The sisters in Ohio, both in elementary school, were shot by their father. The boy in Texas was shot at home by someone in a passing car. The ninth-grader in Arkansas was shot at school by a friend. The girl in Kansas was shot by a toddler, who didn’t mean to do it. The teenager in South Carolina shot himself, but he did mean to do it.
All of them were killed in an epidemic unique to the United States, where, on average, at least one child is shot every hour of every day. Many survive, but many others do not. In the nation’s capital, nine children were killed in gun homicides last year. In Los Angeles, 11 were fatally shot. In Philadelphia: 36. In Chicago: 59. Those figures don’t include the hundreds of other kids who died in accidental shootings and by suicide.
Just how many were taken by gun violence last year will remain unknown until the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention releases its data months from now. But in 2020, the number exceeded 2,200 — by far the highest total in the past two decades — and 2021′s tally is expected to be worse.
The children featured below are broadly representative of those killed every year in America. Even babies are shot to death, but the vast majority of young victims are teenagers. Black kids are more than four times as likely to die in shootings as White ones, according to CDC data, though White kids are much more likely to use guns to take their own lives.
Often, children killed by bullets are memorialized only by brief news reports or anguished obituaries. But the way they lived matters as much as the way they died.
The 13 children profiled here were funny: the 6-year-old who wanted to be a doctor so she could give shots to all the doctors who had given her shots. They were generous: the 12-year-old who used his chore money to take his family out to McDonald’s. And they were ambitious: the 15-year-old who wanted to be a nuclear physicist.
These are their stories, one for each month of a violent year.
Alyse and Ava Williams, 6 and 9
Always together
Alyse and Ava Williams, 6 and 9, knew their parents were arguing, so they made themselves pizza rolls in the microwave for dinner and closed the door to the bedroom of their Columbus, Ohio, home.
It was the first day of 2021, and the previous evening, they’d celebrated New Year’s Eve with sparkling cider and party poppers. In the hours before midnight, Alyse had repeatedly asked their mother, Vanecia Kirkland, about the time. She was too young to read a clock, but she wanted to be the first to wish her older sister a happy new year.
They had always been each other’s best friend. When their mother and father would ask which parent the girls liked best, they’d refuse to choose. Instead, their answer was each other.
While Ava’s first word had been “Dada,” Alyse’s was “Ava.” She adored her older sister. The third-grader could read her books from R.L. Stein’s horror series “Goosebumps.” Afterward, when Alyse was scared to use the bathroom alone, Ava would flip on the light and check for monsters in the bathtub.
Ava was fearless, a “ball of energy,” Kirkland said. When she received a baby walker just before her first birthday, she dashed across their home so fast that she flattened the family dog’s tail.
The 9-year-old liked drawing animals with big sparkly eyes in her sketchbook. She wanted to be an artist and knew how to appreciate the finer things in life, like canned corn and the icing in Oreos — she never deigned to eat the chocolate cookies. Ava was opinionated and outspoken, like her father, Aaron Williams, and had his light hazel eyes.
Alyse, meanwhile, was her mother’s “little twin.” The 6-year-old often wore long dresses. She liked the way they spun when she twirled.
She could argue like a lawyer and knew exactly what she wanted. She never let Kirkland pick out her clothing, but liked raiding her closet for the high heels her mother wore to her job at a bank. Alyse wanted to be a doctor, so she could give all of the doctors — who’d given her shots — shots of their own.
The girls did everything together. They belted out duets on their mother’s old karaoke machine. At bedtime, they crammed into the bottom of their bunk beds, surrounded by pink fleece blankets and stuffed llamas, instead of sleeping separately.
Lately, their parents had been deciding whether they should stay together. After nearly 13 years, Kirkland knew the relationship was ending.
Williams had been laid off from his job in a warehouse when the pandemic began. Money was tight, and being in the house all day with both girls in virtual school made him feel like he was going crazy.
“I wish I was dead,” he’d tell Kirkland. “I want to kill myself.”
“Stop talking like that,” she’d reply.
Now, as the girls played in their bedroom, the argument between their parents escalated. Just before 11 p.m., Williams threatened to shoot her, Kirkland said. Panicked, she ran out of their house, leaving her shoes, her purse, her cellphone — and their two daughters.
“I never felt like he would ever hurt them,” she said. “I wish I had never left.”
Columbus police responded to reports of gunfire soon after. Williams had shot the girls, then killed himself. Ava and Alyse were taken to a hospital but died a few hours later, early on Jan. 2, becoming among the first children to die of gun violence in 2021.
But even in death, they were together. For their funeral, the girls were nestled in the same white casket, their arms wrapped around each other.
