School, shootings

Dozens of school-aged children in Philadelphia were murdered since January 2020  — a spike that tracks with a surge in homicides in cities across the country.

For loved ones, the pain of these losses has been exacerbated by the isolation of the pandemic. And without in-person school, classmates and teachers have tried to navigate their grief from a distance.

This is the story of our other public health crisis, gun violence, told through the lives of three Philadelphia teenagers whose time was cut short.