The Lives They Lived

The following Sunday, the family went back to their church, housed in a one-story building across the road from Ed’s Hometown Fireworks and next door to a saddle-and-tack store. A sign out front assures worshipers that Heaven’s View is “loving, healing and welcoming.” All week LaVonte’e had bubbled with excitement. That morning, the congregation was dressed in yellow — a happy color. The choir sang “It’s Your Season,” and LaVonte’e, in a green T-shirt with a yellow-and-black truck on the front, jumped and clapped, stomping his feet and rocking from side to side in front of Miracle, scream-singing the lyrics: “It’s your season to be blessed! God made you a promise, and you stood the test!”

As the service progressed and time for the baptism neared, LaVonte’e’s grandmother Tanika, whom the grandchildren call Gigi, wanted to make sure the children understood what getting baptized meant before they took part in the ceremony. “The bishop is going to pray over us, and she’s going to put us in the water and bring us back up,” explained Kymora, who was older than her brother by a year.

“Do you believe that Jesus Christ died for your sins?” their grandmother pressed.

“He died so that we can go to heaven when we die,” LaVonte’e told her.

“Do you have any more questions?” she asked.

“Yeah,” LaVonte’e replied. “Is the water gonna be cold?”

Bishop Dr. Belita McMurry-Fite, Heaven View’s pastor, had arranged for a black plastic tub the size of a wading pool, but deeper, to be pulled out of a storage room, placed behind her lectern and filled with water. When the time came, five people lined up to be baptized. Kymora went first. LaVonte’e watched as Bishop Fite’s husband, Deacon Edward Fite, lifted her into the pool. Bishop Fite put a towel over the girl’s face, leaned her over backward and briefly dipped her whole body in. LaVonte’e peered from behind his grandfather’s legs, his eyes growing wide as his sister’s arms and legs flailed. Now it was his turn. Deacon Fite picked him up and eased him into the basin. As he knelt in the water, LaVonte’e clutched the side of the tub and began to cry.

Bishop Fite stroked his head, and Miracle stepped up to reassure him, hug him and hold his hand. “Brother LaVonte’e, in the name of the father and the son and the precious name of the Holy Ghost, we indeed baptize you,” Bishop Fite recited as she dipped him in and out of the water. As the church applauded, LaVonte’e’s father scooped him out of the basin, folding him into a dry towel.

A half-hour later, wrapped in a blanket, the little boy was laughing and smiling, posing with his official certificate showing that, indeed, on that day, young Brother LaVonte’e Williams had been baptized.

On Aug. 15, the day after his baptism, LaVonte’e Williams accidentally shot himself at a basketball park.

“I struggle with lots of things,” Angie wrote a teacher at University Prep High School, where she was a freshman. “I have anxiety and today ... i didn’t get as nervous maybe cause I’m not speaking to anyone but hands are a little shaky.”

Angie kept a low profile at school. But she was proud of her ability to befriend people considered “annoying or strange,” she wrote in her journal, and to put “others before myself.” Her kindness could go unrequited. “She felt out of place sometimes,” said her school counselor, Francesca DiBlasi, noting that Angie was more mature than her peers — a person “who didn’t sound her age,” said her brother Angel. Among her classmates, she could stoke envy. “She walks into a room,” DiBlasi said, “and she’s just this aura of beauty, confidence, a little bit of sass.”

She was happiest at home, drawing elaborate, dreamy sketches on her iPad, watching vintage horror movies like “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and feasting on her mother’s black beans, rice and pernil. As Henriquez’s sole daughter, Angie was the family’s uncontested diva, its “only queen” — a girl who seemed to have left the Bronx all but physically. She stayed off the streets and away from crowds, insisting that her mother, a caseworker for a nonprofit, drive her everywhere because the bus made her “feel poor” (to which Henriquez quipped, “The last time I checked, we live in the projects”). She lobbied her mother for frequent manicures and fancy makeup (“Girl!” Henriquez would say. “I don’t make Sephora dollars!”)