— Lizzie Johnson
Janaria Muhammad, 15
‘Like the sun’
Janaria Muhammad threw her hands in the air and hollered, “When I had my vision, you couldn’t see it!” She swung her hips in a circle. “I’m off to better things!”
Those were the lyrics to her favorite song, Coi Leray’s “No More Parties,” and she belted them out alongside her closest friends at her 15th birthday party last year. It was her version of heaven: six of them, at a chalet a few hours from her home in Knoxville, Tenn., listening to music and pulling pranks on her younger brother. They painted his face with makeup, stuffed cotton balls into his mouth and put mayonnaise on his hands while he was asleep, giggling all the while.
On the way home, Janaria turned to her parents and said, “I may not always act like it, but I appreciate what you do for me."
Her dad, Lawrence Muhammad, smiled from the front seat of the car. He loved to see his daughter so happy, but he wasn’t surprised. Janaria, who went by “Nana,” knew how to turn every single day into a party.
Her bedroom was proof of that. The previous year, she’d painted the walls a grayish purple, hung a string of lights, purchased a plush carpet and started to save up for a trundle bed, which she thought would help create a makeshift living room for sleepovers and after-school hangouts. It was a sparkle-filled teenage playground, perfect for the privacy she’d started craving from her parents.
Janaria had paid for that whole makeover with earnings from a handful of odd jobs: shifts at a local grocery store, babysitting and dog-walking gigs, and a side hair-cutting business. Because that’s who she was. Scrappy, flashy and fun.
Janaria was also a caretaker, of every member of her family. She helped her dad with technology so often that he liked to call her his secretary. When it came to her brothers, Janaria ruled the house. Whenever she heard that their grades were slipping, she would march up to them and say, “If you don’t study, you’re going to be a dummy. Period.” She liked to end most of her sentences with “period,” so you knew she was serious.
Janaria’s sister, 10-year-old Aniya, copied everything she did. And the list was long. Basketball. Volleyball. The dance team. If Janaria had had it her way, her parents said, she would have been quarterback of the football team, too.
“At 15, she was movin’,” her dad said. "You said describe her? She was like the sun. When you saw her, you lit up.”
That light was extinguished on Feb. 16. Janaria had left her house about 7:40 p.m. to meet her friends for a quick trip to her favorite restaurant, Kings & Wings, when gunfire suddenly erupted and a bullet pierced her chest. Lawrence held his daughter in his arms as she bled to death, steps from her freshly painted purple room.
She was one of five students at her neighborhood high school who were shot to death in the first half that year. No one has been arrested, police said, who are still investigating the incident nearly a year later.
Janaria spent her 16th birthday in actual heaven, her dad said, and the rest of her family spent it wishing they could hear her sing “No More Parties” just one more time.
They released lanterns into the sky that night, hoping their lights could reach hers.
— Emily Davies
Daylon Burnett, 15
The big brother
Daylon “DayDay” Burnett hummed a beat as he held both arms out above the water, snapping his fingers and wiggling his hips.
“Ready?” asked his younger brother, Desmond.
“Ready, set,” they said in unison, closing their eyes, plugging their noses and dipping toward the pool’s surface. Except Daylon, then 13, stopped short and opened his eyes, keeping his head just above water. The boys were competing in a breath-holding contest, and a grinning Daylon had decided to guarantee victory.
“Don’t say nothing,” he whispered to his mother, LaKeisha Lee, who was filming the ruse from the pool’s edge.
Twenty seconds later, just as Desmond emerged, Daylon went under. His younger brother tapped him on the head, conceding defeat.
Lee couldn’t stop herself.
“You know what DayDay did?” she blurted, prompting smiles and splashes between her sons.
Daylon knew how to make each of his six younger siblings laugh. To them, he was as much a parent as a brother, rustling the kids out of bed and helping them get dressed, making pancakes and eggs before they caught the bus.
On Wednesdays, family karaoke night at their home in Pine Bluff, Ark., he was almost always the first one up, insisting that his brothers and sisters join him. For Desmond, who could be shy, Daylon served as a hype man, pointing and dancing, mouthing the words and offering high-fives.
He also looked out for him at Watson Chapel Junior High, the school they both attended. Desmond admired his big brother, a thick-shouldered linebacker who wanted to play professional football but who also joined the school’s Junior ROTC program, determined to escape Pine Bluff.
That was until a chilly morning in late winter when a 15-year-old Daylon knew walked up to him in a hallway and raised a gun. Desmond watched the boy pull the trigger, sending a round into his brother’s head. He called their mother as the shooter fled.
“Momma, you need to get to the school!” the eighth-grader shouted. “I’m standing in DayDay’s blood!”
