for the night, and they just started shooting. And evidently, he was trying to—he did—make it out the front door. They shot him as he was going. They shot him four times. The fourth bullet is what killed him.

About 9:20, I got a phone call from a neighbor who said I needed to come up there right away, they believed that my son was shot. I got up there a few minutes later. They had already taken him to the hospital, so my other son and I went over to Johns Hopkins. He was dead when I got there.

About 9:20, I got a phone call from a neighbor who said I needed to come up there right away, they believed that my son was shot. I got up there a few minutes later. They had already taken him to the hospital, so my other son and I went over to Johns Hopkins. He was dead when I got there.

I don’t know if he recognized [the burglars]. I don’t know. My son was very popular because he was a soft-spoken man. He was friendly. As far as I know, he didn’t have any enemies. He wasn’t nothing but a big old teddy bear.

We had been looking for houses [to buy together]. We just wanted a bigger house because we had all these grandchildren, great-grands, and we wanted a bigger yard so we could put [in] a swimming pool. This happened on Wednesday night, and we were supposed to go the next day to a second showing at a house that we both liked. That Friday, I told my other son, ʻI’m going to get that house.ʼ And I’m in that house today. I had to [move]. You know I couldn’t stay in that area.

These people out here these days, they just don’t know what they’re doing, but, then again, they do know, but they don’t care. They need to get that evil fought because Satan is taking over. We don’t have to bother anybody. Folks out there: Put them guns down. So you’re angry with somebody—and that’s okay. That’s an emotion that’s okay to feel. Be angry with somebody. I get angry, too, once in a while, but I don’t want to go out and kill nobody. If I had my way, a police officer wouldn’t even have a gun. I didn’t care for them before. I really don’t care for them now.

It’s really hard to accept your child’s death. I know he’s with God, so I don’t worry about that part. The thing my mind keeps going to is how he died. I can’t deal with that. It was a violent death.

Sherman Carrothers Jr.

Where do you go from here? I ask myself a million times, ‘Why my child?’ But then I ask God, ‘Why anybody’s child?’ One is too many, it’s just too many.

Some folks I’ve talked to still have their children. I don’t care for anybody who comes up to me and says, ‘I know how you feel.’ No, you don’t. You don’t have a clue how I feel. You can say, ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ but for those whose children are still walking around, I don’t want to hear no stuff about, ‘I know how you feel.’

I hold on to my faith. These people think that they have destroyed my family. They haven’t. They shook us up. They broke our hearts. Sometimes I don’t even want to get out of the bed. As a result of this—I had four sons—the other three keep a lot of things bottled in. They don’t even want to talk about their brother’s death. But I know I’ve gotta go on. [Sherman] had seven children. Two are minors, two little boys. One just turned five and the other will be seven on November 11. I have to keep going because I have to help those two little boys. He [also] has four granddaughters. I gotta be strong for them.

There’s never going to be any closure. What’s closure? I want some justice, but there’s never closure. If I’ll never miss nothing else in my life, I miss my son. I don’t know what else to say.

On March 16, 2017, 19-year-old Markel Scott was on his way home from hanging out with friends in East Baltimore when an unknown assailant or assailants shot him six times, including twice in the face. At the time of his death, Scott was a senior at Excel Academy, an alternative high school in West Baltimore, where he was just weeks away from graduation. He was the fourth of five Excel Academy students killed by gun violence during the 2016-2017 school year. A sixth was killed over the summer.

I work at night as a mental health technician. I was running late for work. And I just thought he was calling me, ‘Ma, can you come pick me up before you go to work?’ To hear those words: ‘Your son was shot.’ I just couldn’t even imagine. This was like one of my biggest fears, actually, because I worked in trauma as a nurse technician at [University of Maryland] Shock Trauma, and I’ve seen the violence. But me and my son always thought that violence don’t happen unless you do something, you know? People don’t bring no harm to you, unless you did something directly. But this wasn’t the case. He only had $5 in his pocket. He had his earphones on. He had his book bag.

He made me proud. He had his moments, you know, but he was funny. He liked to dress—he really liked to dress; that’s what he was known for. He was talented. He was one of them kids who used to say, ‘No, I’m going to find a way.’ And he was very intelligent.

I loved Markel so much. I fought for my son. I wasn’t one of them mothers who turned a blind eye. I was one of the mothers who went through his room, went through his Facebook, if he left his phone open, went through his Instagram. He came in the house plenty of times when I’m searching his room and he’s like, laughing, because he knows I’m not going to find nothing. It was just for my own peace.