Yet Angie kept imagining another life: one of far-flung travel and Chanel bags, of Teslas and Kylie Jenner-style fame. She planned to become rich enough to buy her mother a house in Florida and to “run my own company,” she wrote in 2020. “I want to forget all this pain and prove everyone wrong.” In her most fanciful moments, she yearned to try her luck modeling — despite being teased at school about her weight. She jotted in her journal that she was “trying to accept my body.” She had never been to a prom or even a dance. As her 16th birthday approached, she resisted the idea of a Sweet 16. With so few friends, whom would she invite?

Then, in October 2021, Angie changed her mind. This would be “my day,” she told her mother, and the guests would be mostly family. They rented a local banquet hall and, for the next three months, obsessed over every flourish: the 16 candles Angie would light, dedicating each to a special person; the gilded throne where she would sit, wearing a sparkling tiara; the enchanted-forest backdrop and pink-tiered cake adorned with edible butterflies. They hired a professional photographer and a makeup artist to give Angie a “hot-pink shimmery look with wing lashes and a baby-pink lip,” the artist recalled. When Angie fell in love with a flowing $900 ball gown, Henriquez balked — but eventually caved, offering to split the cost with her daughter’s father, Manuel Yambó, who works as a doorman near Riverdale.

“Once upon a time, a young princess had a dream,” read Angie’s invitation to “the most beautiful party anyone has ever seen.” It would only end (according to the invitation) at 2 a.m., by which point the unforeseen blizzard would be in full swing.

Guests or no guests, Angie was not going to miss her own party. By 6 p.m. on Jan. 28, she and her mother made their way down in the elevator. A hairnet covered Angie’s curls as she stepped outside, clutching the ball gown “with her dear life,” Henriquez said. When they pulled up to RV Catering Hall on East 173rd Street, Henriquez hurried her daughter to the back room, where she was soon joined by her father. When Angie peeked out at the party, she saw reams of guests. The tables were almost full.

“OK, Mom,” she said with relief. “We got this.”

The time had come for Angie’s parents to “present” their daughter to the family. They waited for their cue: Marc Anthony’s “Vivir Mi Vida.” The doors swung open and out they walked, each parent leading their daughter by the arm.

Everyone gasped at the sight of Angie Yambo. She had never looked so radiant, “like a princess,” said her father, who began crying later as they danced. Then it was her mother’s turn. She took her daughter in her arms and twirled her around, Angie’s pink tulle floating like a cloud.

“All I kept doing was looking at her face,” Henriquez said. “Like, in disbelief that my daughter was in front of me, becoming a young woman. I was so proud of that moment. Like, oh, my God. Look at you.”

On April 8, Angellyh Yambo was killed by a stray bullet while walking after school in the South Bronx; the suspect’s gunfire struck two other teenagers, both of whom survived.

Coming to the plate during the kickball game, Paula was chirping at an older cousin playing first base, who’d recently torn his A.C.L.: You can’t even walk right — that sort of thing. When Paula kicked the ball and sprinted for first, he made a big show of juking him, wrenching his body to fake his cousin out. But midmaneuver, Paula crumpled to the ground, holding his leg. It was funny at first. “A little bit of karma, to be honest,” another older cousin, Meeli Lokotui, says. Then Paula’s knee bulged up like a hornet’s nest. He’d torn his meniscus and A.C.L.

It was an aggravation of an already gnarly football injury. Since age 8, Paula played in a kind of Little League feeder program for Hunter High School in West Valley City. Particularly for the town’s large Tongan community, “football is the way out,” Paula’s father, Sasa, explains. “And while you’re here, it’s something to do.” Legions of Paula’s uncles and cousins had played at Hunter. Some got football scholarships; some have been in prison. And so, ever since he was tiny, Paula wore Hunter High School Wolverines sweatshirts. He’d have relatives draw “Hunter” in block letters on his hand with a Sharpie. He’d ask family members to film him from the stands whenever he ran the ball. Then he’d edit those clips together with a thumping soundtrack and flood the various cousin group chats with his own bespoke highlight reels. Shortly after the kickball game, he would finally enter Hunter as a freshman. He had a great shot at being the team’s starting quarterback. Now he was on crutches.