The March 1 attack had come at a moment of hope for Daylon. He’d gotten into some trouble as a teen and spent time in juvenile detention, but he’d made real progress at school after switching from virtual classes to in-person learning. Two weeks before the shooting, the principal called Lee to tell her Daylon had worked hard to get his grades up.
None of it would matter. Soon after Daylon reached the hospital, doctors told Lee her son wouldn’t survive. The bullet had done too much damage to his brain. Two days later, on March 3, he was taken off life support. Lee climbed into the hospital bed, holding her son until his heart stopped beating.
When she told her 11-year-old son that Daylon was gone, he punched the wall so hard that his wrist broke.
Her 5-year-old didn’t understand. Daylon used to read “Curious George” books to him before bedtime.
“Why did God take my brother away?” Lee recalled him asking one day.
“God needed him more than us,” she replied.
“Why, Mom?”
“I don’t know.”
None of them struggled more than Desmond, the brother who watched it all, who came home with bloodstains on his white Air Force 1 sneakers. She and her husband moved the kids away from Pine Bluff, hoping to start over, but no one in the family, especially Desmond, escaped the trauma.
One night, Lee heard him get up at 3 a.m. When she checked on him, he told her that his mind wouldn’t stop replaying the shooting at their school, the place where he and his brother were supposed to be safe.
— John Woodrow Cox
Joshua Rodriguez Jr., 15
A fierce protector
When the police knocked on the door of her San Antonio home late one evening, Rosalinda Zapata braced for bad news. Instead, the officers commended her grandson, Joshua Rodriguez Jr., for persuading a friend not to hurt himself.
Later, Zapata overheard Josh talking him down again. Josh knew what it was like to lose an older brother, he told his friend, and no kid should have to feel that pain.
“You don’t want that for your brother — you love your brother,” she heard Josh say.
Josh was just 13 when his own brother, Jacob, was killed in a 2019 car accident. Josh was devastated, and he had been struggling to cope, getting in trouble at school and breaking down at home. But the way he channeled his grief to help his friend made Zapata proud.
“God, you were awesome,” she told him. “You should be a counselor.”
After Jacob died, Josh became the oldest of nine siblings and fiercely protective. When one younger brother, who has a mood disorder, erupted in angry outbursts, Josh would often be the only one in the house who could mollify him. He’d scrunch up his stomach and instruct his brother to punch him. It always worked, Zapata said, and even when Josh winced, he smiled and told his grandmother it didn’t hurt much.
Two years after the family decided to take Jacob off life support, they were back in the ICU.
On April 7, Josh, his girlfriend and one of his brothers were watching a movie together when an unidentified gunman fired several shots at Zapata’s home. One of the bullets pierced the wall and hit Josh’s head. The 15-year-old died two days later.
The family believes the unsolved shooting was a random act. San Antonio police did not respond to questions about the investigation.
Josh’s obituary — written by his mother, Bianca Matta, and Zapata — reads like a letter to the boy they lost.
“You never gave up on your mom and dad, grandmother and grandfather, brothers and sisters,” they wrote. “You loved each of us in such special ways.”
Matta saw that love in the way Josh agreed to work on their relationship after she lost custody of him. It took a while to rebuild trust, Matta said, but once they did, he confided in her all the time.
Zapata heard it in the way Josh spoke to her, always calling her “Granny,” rather than “Grandma” like his siblings. And she felt it in the tight bear hugs he gave her every evening before bed.
“It was always, ‘Granny, I love you,’ ” Zapata said. “At night, he would tell me; in the morning, he would tell me.”
Josh loved hip-hop and basketball, recording rap songs with friends and spending hours playing NBA 2K on his Xbox. He’d tell Zapata which team he was controlling so she could cheer him on. She showed up for his real-life games, too, and yelled his name from the stands, embarrassing him.
But he didn’t embarrass easily. Once, Josh stole his sister’s leopard-print onesie and danced through the house wearing it. Another time, he was so excited to show off his new clothes, he put on an impromptu fashion show in his underwear, shirt and just unboxed Vans.
His mother and grandmother like to tell the other kids, including a newborn who will never meet his oldest brothers, that they have two guardian angels. On a recent day, Matta said, her 5-year-old daughter pointed to the sky.
“My brothers, Jacob and Joshua,” she said. “They’re right there.”
— Reis Thebault
Sterlyn Bullock, 15
A fedora and a nose ring
On the day Sterlyn Bullock pierced his nose with a safety pin, the ninth-grader didn’t try to hide it from his mom. When she came home, he walked right up to her with his new accoutrement.
“Hey, mother,” said Sterlyn, who would soon turn 15.
