One of the challenges for media orgs in this age of mass shootings is how to cover the constant drumbeat of gun deaths alongside larger-scale events. It’s hard to argue with abundant coverage of things like the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in February 2018, during which 17 people died and another 17 were injured. But that attention has had the effect of dwarfing smaller-scale shootings.
Enter this newly published, exhaustive project led by The Trace and The Miami Herald and carried out by teenage journalists across the country. In the year since Parkland, young writers have researched and written up 1,200 little micro-profiles, one for every kid shot and killed since Stoneman Douglas.
Exactly 101 of these kids were residents of Texas. Filtering as such and clicking through, you can read about DFW victims like Arthur Holloway, who played the bongos and went to church and was killed in northeast Dallas. There’s 17-year-old Raul Garza, who liked playing sports in the yard and for Halloween dressed as Mario and Luigi with his brother. You can find a synopsis of Nequacia Jacobs’ story, an 18-year-old who’d just been accepted to the University of Texas at Austin. There are also the tales of Dwight Manning and Drew Conley and Kemondra Tucker and several others.
The reporting in “Since Parkland” is pulled from media reports, depending on how much exists, as well as obituaries and the online lives of the kids, be it on Facebook or Twitter or Soundcloud. Taken individually, they’re quick rundowns of who the victims were. Taken as a whole, they speak to something more profound. Spend some time with the project here.