Paula was a voraciously social teenager, a cannonball of comic, kinetic energy. He lived with his parents, six of his sisters, his grandma, his aunt and uncle and their six children. But as one of those cousins explains, “He was the one who was never really home.” Paula was never old enough to have a driver’s license but was a savant when it came to finding a ride. “You would never know where you would see him at,” his cousin Sepi Lokotui explains. When Paula was 11, he appeared in the hallway of Sepi’s high school, just to say hi. A year or two later, she was attending a friend’s wedding, an hour and a half away, and there he was. (“It makes sense that I’m here,” Sepi told her little cousin, “But you?”) His cousin Sinia Maile’s college graduation was held in the middle of a workday, clear on the other side of Utah, and few in the family could make the trip. “But I walked out of the ceremony,” Sinia remembers, “and the first one who found me was Paula.” His mother, Lata Bloomfield Tahi, says, “He managed to make it to my family reunion twice without me” — the reunions were in Idaho, hundreds of miles away. “You couldn’t imprison this child,” she adds. “You could never keep him at home against his will. That was something I had to accept.”

But now that child was supposed to sit around the house for weeks after surgery, elevating his leg. Sasa had dislocated his hip playing football at around the same age and hadn’t been patient enough to prioritize his healing. He worried that his son would make the same mistake. Initially, Paula didn’t seem too miserable, stationed in his special chair in the living room, snacking prolifically and playing on the PS5, collecting pity leftovers from any member of the household who’d eaten dinner out. But it pained him to miss football. It pained him to miss out. “He was tired of staying home while everyone was out having fun,” his cousin Pita Tofavaha says.

To lessen his boredom, the family treated Paula to a road trip to see a favorite uncle in California. It was a 12-hour drive to Santa Cruz. The whole way, Sasa asked: “You OK? You got your pills? Does it hurt?” When they arrived, they went straight to the beach. While the younger kids raced into the ocean and splashed around, shivering, Paula trundled right to the waterline on his crutches and sat down in the sand.

The foamy edges of the waves lapped around his lower body, soaking his leg brace. But Paula kept scooting a little deeper. Eventually, he lay down on his stomach like a sea lion, waved his hands as if he were swimming and kicked his feet.

When he was done, Paula threw his crutches aside and walked awkwardly toward his anxious father. “Dad!” he said. “Look, I can walk! I can walk, see? Look at this. I can walk!”

Sasa hollered at him to slow down.

“No, look! It doesn’t even hurt,” Paula said, lumbering around, trying to run.

“Calm down,” Sasa told him, wincing and waving at his son to get back on the crutches, to stop. “You don’t realize your leg is numb now! That water is hella cold!”

But Paula kept going. He didn’t understand or he just didn’t care. For the rest of the trip, Sepi explained: “We had to watch him 24/7. He’d try to run off.”

On Jan. 13, Paula Tupou Bloomfield Tahi was shot during an altercation with other teenagers near his school in West Valley City, Utah. Two other students were also shot. One of them, Tivani Lopati, a friend and fellow football player, was killed.

Once they were in the sky, she smiled as DJ and Hunter, two boys who vibrated with jokes, dance moves and pranks, leaned against each other, napping like toddlers.

At 11, DJ was Bre’s little cuddler. Her other two children were teenagers — quieter, more withdrawn, already leading their own lives. DJ was the one who asked about her day, who curled up in bed with her and watched “Edward Scissorhands,” who let her braid his hair. Ever since DJ was little, Bre predicted that he would be the one always underfoot, the strapping adult son moseying through her kitchen unannounced.

Theirs was a sprawling, intertwined family. Bre was the oldest of six sisters, who were known in high school as the Francis Girls. In adulthood, they stayed just as close — almost all of them lived within 15 minutes of one another in east Houston. The sisters had nine kids among them, and they spent their weekends and evenings in an ever-shifting constellation of siblings, cousins, aunts, mothers. If loneliness had become endemic to modern American life, no one told the Francis Girls.