She shook her head, but Hollie Besimer didn’t scold him.
“If that’s the worst thing you’re going to do,” she recalled thinking, “I’m okay with that.”
He had always been a kid with a deep sense of empathy. He doted on his younger sister, Amelia, giving her bottles when she was a newborn, bringing her Gatorade when she was sick, walking her into school when she got older. For his 14th birthday, he adopted a kitten from a rescue shelter and named it “Bruce Wayne,” after Batman. Once, on a school trip, Sterlyn used his own money to pay for a friend’s meals after the boy lost his wallet.
At home, he watched Hallmark movies with his mom and practiced chess with his dad. At school, he played saxophone in the band and made A’s in most classes. Sterlyn aspired to become a nuclear physicist, a job that Hollie, who drove school buses and dump trucks for a living, told him she would need to Google.
Sterlyn was artistic and quirky, but Hollie, 32, never discouraged his eccentricities.
Before the nose ring, he decided to dye his hair red, and she helped him do it. Later, when he wanted it micro-braided, she helped with that, too. And after he announced that he needed a fedora, she drove him an hour away, to Greenville, S.C., where he searched the department stores until he found just the right one in the “grandpa section” at Belk.
Their family lived in Due West, a deeply conservative community of 1,200, and Sterlyn attended Ware Shoals High with fewer than 300 other students. Some of them teased him, his mother knew, but she didn’t think her son cared. Sterlyn seldom complained, and he never changed — at least before the pandemic.
With in-person school closed, he spent more time alone, playing video games. He missed his bandmates and wailing on his sax with them. After Sterlyn’s grades slipped, Hollie worried he might be depressed and urged him to lean on his sister, and for her to lean on him.
“One day, you’re only going to have each other,” she told her kids.
When campus reopened last winter, she hoped her son would improve. On May 4, Hollie picked Sterlyn up from school, and he seemed like himself again. It had been a good day, he told her.
Before bed, he stopped by her room, as always. It was part of a tradition that began when he was a toddler. She’d sing him “Little Bunny Foo Foo,” tickle him and then say, “Night night,” and he’d say it back. The ritual never stopped, even when he outgrew nursery rhymes.
“Night night,” he told her that spring evening.
Those were the last words he would ever say to her.
Sometime before morning, he unlocked her car and removed the gun she kept inside it to protect herself. Later, at school, Sterlyn was sitting with a friend in a car when a staff member approached. He got out and drew the gun. Then, in front of at least three other students, Sterlyn shot himself.
“Life is nothing but a mess,” he’d written in a note. “Every time I try, I get less.”
Hollie was overcome with guilt. She wished she had known how much Sterlyn was struggling. She wished she could have kept him safe.
As she watched her son die in the hospital, Hollie told him she was sorry.
— John Woodrow Cox
DaMya Hudnall, 13
The TikTok queen
No matter where inspiration struck, she was ready.
On this particular day, DaMya Hudnall was with her best friend in the water bottle aisle of a Walmart, both of them wearing tie-dye Crocs. DaMya set her phone on a shelf, checked for adults, then began recording her newest TikTok, dancing to Coi Leray’s “No More Parties.”
That was DaMya — always moving, always bouncing around the house, through the school hallways, inside the grocery store. The 13-year-old was a TikTok queen, a master of viral routines and a creator of her own. She had a boisterous, goofy presence. In one video, she and a friend make faces at the camera, then DaMya squeals, a mirror behind them comes crashing down and the two erupt in laughter.
DaMya’s mother, Tara Williams, likes to say her daughter was “full of awesome sauce.”
Their family was big, eight kids in all, but Tara spent the most time with DaMya,who liked tagging along on errands, always riding shotgun in her mom’s SUV as they drove around Topeka, Kan. Usually the first one out of school, DaMya would rush to Williams’s car, hop in the front seat and lock the door so her siblings couldn’t get in.
“DaMya was like my backbone,” Williams said. “She was my shadow. She was always the one right next to me.”
Now when Williams is alone in the car, she breaks down at the sight of the empty passenger seat.
On June 12, DaMya was unintentionally and fatally shot with a Ruger-57 semiautomatic pistol left on top of the refrigerator in her family’s home. The gun belonged to the boyfriend of one of DaMya’s sisters, court records say, and he had set it beside the children’s fruit snacks and cereal boxes.
Early that summer Saturday, a toddler — one of three small children in the home — climbed on top of a kitchen chair, found the loaded weapon and fired it, prosecutors say. The bullet hit DaMya behind her right ear as she played video games on the living room recliner. The shooting was ruled an accident, and the boyfriend now faces three felony charges, including first-degree murder.
