Some hadn’t yet celebrated their first birthday; others were on the cusp of adulthood.
Some died by accident; others were killed by someone they knew; still others were murdered by a stranger as they stood in the wrong place at the wrong time.
All are children dead from a gun.
Over the past few months, more than 200 teens across the country, including some in the Chicago area, are naming those children, writing obituaries for every minor who has died from a gunshot in the year since the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., that left 17 dead and sparked a youth movement on gun control.
The memorials are part of a project from the nonprofit The Trace to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the shooting, which is Thursday.
Jimmy Rodgers, 15, of Chicago’s Garfield Park neighborhood, has written nine obituaries. The kids vary in ages, and all lived out of state, he said. Some were teens like him; some died much younger.
The George Westinghouse College Prep sophomore said that having lived in Chicago’s West Side neighborhoods his whole life, he already knew the impact of guns.
He said he hopes this project spreads that awareness around.
“No matter what block … there’s always been something,” said Rodgers, who described running from gunshots as a kid. “I just think it’s important, letting a lot of people know guns aren’t good at all.”
For a group of students at York Community High School in Elmhurst, Ill., working on the project was eye-opening.
The west suburban teens said that while they were aware of the severity of gun violence, especially its prevalence in some Chicago neighborhoods, writing obituaries for children who died across the country underscored that gun violence can happen anywhere.
“Seeing those names on a spreadsheet hit home. If it happened to me, would someone write an article about it?” said Ava Uditsky, a 16-year-old York sophomore. “Gun violence is an everyday problem, and it happens everywhere. Nobody is safe.”
The project, started by nonprofit news organization The Trace, aimed to compile obituaries for every person 18 and younger murdered or accidentally killed by a gun from the date of the Parkland shooting through Wednesday.
The news organization, which devotes its coverage to gun violence, partnered with the Miami Herald to compile the list of victims, using area police reports and the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks shootings.
The teen writers, many of whom learned about the project at school, chose to participate and randomly selected names from the more than 1,100 victims to memorialize.
They were paid $25 per obituary, and their work appears on sinceparkland.com.
“The goal is to really show people the full scope of gun violence in America,” said Akoto Ofori-Atta, The Trace managing editor. The project employed teen writers instead of professional journalists, she said, because “we thought it was their story to tell.”
In many cases, teens know more about the pervasive problem of gun violence than adults do, she said, whether it’s because they see it firsthand or they prepare for the possibility of it, however remote, in school lockdown drills.
And while the Parkland school shooting mobilized teen activists to take a stand on gun control and inspired legislation, Ofori-Atta said it also is important to highlight all circumstances of gun deaths, because most don’t occur during school mass shootings.
Most happen on the streets or in homes, she said.