Shared from the 11/20/2022 Houston Chronicle eEdition

HOUSTON KIDS KILLED BY GUN VIOLENCE ON RISE

Data shows this to be deadliest in at least five years for children, reflecting a national crisis

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Marie D. De Jesús/Staff photographer

Desiree Stewart holds the jacket of her 17-year-old son, Robert “FYN Duke” Butler, who died in a shooting at a birthday party in March. The number of children under 18 killed by guns in Harris County so far this year has already surpassed the total from last year.

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Elizabeth Conley/Staff photographer

Lucki Green’s son, Isaac Lowe, 17, was killed in an apartment complex parking lot in September. “I just knew my son had the potential to be somebody,” she said. “I’m stuck trying to figure out what happened to him.”

Fifty-three children and teenagers have died from firearm injuries through October in Harris County, according to data from the Institute of Forensic Sciences, making this year the deadliest in at least five years.

Children have been struck by stray bullets while sitting in the back seat with headphones, going to get ice cream and grabbing a jacket from the car on a cold night. Teens have been gunned down by other young people at parties and in parking lots. One boy died by suicide near a pond at a park.

Many of the victims were Black and Hispanic boys, the data shows, and most of the shootings happened outside Houston’s Inner Loop, with gunfire cutting short young lives in far-flung places: a strip mall parking lot in Katy, a mobile home in Cloverleaf, the sidewalk outside a house party in South Acres.

No matter the circumstance, each death delivers devastation and leaves a gaping hole in the world.

“It still doesn’t seem real,” said Dede Denman, whose son Dillon Den-man, a 16-year-old star football player, was killed months before his senior year at Klein Oak High School. “I never thought in a million years I would be burying my child before he even reached 18.”

Dillon, who hoped to get offers to play college football, was killed at a July pool party in north Harris County alongside his 17-year-old friend and former teammate, Cameron Allen.

The death toll so far this year — 41 homicides, 11 suicides and one accident among children under 18 — has already surpassed the total number from last year, according to data from the medical examiner.

The number has been growing for at least five years, according to the medical examiner’s office, which counted 34 juvenile gun deaths in 2018, 40 in 2019, 42 in 2020 and 52 in 2021.

Among the victims this year were Paul Vasquez, an 8-year-old boy whose mother treated him to Little Caesars pizza after school each Friday, and Arlene Álvarez, a 9-year-old girl with a pure smile who loved her dog and wanted to become a veterinarian or maybe a doctor.

There was Robert Butler, a 17-year-old momma’s boy and new father who loved working on cars, and Isaac Lowe, a 17-year-old outgoing teen from San Antonio who loved to dress well and excelled on the football field.

“I just knew my son had the potential to be somebody,” said Lucki Green, Isaac’s mother. “I’m stuck trying to figure out what happened to him.”

The trend extends nationally. In 2017, gun injuries surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of injury-related death for American children, adolescents and young adults, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.

“This crisis is really not just impacting Harris County — we’re seeing it all over,” said Jane Kelso Winter, a Houston-area volunteer leader for Moms Demand Action. “It’s really shaping this whole generation.”

Spike in deaths

Gun violence involving children is increasing by other local measures, too.

Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital announced in June that it had treated 140 children for gunshot wounds in the last year, marking a 75 percent jump from three years ago.

Of course, not all victims die from gunshot wounds. Nonfatal firearm injuries are three times more common than firearm deaths among children in Houston, according to Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

Statistics from the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, too, show a spike this year in gun-related deaths among youth.

Fourteen children and adolescents have died in murders, manslaughters and justifiable homicides involving a firearm this year in Harris County, not including Houston, according to the agency — nearly triple the total count from last year.

The sheriff’s office recorded five or fewer gun-related deaths, excluding suicides, among children under 17 in each of the prior three years, according to the agency.

Meanwhile, more young people are also perpetrating violent crime, said Wayne Kuhlman, a major overseeing the sheriff’s office criminal investigations bureau. Older gang members are recruiting middle and high schoolers, he said, enticing them with stolen guns and access to cars.

Some teenagers are losing their lives in shootings as a result of their involvement in such criminal activity — they “live by the sword, die by the sword,” he said.

“They are victims of their own choices and decisions,” Kuhlman said.

But systemic problems like racism and poverty play a role in those decisions, too, said Brandon Denton, director of My Brother’s Keeper, an organization backed by the Houston Health Department that serves boys and young men of color.

Some teenagers get involved in criminal activity because they lack the resources and opportunities to thrive in their communities, Denton said.

“They might not even have the basic needs, like laundry detergent or clothes to wear to school,” he said. “Then they do turn to the streets or they turn to the gangs or they turn to the people who can make them feel most like a family or at home.”

Denton’s organization is trying to change that by providing mentors, jobs and positive social activities to help young people reach their potential.

Black and Hispanic youth are disproportionately affected by gun violence in the Houston area, according to the medical examiner’s office data. They make up 88 percent — all but five — of the homicide gun deaths among children this year.

“We want to make sure we’re going into the communities where these Black and brown boys are living, where this crime may be at its highest, and making sure they have the resources, the tools and the education that they can use to better protect themselves,” Denton said.