Williams’s family moved out of the house where it happened, a place they’d loved. Their new home gets so quiet, and, like the front seat of her SUV, she said, it can feel empty.
DaMya was “the glue to the family,” said Williams, and “a mom before her time.” She doted on little kids, whether her own brothers, the children she babysat or whoever happened to be outside on a hot day, when she would sometimes empty the family freezer of its ice pops and dole them out to any young one she saw.
But it’s the child she never got to meet that Williams thinks about most.
Baby Ma’Laya, born 135 days after the shooting, was going to be DaMya’s first little sister. She had been rooting for a girl, and she cheered at the gender-reveal party. Ma’Laya will now learn about her sister through videos and family stories.
“As long as I have a breath in my body, I’ll make sure everybody knows about DaMya,” Williams said.
Before she was taken off life support, DaMya became an organ donor. Her heart went to a 17-year-old girl in the Midwest. Williams finds comfort in the idea that part of DaMya lives on, and sustains the life of another young girl.
DaMya’s spirit is alive at home, too. As Williams spoke about her, Ma’Laya cried in her mother’s lap. She held her youngest daughter, as DaMya had longed to do.
“It’s okay,” Williams cooed to her. “It’s okay.”
— Reis Thebault
Max Mendoza, 12
No fear
Maximilian Wyatt Mendoza was born premature and undersized, 5 pounds and 2 ounces — “the smallest baby with the biggest name,” his doctor declared.
But Max’s father noticed something else: His newborn son’s impeccable sense of balance. When doctors first sat him up, “he looked to the left and to the right and never tumbled,” said Max’s dad, William Tagle.
It was as if Max arrived in the world telling everyone around him, I got this.
He carried that confidence into his early years outside San Diego, when most everything he tried seemed to come easily. Max remained steady atop skateboards, bikes and scooters, dropping into 20-foot halfpipes with no fear.
At home, the 12-year-old was also poised, mature. He had a side hustle helping neighbors with chores for a few bucks. When he had enough saved up, Max treated the family to McDonald’s.
“Oh, I got you,” he proudly told them. Last Christmas, when he heard that a family was struggling to afford gifts for their four boys, Max donated his presents.
He sometimes got so serious he could look like a miniature man, said one of his older sisters, 16-year-old Melanie.
“Then out of nowhere, he smiles, and you’ll be like, oh, this kid is a kid,” she said.
Max and Melanie both loved the outdoors. When they biked the few miles from their home in Chula Vista to their grandfather’s in National City, they’d race to beat the GPS’s estimated time, trying to get there faster but always staying together.
As he approached his teenage years, Max’s mom, Aida Mendoza, began to worry about her son. A bad fall on a department store escalator a few years earlier had led to head surgery and left him with severe night terrors.
In May, he brought home a BB gun he’d bought at a swap meet, showing it to his mother and arguing that her ban on anything resembling a weapon was too strict. He didn’t know that it still had a pellet lodged in it. The BB gun went off and hit him right below the eye.
Aida decided to get him counseling, hoping a therapist would reinforce her warnings about guns, and Max agreed to it. But it was difficult to get an appointment through California’s Medicaid program. Max never got a chance to go.
On July 2, their last day together, Aida was running errands with her three oldest children, Macy, Melanie and Max. Things were changing so fast, she realized: Macy heading to college, Melanie nearing driving age, Max in middle school.
“Let me cherish this moment right now,” she said she told them. She wanted them to spend the Fourth of July together at a family barbecue. Max hugged her and kissed her cheek.
Aida and William went to bed late that night and woke to the sound of gunfire.
Police are still investigating what happened, but they say a 15-year-old acquaintance brought a “ghost gun” — an untraceable firearm assembled from a kit purchased online — into the apartment. San Diego County medical examiners ruled the shooting an accident, and they believe Max was holding the weapon when it went off. But the other boy should never have had the gun, authorities say, and he may still face charges.
When Aida saw Max, he was holding his blanket above his chest, bleeding badly.
She held her son as he lay on the floor, dying.
“I got this,” he whispered. “I got this.”
— Reis Thebault
PJ Evans, 8
‘I believe in myself’
Every time his mom finished buckling his helmet and securing his shoulder pads, Peyton “PJ” Evans had to go to the bathroom.
The tic was a sign of anxiety. It had started two years earlier when, at age 6, he had joined a high-powered Maryland youth football team. PJ wasn’t used to playing with kids who knew football as well as he did. It made him feel small and a little bit scared.
“Mom, I’m not the star anymore,” he said one day, as the two trekked across a turf field in search of the nearest toilet.