When he dropped out of school in 2015, I would wake him up at 7 o’clock like, ‘No, you gotta get out of here. You’re not staying in here if you don’t want to go to school.’ And it didn’t even dawn on me that he had lost like three friends right around the same time. He might have had post-traumatic stress, and that might have contributed to him dropping out of school.

Markel Scott

I think it was November or October of 2016 [that] he woke me up one morning. I had worked that night. I, myself, was eight credits away from finishing a nursing program. So I was tired, and I said, ‘Let me get an hour or two of sleep.’ And he woke me up like, ‘Ma, can you take me to school?’ I turned over all groggy, like, ‘Boy, I am tired. I just came from work.ʼ And I just put the covers over me like, ‘Can you shut my door?’ And then I jumped up and said, ‘School?!’ He started laughing. He was like, ‘Yeah, I already went to North Avenue and reenrolled myself. All you’ve got to do is just drop me off.’ He had already got everything straight. That’s all he wanted to do. He was supposed to graduate this year. I had a funeral, a graduation, and birthday for this same child within 12 weeks.

Now, seven months later, I’m still angry because we don’t know who killed my son. Nobody has been arrested for it. So I know he’s still among us, so there’s this paranoia, this fear that I carry with me. It makes me shelter my other kids, too. It’s like I’ve got to keep a hold on them, which is kind of bad, but good at the same time.

I was so numb for the first couple months. I’m really just coming around to getting a little bit of feeling in me. There are no stages no more because some days I’m happy, some days I’m sad, some days I’m punching a wall, some days I’m screaming, some days I’m crying, and some days I just want to know ‘Why, God? Why? What was the testimony in this?’

In the early morning of July 1, Louis Cody Young was a passenger in a car that had stopped to refuel at a gas station in Northwest Baltimore. Shortly after Young and his party arrived at the gas station, a Volkswagen Passat pulled in and two men jumped out and began shooting. Young was hit multiple times and died of his wounds shortly thereafter. Young’s mother and his ex-stepfather, prominent Baltimore defense attorney Warren Brown, offered a $10,000 reward for the capture of the perpetrators, and police have arrested two suspects. Young was a stranger to his assailants, and the crime is described as one of “opportunity.”

It’s just senseless. There was no attempted robbery. There was no, ‘I’m going to gain revenge.’ He never even spent time over on that side of town. All of his friends are [either] at Stevenson University [or] they live on, like, the east side of Baltimore. None of this added up for us.

Cody was 22. Cody had taken off a year [from college]. He’s been playing football since the age of probably 12 or 13, but he left to play in different states starting at the age of like 14 or 15. He had an extensive career, and if you Google him, he’s there. And this is actually the first year he’s been really home, in Baltimore, for the whole year.

You do blame yourself sometimes. You do. You blame yourself like, ‘Why couldn’t I have just told him to . . .’ He’s twenty-something years old. I can’t say, ‘Get your butt in here now. Come home.’ These are grown kids, literally. He has a driver’s license. He’s legal age. I can’t stop him. But then you think about, ‘Well, had he stayed in college and never come back for a year . . .’ Your mind just tells you all kinds of things.

Cody and I were very, very close. His determination to help people, his level of loyalty was incredible. He defended everyone he loved. He would never let you go somewhere by yourself. Like that night, he didn’t let his step-brother, who is my ex-husband’s son, go to the gas station by himself. That’s the level of commitment. What he had tattooed on his arm was ‘loyalty over royalty.’ That’s all he said, ‘Mom, loyalty over royalty.’ I said, ‘Cody, what does that mean?’ He said, ‘I am loyal to those that love me. Royalty, money, materialistic things, that’s not success, mom. Me being loyal to what I’m passionate about is.’ And that was the biggest joy I got from him. He pretty much knew who he was.

Louis Cody Young

I think [his death] has had a great impact in realizing how we need to stick together as a family and understand that when we disagree, that we don’t let it just fester. I think, more than that, it has affected my 7-year-old grandson, my daughter’s son. He knows Uncle Cody has gone to be with God, but he thinks sometimes, if it rains, Uncle Cody could come through the rain. But he plays football for Uncle Cody. He does well in school for Uncle Cody.