‘Still a little kid’

Cynthia Sauceda watched as her oldest son, Damian Guillen, became involved in street life and started hanging out with the “wrong crowd.”

The mother tried everything to stop him — lectures, crying, kicking him out — but her words seemed to go “in the one ear and out the other.”

She told him to channel his energy into something positive and reminded him that he was handsome, talented and smart enough to do anything. She warned him, too, that his choices would eventually land him “in the ground or in jail.”

“I knew that this was a possibility,” she said. “Those are the only options for that lifestyle.”

There were signs earlier this year, though, that her 17-year-old son was getting his life on track. Damian, a young father, had a job, a girlfriend and a camera roll filled with clips of him doting on his small children and younger siblings.

But those kids will grow up without a father.

Damian and Tristan Rodriguez, 16, were killed in a shootout with another boy in late June at a Pasadena apartment complex, leaving Sauceda tormented with questions surrounding the circumstances and investigation into her son’s death.

“I want to put the pieces together,” she said. “It’s not going to bring him back or anything. ... I just want to know why they felt the need to take him from us.”

These days, the mother has four jobs to keep her mind busy.

She was at work on a recent afternoon when she saw kids walking home from school. Sauceda bolted to the bathroom as everything came rushing back: The phone call from her son’s screaming girlfriend, the crowded hospital room, the moment she lowered Damian’s casket into the dirt.

“At the end of the day, he was still a child,” she said. “He was still a little kid.”

Authorities, experts and family members of the victims have different ideas about the root causes driving the growing problem and possible solutions for addressing it.

Kuhlman said educating kids is an important step in keeping them away from criminal activity and gangs.

“These kids in school, they need to hear these hard facts,” he said. “We need to educate them at the places that they are being recruited from, what is in store for them if they follow the lead of these individuals.”

Robert Minchew, a lieutenant in the HCSO homicide division, said another prevention strategy is setting higher bonds and more severe sentences for violent offenders.

These cases will continue to increase due to the growing population and failure by the Harris County criminal justice system to lock up criminals, he said.

Meanwhile, Winter, the Moms Demand Action volunteer, said she believes three factors are driving the surge in child gun deaths: an increase in unsecured guns in homes as more people purchased firearms during the pandemic; weak gun laws in Texas, including permit-less carry legislation that went into effect last year; and mental health stress.

“We’ve got to do something for our kids,” she said. “They really are facing the brunt of this. These are deep, deep scars that these kids are going to be taking with them, whether they’re just witnessing these shootings — they’re never going to be the same.”

Her organization provides free gun locks and teaches people about safe gun storage through a campaign called Be SMART for Kids.

“When they’re not stored properly, they fall into the hands of kids and teens,” Winter said. “They may not have the intention of harming themselves or others, but you have that access and we’ve seen what happens.”

Johan Garcia, 12, and Isaac Gutierrez Silva, 8, were killed days apart last month in separate incidents in which relatives unintentionally shot them while playing with firearms, according to Houston-area authorities.

Similarly, 4-year-old Ryan Gomez Lupian was shot by his 9-year-old brother in May. Prosecutors charged the boy’s uncle with a misdemeanor for leaving his firearm available to a child, according to court records.

Although Winter has been advocating for gun sense since the late 1980s, the issue became more personal for her roughly a decade ago when her son was a junior at the University of Houston.

Kelsey Buzzanco, a funny, popular 21-year-old student who held several leadership positions on campus, died by suicide during a depressive moment, she said.

“Had that firearm been secured, likely that moment would have passed,” Winter said.

Kuhlman, meanwhile, said he does not believe that stricter gun laws would mitigate the problem because people intent on committing violence could break into homes or cars to steal weapons.

“They’re going to have them regardless, they’ll find a way,” he said. “Unless we as citizens have them, we’re going to be at their mercy.”

Tela Johnson, a mother whose 16-year-old son died in an August shooting in Fifth Ward, said she wants a stricter gun law or an outreach program to educate kids and communities about the consequences that stem from mishandling guns, which are widely available.

“You can buy them off the street, you can buy them at the stores, they’re passed down,” the mother said.

‘Stranger to nobody’

Johnson, 38, knows the deadly consequences all too well. Her brother died at the same age as her son in a drive-by shooting near Homestead Road in northeast Houston.

She watched her mother mourn a child, and now, she is doing the same.

Johnson said her son, Edd-Zavian Galloway, was a smart freshman at Wheatley High School who loved math, tutored middle school kids and hoped to become an architect.

The well-rounded boy had many passions: drawing, fixing dirt bikes and playing basketball at a city park where he also worked as a lifeguard.

“He was like his dad — he wasn’t a stranger to nobody,” Johnson said. “If you knew him, you loved him.”

The family moved from Acres Homes to Fifth Ward after Johnson and her husband lost their jobs during the pandemic.

Gunfire rattled their new neighborhood most nights.

Another blow came in March when Johnson’s husband died from a heart attack. Edd-Zavian started spending more time away from home.

His mother cherished the little moments with her teenage son who loved to make people laugh. One night this summer, she woke up to find him dancing around her room.

“Momma, I love you,” he said.

Edd-Zavian was scrapping metal in the backyard one evening in August when an unknown shooter sped past the home and opened fire.

The boy died in the driveway in his little brother’s arms. anna.bauman@chron.com

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