They vacationed together too. This trip to Colorado included Bre’s younger sisters Monique and Catria, her cousin Channing, her uncle Michael and his fiancée, Jessica. After a lifetime in flat, steamy Houston, Colorado felt exotic — the clear, cold skies, the unscalable mountains, even the thin air that made it hard to catch your breath.

When they arrived at the Airbnb in Breckenridge for their two-night stay, DJ ran through the house checking out the bedrooms, flinging open the cabinets. He reappeared with an important announcement: There was an outdoor hot tub. That first morning, DJ woke Bre early, pleading with her to shovel the snow off the hot tub’s cover. It was barely light out, and most of the adults hadn’t had their coffee yet, but DJ was bouncing up and down. The snow already stood higher than great-uncle Michael’s waist, and it kept falling like a drawn-out invitation to come out and play, an offer DJ rarely declined.

In Breckenridge, they stayed in for meals; Michael did most of the cooking. The steak-and-egg omelets were a smash hit, so good they had to be Instagrammed. People fought over the chicken lollipops wrapped in bacon, a dish that no matter the size of the heap was somehow never large enough.

After one dinner, DJ and the kids got their dream assignment: dessert-contest judges. First up was Catria’s deconstructed Nutty Buddy — an ice cream cone covered in chopped peanuts spread across freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies beneath a coating of chocolate sauce. Next was Michael’s confection, a toasted marshmallow mélange beneath a homemade raspberry glaze. To this day, Michael believes the kids’ palates weren’t sophisticated enough to appreciate his artistry.

DJ lived in a honeyed window between two worlds. He was still a child, a rubber-limbed charmer unburdened by self-consciousness who danced in the Walgreens parking lot and celebrated nacho night with fist-pumping gusto. But while he had not yet retreated behind the closed door of the teenage bedroom, his family could glimpse the silhouette of the adult coming into view, an intriguing and familiar version of the child they knew so well. His shoulders were broadening, and he kept getting taller. Bre imagined that his fascination with video-game coding and his tinkering with remote-control cars might lead to a career someday. He was unusually self-possessed, and when he heard that kids weren’t allowed at his grandmother’s 50th-birthday party, he came up with a way to be useful enough that he earned himself entry: shuttling guests around in a golf cart. He strained to reach the brakes, but he impressed the adults as the only kid in attendance.

On that first morning of vacation, the adults stood back to let DJ and Hunter take the first steps into the hot tub. The family watched as the Texas boys simmered in the bubbling jets. They wore snow hats and bathing suits, an outfit as thrilling as it was ridiculous. The snow came down in big, puffy flakes, forcing the boys to squint as they looked up into the bright white sky. They giggled, beaming, throwing their hands up in mock tough-guy poses for the cameras. They tried hard not to laugh.

On Feb. 3, Darius Dugas went to get his jacket from his mother’s car in their apartment building's parking lot. He was struck and killed by a stray bullet that the police say was fired by a man running from a car he had just robbed.

“He always had a smile,” St. Martin says. “But then his smile left.”

It disappeared, he says, on Thanksgiving night in 2019, when Mark (Mario) Robinson, Rashad’s older brother — his mentor, his father figure, his best friend — was shot and killed on the front stoop of their home in the Upper Ninth Ward. As Mario died in his mother’s arms, Rashad watched from the doorway. Later, on his bad days, Rashad would tell his mother that he wanted to join Mario. On worse days, he would say that he was already with Mario, that he, too, died that Thanksgiving night. “Nothing has really mattered since Mario died,” he’d say.

Mario had always told Rashad that, in order to survive childhood, he would have to grow up as quickly as possible. Everybody’s not your friend, Mario warned him. You can’t trust anyone. Be careful about where you go, what you say. It’s best to be alone. After Mario’s death, Rashad began heeding his brother’s advice. He tunneled himself inside his bedroom, coming out occasionally to play video games in the living room, where the curtains were perpetually drawn — curtains screen-printed with blown-up images of Mario and the date of his death. Rashad stopped going to school and was arrested on a series of charges (which were going to be expunged from his record). Once he came back to ARISE to fight a student. St. Martin intercepted him. “That’s not who you are,” he said, but St. Martin was no longer sure if that was true.

