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About This Project


Why We Spent a Year Reporting on Child Gun Deaths

In Parkland, kids who endured the unspeakable emerged with a blunt message for the grownups of America: You are failing us. Their frustration was initially and primarily directed at elected officials in Washington and state capitals around the country, but it also extended to the media. Standing alongside their peers from Chicago, St. Louis, and the District of Columbia, they accurately criticized journalists for mobilizing to cover mass shootings while devoting relatively little attention to the chronic gun violence that exposes children in some city neighborhoods to danger every day.

“Since Parkland” was conceived as an antidote to that imbalance — one powered by young people themselves.

Over the summer, more than 200 teen reporters from across the country began working together to document the children, ages zero to 18, killed in shootings during one year in America. The stories they collected go back to last February 14, the day of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, when at least three other kids were fatally shot in incidents that largely escaped notice. As the weeks went on, the stories came to include children lost to school shootings, as well as to armed domestic violence, drug homicides, unintentional discharges, and stray bullets. The stories do not include victims killed while fatally injuring someone else or in police-involved shootings, nor children who died in gun suicides, for reasons explained here.

As this site goes live on February 12, 2019, the student journalists are still working to report on the cases that continue to come in. The project is intended as work in progress, and we ask your help in completing it. To share a photo or a memory of a young person memorialized here, please email sinceparkland@thetrace.org. Please also reach out with any corrections, or to notify us of a victim we may have missed.

The reporting you will read in “Since Parkland” is journalism in one of its purest forms — revealing the human stories behind the statistics — carried out on an exhaustive scale. Several partners supported the teen journalists in making it possible. The Trace, a nonprofit news organization dedicated to reporting on gun violence, worked with journalism teachers to provide the students with training and editing. Another nonprofit, the Gun Violence Archive, maintains the running count of shooting incidents from which the project team identified child victims. The Miami Herald provided additional research, several of its journalists reported stories building on the students’ work. The Herald’s siblings in the McClatchy newspaper group contributed stories in their areas. NowThis translated the project to video. Global Student Square helped us recruit more than 100 of the student reporters.

Ultimately, however, “Since Parkland” exists because of the doggedness of the young people who took it on. This was their story to tell, and it is told in their voices.

Through their determination, we have gained an unprecedented account of the full scale and contours of gun violence as it impacts American children.

From the student reporters:

Our goal for these stories.

Behind the scenes:

What the teen journalists learned.

Methodology:

How we identified cases.

The missing 900:

The obstacles to reporting on children who die in gun suicides.

Since Parkland

Akoto Ofori-Atta

Beatrice Motamedi

Katina Paron

Miles Kohrman

Daniel Nass

Mayra Ortiz-Paige

Leonor Mamanna

Amanda Saviñón

Jennifer Mascia

Sean Campbell

Allegra Cullen

Bianca Fortis

Camille Respess

Roxanne L. Scott

JJ Hennessy

Allie Kelly

Joe Meyerson

Helina Selemon

Nora Biette-Timmons

Matthew Asuncion

Madison Hahamy

Zoe Hsu

Hannah Jannol

Willow Taylor Chiang Yang

Terry Collins

Beatrix Lockwood

Mary Claire Molloy

Michael Pincus

Lila Taylor

Elizabeth Van Brocklin

Elana Dean

Brian Freskos

Ann Givens

Sarah Ryley

Mike Spies

Alex Yablon

David Geary

James Burnett

Tali Woodward

Upstatement

Since Parkland was produced in partnership with the Miami Herald and McClatchy

Aminda Marques Gonzalez

Rick Hirsch

Casey Frank

Eduardo Alvarez

Caitlin Ostroff

Aaron Albright

Jessica Gilbert

Virginia Bridges

Tim Chitwood

Lexi Cortes

Amy Driscoll

Liz Fabian

Glenn Garvin

Kevin G. Hall

Alex Harris

Jason Koch

John Monk

Phillip Reese

Joe Robertson

Diane Smith

Carli Teproff

Anna M. Tinsley

Erin Tracy

Martin Vassolo

Marcus Dorsey

Tammy Ljungblad

Travis Long

Esther Medina

Emily Michot

Matias J. Ocner

Marta Oliver Craviotto

Tiffany Tompkins

Jessica Huff

Adrian Ruhi

Mary Behne

Partners

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Supporters

The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation

Fund for a Safer Future

The Kendeda Fund

Levi Strauss & Co.

Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund

Manaaki Foundation

Mimi and Peter Haas Fund

Paul and Ann Sagan Family Fund

The Trace’s policies on Editorial Independence and Donor Transparency

From the student reporters:

Our goal for these stories.

Behind the scenes:

What the teen journalists learned.

Methodology:

How we identified cases.

The missing 900:

The obstacles to reporting on children who die in gun suicides.