But Tiffani Evans knew that wasn’t true. PJ, quite literally, was born to play football. On Valentine’s Day in 2013, he flew out of her body with such force that the doctor caught him like a football. Tiffani declared in that moment that her son would have a knack for the sport and a big heart. And she was right.
As he grew up in D.C.'s Maryland suburbs, PJ became a fierce defensive tackle renowned at a local training center for consistently asking his coaches what he could do to improve. He dreamed of being an NFL player, and, as his mom liked to joke, he had already started to eat like one. Only 8 years old, the boy weighed nearly 150 pounds.
PJ also developed a love for music that, from an early age, seemed to bring him a sense of peace. He would ask his mom to blast Gladys Knight and Patti LaBelle in the car, and then he would belt out Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” as soon as they got home. He learned to play the violin in first grade and wanted to learn to play the drums. It was going to be so fun, he would say to his mom, snuggled up to her on the couch.
Instead, PJ’s last moments on earth came a week before he was supposed to start third grade. It was Taco Tuesday, and he was spending that Aug. 24 sitting at his cousin’s dining room table in Landover, Md., with a fried salmon taco in his hand.
“Hey, Mom,” he exclaimed, his mouth still full. “This taco bussin’!”
Less than two minutes later, gunfire erupted outside. A bullet shattered the front-porch window. Tiffani, sitting on the patio, screamed for someone to grab the kids. She didn’t know that her son was already slumped over at the table, the taco still in his hand. Police later arrested three men and charged them with murder.
Months after his death, Tiffani finds some solace in thinking about PJ’s last day. Earlier that Tuesday, he had managed to gear up for a football scrimmage without needing to use the bathroom. He had learned a strategy from his mom that eased his anxiety.
It was an affirmation that he and Tiffani said together almost every day for months before each practice and each game, no matter how rushed or tired or late they were. Tiffani thought it would teach her son that no one could scare him away from he what he loved, that the light inside him was powerful enough to drown out the fear.
“I believe in myself. I believe in myself,” he and Tiffani said together that day, holding hands in the car when they arrived at the game. “Without God I’m nothing, but with God, I’m everything.”
Then he ran onto the field.
— Emily Davies
Mychal “MJ” Moultry Jr., 4
A brilliant boy
Mychal Moultry Jr. was so overjoyed by the sight of his mother that he’d call her by only one name: “Happy.”
“When I would walk in, he’d be like, ‘Happy, Happy!’ ” Angela Gregg said. “I’d be like, ‘No, it’s Mama!’ He really thought my name was ‘Happy.’ ”
She and MJ spent the first eight months of MJ’s life in Alabama, before moving in 2017 to Chicago, where his father, Mychal Moultry Sr., was living. He was thrilled to have a son — and so was Gregg. She’d grown up with three brothers, and so she had feared having a daughter, mostly because she “didn’t know how to style the hair of little girls.”
But, she often joked, “God has a sense of humor, so he blessed me with a boy — but gave him a head full of hair.”
In Chicago, Moultry took MJ with him everywhere: to friends’ parties, to the dry cleaner, to the carwash. He wanted everyone to see how proud he was of his son. When Gregg got a job as a receptionist at a hospital, MJ began attending the same day care his father had 30 years earlier.
Even at 4, he was thoughtful and curious. He preferred to eat vegetarian, gobbling his fruit and french fries but neglecting his hamburger. He wouldn’t eat his SpaghettiOs until he’d picked out the meatballs. And he could entertain himself for hours with his Lightning McQueen cars or his blocks. His father, a mechanical engineer, wondered if his boy might wind up in the same field someday.
MJ’s preschool teachers had already told his parents that he was brilliant, suggesting that he take their kindergarten readiness test. By the age of 3, MJ already knew how to solve simple math problems. He regularly astounded his parents with his vocabulary, too. His teachers thought he could benefit from starting elementary school early.
He was scheduled to take the test after Labor Day weekend.
For the holiday, Gregg and MJ — who’d recently moved back to Alabama — flew to Chicago to see Moultry. That Friday, Moultry took his son to get his hair braided at a family friend’s home. MJ had school pictures the next week, and Gregg wanted him to look nice.
“He kept saying, ‘No, I don’t want to get my hair done,’ ” Gregg said. “He was acting like a baby that day, crawling into my lap and hugging me.”
She promised to get him a snack as a reward.
When his mother went to pick him up, he had one braid left to go, so she stayed in the car, she said, not wanting to disturb the stylist. About 9 p.m., she heard gunshots.
“The beautician called me and said, ‘Where are you at?’ ” Gregg said. “She said, ‘We’ve been hurt. We are all hurt.’ That’s when I ran into the apartment and just saw everything.”