Cheri Deatsch, the attorney who represented Rashad at the Orleans Public Defenders’ Office, visited him the year after Mario’s death. Deatsch had been visiting with another client a few blocks away who had just witnessed a shooting, and she decided to check on Rashad. For privacy, they held their conversation outside, on the front stoop. “I remember looking at him,” Deatsch says, “16 years old at the time, and realizing how heavy the world was on his shoulders.” Deatsch delivered her typical pep talk, about staying in school and keeping out of trouble, but the words felt hollow as she spoke. Rashad couldn’t pay attention: he was too anxious scanning the block, looking over his shoulder, wondering who might come around the corner. He didn’t feel safe, outside. On that stoop. “When he was able to be a kid, he was so gentle,” Deatsch says. “That was his true demeanor. But he couldn’t be that person. He was forced to become tough, because you have to be tough to survive. His life was a struggle from the time he was born.”

Or at least from eight months after he was born. When Hurricane Katrina hit, Rashad had just begun to crawl. Water filled the house, destroying everything. His mother, Lori Smith, waded to a shelter through knee-high water, the baby tied to a neighbor’s back in a bedsheet. Conditions at the shelter swiftly deteriorated: two people died before their eyes, a woman was raped, guns were ubiquitous. Lori’s sister died that week in the Superdome, leaving behind six children, all of whom would move in with Lori and her seven.

But a miracle also occurred at the shelter. As soon as they arrived, as if refusing to be a burden any longer, Rashad suddenly began to walk. Lori laughs, recalling her disbelief. “I was like, wait, hold up — you’re walking? Rashad, you’re walking! Rashad, you’re walking!”

On March 4, Rashad Smith was called out of his house by a group of people he knew and shot and killed.

The eldest of four siblings, Junior looked just like his father, but everyone knew that he was his mama’s boy at heart. He was her sounding board: when she picked a car, when she planned a family vacation, when she chose Christmas decorations or any little thing. She always asked him, Junior, what do you think? They joked and bickered and relied on each other like best friends.

And when they worked together at the Auntie Anne’s, they competed relentlessly. She didn’t want anyone to think that because she had hired her son, he was going to get off easy. Sometimes she’d fill every rack in the oven with fresh pretzels, so that he’d have to butter all the hot baked goods at once. You think you’re faster than me? he’d say, rushing to prove that he could keep up.

Junior planned to start managing his own Auntie Anne’s as soon as he turned 18. He wanted to be like his mother’s boss: an entrepreneur who owned franchise stores in several cities. He wanted to grow up quickly so he could let his mother stop working, so he could move his little brother and sister out of their North Philly neighborhood into a safer one. He opened a bank account when he was 14. He got a credit card. He began saving money for his first side hustle: a vending machine that he planned to install in the barbershop of a family friend. “All he ever used to talk about was making his mom proud,” his co-worker Yamira Dillard said.

It had been like that all his life. When he was 10 and his family lived in New York City, his mother commuted from their home in Staten Island to a Dairy Queen she managed in the Bronx. At times, especially during the holiday season, she wouldn’t get back until after midnight. On weekends, Junior often made the two-hour trek with her. Together they’d rise at 6 a.m., board the ferry and ride two express buses up to the Bay Plaza mall. Then she would park him in front of Netflix in her office or arrange for him to play on the slides at Billy Beez. But he was always sneaking away: to restock the chips, to sweep the kitchen, to sprinkle toppings on the shakes.

What are you doing? she’d say when she caught him. You can’t be working. I’m going to get in trouble.

I just want to help, he’d answer. I’m tired of playing around.

When you get older, papi, she’d say, then I’m going to put you on.