I can honestly say—maybe I grieve differently—sometimes I believe he’s still coming home. That gets me through. Sometimes I don’t believe he’s gone. If I believe, like, ‘He’s away at college,’ that keeps me alive. I think if I really just went home and said . . . and I can’t say it.

You know, I promise, if it takes me everything, if some days I can’t get out of the bed, I get out of the bed, because his life will matter. I’m working on his foundation, The Cody Young Foundation, which provides mentorship to children. This is not just about this individual child, that individual child. This is about people collectively. We are suffering. This thing doesn’t have a face. It doesn’t identify with your ZIP code, your address, where you live anymore. It has taken innocent lives.

I prayed not too long ago and the message that kept on coming to me was, ‘Baltimore is not a leftover. Let’s just begin to make it over.’ I think that these kids have lost so much hope. You have a city that’s so fearful. Do we walk in fear? Or do we take a stand and win back with love? See, anybody knows that love conquers everything. If you tell the most hateful person, ‘I love you,’ you’re going to love the hate out of them. We’ve got to start looking at things from that perspective, and I think that’s what my son did for me. He loved me. And so I went places—because he was 270 pounds, 6 feet tall—I was like, ‘My son got me. He loves me.’ I’ll never have that again. But I can have that if I build that in other people.

To those familiar with Baltimore’s dirt bike culture, Sean Williams Jr. was something of a celebrity. Also known as Biker Boy Sean, Williams was a member of Baltimore’s famed dirt bike crew, the 12 O’clock Boys, and a aspiring motocross racer. The 18 year old was shot in June while riding his dirt bike through West Baltimore. His murder remains unsolved.

He was murdered on Father’s Day. I was at a Father’s Day cookout, and I had just seen him. I noticed that he was gone, and I got this funny feeling. I asked his stepbrother, ‘Where’s your brother?’ and he said, ‘Oh, he’s over there shooting dice,ʼ or ‘He went to take the bike back.’ So I was like, ‘Something ain’t right.’ And then my oldest daughter called me yelling and screaming and said Sean had gotten shot off of a bike.

I got to the scene as they were wheeling him to the ambulance. The EMT asked me to get into the ambulance. So I got in and just began to pray and started trying to call people to come meet me at the hospital because I knew that if anything happened to him that I wasn’t going to be no more good. So I was just praying, and the EMT was just saying, ‘Please don’t scream and yell, because that could make him go into shock,’ so they closed the curtain, and we went to Shock Trauma, University of Maryland.

Once one person found out he was shot, it just traveled. So it was like 200, 300 people at the hospital. Then maybe 45 minutes after he had been there, the chaplain, the nurse, the doctor, and all these security guards came back downstairs and told me that he didn’t make it. I just lost it because he had only been home for five days.

He had been six months in prison. It’s illegal to ride dirt bikes in Baltimore City, so once he turned 18, they just put all of his dirt bike charges against him. I begged him to stay off the bike, but he wouldn’t. There was a gun charge against him [too] because one of his friends had called the police and told the police that Sean had a gun in my house without my knowledge.

Sean Williams Jr.

He just said that he [had the gun because he] wanted to protect himself with all these people getting killed. I told him, ‘That’s not the way to protect yourself. I don’t want you playing with guns. That’s not the answer.’ We really didn’t talk a lot about it because he knew how I felt about the guns. But the population these days, it seems like everyone has a gun—and I don’t understand why. And that’s where a big part of the violence is coming from.

Sean was a fun kid. He was an agitator. Irky. He liked to pick with people. He liked to make jokes. He liked to dress real nice. He liked to go out partying. He was family-oriented. He loved his nieces and nephews. He loved family gatherings. He always had to come through on a bike. From a young age, all he wanted to do was ride a dirt bike. Take ’em apart, put ’em back together. He did the motocross last January for the first time, at the Baltimore Arena. He came in fourth place. He just kept saying when he became a professional dirt bike rider, he wanted to move [me] out of Baltimore City.

I’m just an emotional wreck really, because I’m trying to wrap my mind around the fact that I’m never going to see him again. I work for the University of Maryland department of psychiatry. It took me like two and half months to go back to work because I’m in the field of helping people. So I just felt like listening to other people’s problems would not help me. [My colleagues] give me hugs and just try to console me. I’ve had a lot of support. I go to counseling. Sometimes I want to be bothered, and sometimes I just want to be to myself. But for the most part I just pray to God to give me the strength.