Three people in a silver vehicle had fired round after round into the apartment building, and two of those bullets had struck MJ in the head. He died two days later at Comer Children’s Hospital.
Police later recovered 27 spent shells at the scene. They said that the 4-year-old’s family was not the intended target — that he’d been a casualty of gang conflict in the community. No arrests have been made.
Now Gregg walks the streets of the neighborhood where her son was killed, handing out fliers seeking information and telling people about the boy who called her “Happy.”
— Lizzie Johnson
Troy Dueñez, 3
The Spider-Man superhero
Troy Dueñez was ready to be a big boy, just like his older siblings.
His 5-year-old brother, whom he called Dak, loved Spider-Man. So 3-year-old Troy loved Spider-Man, too.
The two boys would run around their house posing like the superhero, squatting with one hand in the air or jumping with their arms flung behind them. Sometimes, they would shoot pretend spiderwebs at each other.
Troy also liked to copy his 6-year-old sister, Heavenlee. She would throw a play purse over her shoulder and strut across the kitchen. Right on cue, Troy would find a spare purse, strap it over his shoulder and follow suit, swaying his hips from side to side.
But Troy also had his own preferences and his own personality, displaying what his mom said were outsize emotions. He developed an early love for curse words, with a special appreciation for the one that starts with an “F.” He liked screaming “motherf-----” in his distinctly high-pitched, preschool voice. His mom said he may have learned that unfortunate word from conversations she had had with his dad.
When the boy got into trouble, as he inevitably did with all that yelling, Troy knew what to do. He would pucker his lips, lock eyes with his mom and blow kisses her way. Janett Rivera laughed at her son, even though she knew that she shouldn’t.
For every profane tendency, Troy had an equally loud expression of love. He was known as his little sister’s protector, always making sure she didn’t pick up trash from the ground or touch anything that could hurt her. He liked to compliment his mom, too, almost every time she got dressed in the morning.
“Mom, you’re so beautiful,” he would say. “You’re so pretty. I love you.”
"Aw, baby,” Janett said, looking down at her son, who hovered just above 3 feet. “I love you, too.”
Janett had hoped her third child would be a girl, but she fell in love with Troy the second she saw his little features on the sonogram. His face looked the same in the womb, she said, as when he arrived on March 6, 2018. His big eyes. Those delicious cheeks, made plumper over time by his obsession with Mexican food. That long forehead. His smile, accentuated by a gap in his front teeth from a fall in the bath when he was 2 years old.
Troy was supposed to learn how to ride a bike in October. Instead, he went to his dad’s house one day and never came back. Police said Troy found his dad’s handgun in a bedroom closet and accidentally fired it. The bullet tore through his chest. His older siblings, in the living room at the time, heard the weapon fire.
Police arrested Troy’s father, who had a previous conviction for deadly conduct with a firearm, and charged him with unlawful gun possession. But Janett doesn’t care about that.
She wants to teach Troy to ride a bike, to see him off to his first day of school, to watch him make friends and find love and become that big boy he always wanted to be.
— Emily Davies
Hana St. Juliana, 14
A final bus ride
Hana St. Juliana usually walked to the bus stop near her Michigan home, but the weather on this Tuesday in late November was cold and overcast, so her father offered to drop her off.
As she climbed into his SUV, the 14-year-old had so much to be excited about. That evening she was playing in her first official basketball game of the season. Her whole family — her mom and dad, younger brother and older sister — planned to be there.
There weren’t many players on Oxford High School’s freshman girls’ team, so Hana was getting more playing time as a guard than she’d expected. Naturally athletic, she had taken easily to the sport.
Still, Hana wasn’t sure if she’d stick with basketball when the season ended or try something else. This was typical of a teenager friends described as having “a million hobbies.”
She’d grown up in the shadow of her sister, Reina, who was a junior and seemingly good at everything. Recently, though, Hana felt like she was finally finding her own identity.
She was the funny one, with a sarcastic streak that made people laugh. She was detail-oriented and creative, too. Her nails were always perfectly painted, and she made ceramics that she displayed in her father’s basement office, among them a miniature bathtub with a rubber duck floating on the water’s blue surface. For Christmas, she’d put together a 10-hour playlist of holiday music.
Since Hana and Reina had begun attending the same high school, they’d stopped fighting as much and grown closer. Still, one thing continued to cause conflict: their heights. The two girls were constantly vying to be the tallest, standing on their tiptoes in family photos. At 5-foot-7, Hana always won.
“That was the big joke,” said their father, Steve St. Juliana. “Hana was just a couple inches taller, but it would drive Reina crazy.”
Both girls spoke fluent Japanese. Their father was from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; their mother was from Yokohama, Japan.