When the store shut down during the pandemic, his mother took the job at Auntie Anne’s in Philly. There, Junior played and worked at the same time. He cracked goofy jokes while making pretzel nuggets, flirted with girls passing the kiosk, challenged co-workers to TikTok dance battles. Whatever dance was going viral, he would master: the Shake It, the Sturdy. “When I first met J.R.,” Dillard recalls, “he was the light in all the darkness.” She was three years older than he and struggling with problems at home, but no matter how sad she felt when she started her shift, he would find a way to cheer her up, singing and dancing at her until she started laughing. “Even if he was having a bad day, he would never let it show,” Dillard remembers. “He was always that person you know you can count on.”

Making work a place where people wanted to be was a skill Junior had picked up from his mother. In the Bronx, some of her teenage employees grew so attached to her that they’d hang out at the Dairy Queen on their days off. She would cook Mexican rice and sausages for them, arrange Secret Santa gift exchanges, listen to their problems and their triumphs.

At 15, Junior was turning out like her. He organized Christmas gift giving among his close friends and encouraged them to work. Several of them landed their first jobs with his mother at the mall. “His work ethic was crazy,” his classmate Sharif Smith recalls. “We’d tell him, Come play ball.” But Junior had a vision for his future. So after school, he’d see his brother and sister safely home, then head downtown to Auntie Anne’s.

On April 4, Juan Carlos Robles-Corona Jr. was shot on a street near his public school. The killing remains unsolved.

“He was an entrepreneur,” Martin said. “He didn’t come out there and gangbang. He didn’t come out there and fight people. He came out there to hustle. Sincere wanted to come back with nachos, pop, Cheetos, pizza puffs.”

That Saturday evening he stopped by his cousin Anyah’s. Sincere didn’t hang out with many people. But he and Anyah grew up together on the same block, and Sincere sometimes spent the night there. Anyah’s mother told Sincere she would leave the door unlocked for his return. Anyah wished he wasn’t walking the streets alone. You couldn’t go four blocks without crossing a gang boundary.

“I’m not bothering nobody,” Sincere repeated.

Sincere was tall, six feet by the time he was 12. He wore cinched hoodies that revealed only a tight circle of his face. When he smiled, he looked like a cherub, baby-faced, his cheeks balling up like crab apples, a cleft set like a jewel inside his squared chin. Because of his size, Sincere was mistaken often for an adult, but to the people who knew him, his silliness made him seem young. The way he tapped his cousins incessantly. How he disrupted video calls by yelling nonsense words. “It was annoying,” Anyah said.

At some point that evening, Sincere went into Images, a barbershop on Western Avenue, where he had been working since he was 9, sweeping up hair or picking up food for the barbers. A customer who knew Sincere as part of the community handed him a few bucks.

“Sincere was just a young guy living in an urban area trying to find his way,” YaMoni Williams, a barber at Images, said. Williams had been friends with Sincere’s mother, Felon Smith. People said Sincere got his hustle from her. She raised Sincere and his two older sisters on her own, working multiple jobs while training to be a certified nursing assistant. Sincere and his mother looked alike too — the same high forehead and soft brown eyes.

Sincere was 12 when his mother was killed. She was on a train platform and jumped onto the tracks to retrieve her cellphone. When C.T.A. footage was leaked, the video played everywhere and was seen by Sincere and his sisters. It shows a security guard and a couple of passengers making no effort to help her back onto the platform as the train barreled down.

“Mom I love you so much until this day this shit hard,” Sincere wrote on his Facebook page.

Sincere needed help with trauma. He needed counseling. But the adults in his life were also reeling. The video turned the family’s tragedy into a spectacle for public comment and ridicule. Then just seven days after her death, Sincere’s 22-year-old cousin — Aunt Brandy’s daughter — was shot and killed in another part of the South Side. The family had to hold a double funeral.

“Love you mama and cousin miss y’all,” Sincere posted.

Sincere changed: He cried more and smiled less. He smoked weed and stayed in his room for long stretches of the day. He listened on repeat to a song called “Heartbreak Anniversary,” by the R.&B. singer Giveon. “Still got your things here/And they stare at me like souvenirs/Don’t wanna let you out my head.”

When school was halted by the pandemic, it came as a relief. He had A.D.H.D., and classes were never a haven. When school resumed in person, Sincere didn’t go back.

“A part of him broke down emotionally,” a friend of his mother’s named Denise Swift said. “A part of him went mentally.”

Many days Sincere would wander beyond the boundary of 71st Street, to a two-flat where a woman in her 80s lived. Sincere had helped her once when he saw her slipping on ice. He returned to shovel her walk and clean off her car. Then he started showing up regularly. He mowed her grass in the summers. And he came even when there wasn’t work. She cooked for Sincere, and he told her about his life.

But that Saturday night this February, Sincere headed in the opposite direction. He went to a Shell station on Western and 67th Street that he frequented. Sincere cleaned up at a Mexican restaurant and bagged groceries, and the gas station was another one of his steady gigs. The busy intersection meant more traffic, which meant more customers. “Want me to pump your gas, ma’am?” he asked as people pulled up. “God bless you,” he said.

With the temperature dropping, Sincere went inside the Shell’s food mart. He was ready to spend his evening’s earnings. He picked out snacks, maybe selecting something to bring to Anyah, and he paid the man behind the bulletproof glass. Then, as he always did, Sincere started his journey back.

On Feb. 12, Sincere Cole was shot 24 times and killed on the sidewalk outside the Shell gas station on Western and 67th Street. His case remains unsolved.

While the childhood that Tioni’s mother, Theresa, built for her in Compton, Calif., was full of everyday joys — golf lessons, money for fresh hair and nails, babysitting nieces and nephews — the kinds of sorrow in that music touched her life as well. One of Tioni’s brothers was sent to prison when she was 7. Another, Darien Jr., was shot and killed four years later; he was 19. Still, Tioni grinned in photos, and as she matured into adolescence she began to reach for a kind of toughness, a cool insouciance: slim hips cocked at an angle, eyes narrowed, shoulders thrown back. Invariably, her playfulness still shined through.

For most girls, the early teenage years can feel by turns tumultuous, revelatory and perilous: the hormones, the social pressure, the changing body. For Tioni, that period began with an event that shattered the world as she knew it. In early 2019, when she was 13, her mother was struck in a hit-and-run while crossing the street; she suffered serious brain damage and was relocated to an assisted-living facility. Eventually Tioni was uprooted, sent to live with her father in Los Angeles. She was 14 and heartbroken. On her Instagram, the following year, she posted herself singing along not to the pop and R.&B. ballads she’d been known to love, but to Rod Wave’s “Popular Loner”: “I don’t get along with my peers, I’m at war with myself/So fuck you and everybody else.” She began ditching school and rebelling against her father, Darien Sr. They had good moments together, like when he took her on driving lessons, putting her one step closer to her dream of having her own car. But “we clashed a lot,” he said. “She’d run away because there was some things I just wouldn’t let her do.”

Another hallmark of adolescence is the sudden desire to be regarded not just as a young adult with your own mind but as an individual worthy of romantic attention. As she went from 13 to 14 and then 15, the songs featured in Tioni’s posts — from femme rappers like Dej Loaf and Megan Thee Stallion and groups like City Girls — became more sexually explicit. They reflected a teenage yearning for bodily autonomy, to be seen as sophisticated and worldly and to experiment with communicating desire. Tioni might wind her waist alone to the music, or dance in a thong, or grind against the waistband of an unidentifiable male wielding the camera.

Darien Sr. worked days at a men’s-wear store in Inglewood and certain nights as a security guard. His daughter slipped out, during those hours, to hang out with people she met online or through mutual acquaintances. Venturing out alone was a notable shift. Her sister Dariyana recalled a time when Tioni would say, about the two of them and their sister Precious, “One go, we all go.” On more than one occasion, Tioni called her father to come rescue her from a situation that had turned violent. In a late 2020 Instagram post, she swigs from a bottle of Hennessy while singing along to Rod Wave’s “Dark Clouds”: “I done became numb/I don’t make it no better/I give my heart to whoever/They take it and they run.”