The children spent every other summer in Fukuoka with their grandparents, attending a local school. Hana’s name — pronounced Hah-nuh — meant flower in Japanese.
She loved the food most of all. She was the only one of the siblings who’d shown an interest in learning to cook Japanese cuisine, so her mother taught her to prepare traditional broth-based soups and the sweet black bean dish that her younger brother loved.
For Japanese New Year, they organized and prepared the meal together. On Thanksgiving, Hana opted to put her own twist on the family’s apple pie recipe by adding yuzu, a common type of Asian citrus.
During her first year of high school, Hana enrolled in Chinese and committed herself to schoolwork in a way she hadn’t in middle school. She’d never been a big fan of studying and often procrastinated, crafting jewelry out of beads or watching TikTok videos until 10 p.m., when she’d roll her eyes and rush to finish her homework. But she managed to earn all A’s on her report card.
Now, Hana buckled her seat belt and headed down the long driveway with her father.
It was Nov. 30. In just a few hours, a 15-year-old with a semiautomatic handgun would open fire in a school hallway, killing Hana and three of her classmates. In the chaos, Reina would send a barrage of texts to their parents: first telling them that she loved them, then saying she couldn’t find Hana.
At the bus stop that gloomy morning, Hana got out of her father’s SUV and slid on her black backpack. She flashed her trademark smirk at her dad.
He watched as she boarded the bus for the last time.
— Lizzie Johnson
Elyjah Munson, 11
The family peacemaker
By 11, Elyjah Munson had already become his family’s most gifted peacemaker. No one knew for sure how he’d developed his preternatural skill for saying just the right words at just the right moment, but his adult relatives marveled at it.
Often, when his two older brothers would start to argue in their Riverdale, Ga., home, the boys’ maternal grandmother, Grace Wells, wouldn’t intervene, because Elyjah would instead.
“So why did you do that to him?” he’d ask one brother, before turning to the other. “Well, why did you do that to him?”
His 12-year-old cousin, TJ, is autistic and feared crowded spaces, but he’d venture into Walmart with Elyjah, who would guide him through the store.
His four grandparents were his best friends, and their influence had shaped his temperament. He learned patience with his father’s father — “Granddaddy” — with whom he spent hours watching “The Andy Griffith Show” and “Gunsmoke,” black-and-white programs that most kids would find unbearable. With his mother’s father — “Papa” — he learned attentiveness, checking on him each day after school and volunteering to fix the computer when it stopped working.
One day at a grocery store, Wells grew annoyed with how long an elderly woman ahead of them in line was taking to load her items. She told Elyjah they should find another register.
“No, Granny, we should just help her put the stuff up,” she recalled him saying, and that’s what he did.
Elyjah, whose cheeks swelled when he smiled, enjoyed pranks, and for April Fools’ Day one year, he set a trap in a closet for one of his brothers. When Wells opened the door, out fell a book and a shoe. She hollered, and Elyjah rushed into the room, mortified.
“I’m sorry, Granny!” he said. “That wasn’t supposed to be for you.”
Elyjah had always cared about people, just as he did on the afternoon of Dec. 9, when he called his mother, Kendall Munson. He asked if he could pick up snacks — but only after his brothers got home, so they could get some, too.
For a time, Munson’s three oldest sons had lived with her in Chicago, but she’d sent them back to live with their grandparents in Georgia, where they would be safe from the gun violence ravaging the Windy City.
She still doted on her sons from afar. When Elyjah’s brothers got home, she sent them money for the snacks and off they went, walking to a nearby gas station. Elyjah wanted a Minute Maid Lemonade, Doritos, and Mike and Ike candies.
The family has pieced together what happened on the way home from police, a neighbor and Elyjah’s 12-year-old brother, Jorden. A group of children were walking together as Elyjah trailed behind with one of his best friends, who was showing off a gun he’d taken out of his backpack.
“Man, you play too much,” one of the kids said, then the boy raised the gun and fired it, sending a round into Elyjah’s head.
The 12-year-old boy who shot him wanted them to make up a story, blaming a drive-by shooting, Wells said Jorden later told her. Weeping, he refused.
“I’m not going to lie,” he said. “You just killed my brother.”
The boy, who played with Elyjah nearly every day, was charged with murder, but Munson is convinced the shooting was an accident. His friend, she said, wouldn’t have done that.
Wells has also struggled to accept that the boy killed her grandson on purpose, but her disbelief has less to do with the shooter than with Elyjah. At his funeral, she listened to one person after another share how he had made their lives happier, richer, more peaceful.
How could anyone want to end the life of that child?
— John Woodrow Cox
John Harden and Steven Rich contributed to this report.