Throughout this time she relied on her own peculiar sense of irony to give even grim or distressing situations a lightness. “Fighting in South Central,” reads the caption on a video of Tioni brawling with a girl in an apartment-complex courtyard. The other girl pulls Tioni into a headlock, and they sway perilously close to a fence. “We in a tight area!” Tioni narrates, a self-aware giggle in her voice. In another Instagram story, she dons a surgical mask while Mark Morrison’s 1990s classic “Return of the Mack” plays on the car stereo. She complains of being sick: her throat, neck and hands hurt. “I’m finna go broke, my mouth don’t work no more.” It is the sort of comment — an allusion to sex for money — that you hope is a joke. But as with many aspects of Tioni’s life, the stakes were higher than they should have been: Both investigators and some family members have suggested that she may have been a victim of human trafficking.

No matter how tough or knowing she appeared online, Tioni never stopped pining for Theresa. If she met someone new, someone with a car, she would ask them to drive her to her mother’s assisted-living facility. “That’s tough when your mother does everything,” her older sister Precious said, “and then all of a sudden she can’t do anything for you.” Online, the loss of Theresa undergirded most of Tioni’s posts, as she performed the role of the rudderless teenager, the daughter starved of mother-love.

In one video, posted to Facebook, Tioni is sitting in a car with her brother Arien, using her selfie camera to fix her hair, when Arien shows her a picture of her younger self, from the days when her world revolved around her mother. Tioni breaks into a smile. “My mama is dope,” she says. “Well, she was dope.”

Arien corrects her: “She still is dope.”

Tioni looks away. Is she self-conscious about using the past tense, or is it something else, the reality that things will never be the same? She keeps a smile on her face regardless.

On Jan. 8, Tioni Theus was found dead along an on ramp of the 110 freeway, with a gunshot wound to the neck.

He didn’t see a picture of her or even know her real first name (Shiway) or her sister’s (Sadie) for almost a year into their friendship. But still, he knew her. He knew she was tenderhearted but liked to appear tough. She called her pet guinea pigs — she had at least five, in the 18 months he knew her — the “rats”; but she called them the rats the way she called Sadie a pain, kind of a reflexive defense against sappiness. It was true that he and Shiway made Sadie stand guard while the two of them went off pillaging and feuding, but it was always a given that Sadie would be on their team.

Sometimes Shiway had to go offline to help out with what she always called the pyramid scheme — which was just Sadie’s extensive Girl Scout cookie-selling campaign. Sadie could unload Girl Scout cookies as if she were giving away gold — she sold 1,400 boxes in 2022. When Shiway competed on a basketball team, Sadie wandered among the spectators, a 9-year-old approaching strangers to ask if they wanted some cookies.

Day after day, Sadie used to sit, bundled up in a down coat, on a busy corner a few blocks from her home and sell and sell and sell, cars parking, people darting into the frigid air to get the goods from the small girl with the electric smile. Sometimes she sold for hours at a booth set up in a supermarket, napping in a grocery cart when she finally got too tired, as Shiway stepped in to relieve her.

And why was Sadie selling all those Girl Scout cookies? The prizes. Sadie wanted her cookie credits to go toward a hammock. But she was also selling cookies to win enough credits for Shiway — so Shiway could use them to attend a weeklong horseback-riding camp.

In one of the two photos of herself that Shiway ever shared with him, she was nuzzling a guinea pig, and he could see it already: She would grow up to be a veterinarian, just as she always said she would. She was different from the other kids he sometimes talked to on the server — she had such clear plans for what she wanted to do when she was older. By the time she was 12 and he was 13, he realized that she was someone he could talk to about anything, could trust with any feeling that he needed to share, even if he was at the mall with his mom a few feet ahead of him and Shiway was at the park, on a swing, keeping an eye on Sadie as she approached random kids to play. How was he feeling that day? The two of them could dissect that stuff together with the same ease and attention and enjoyment they devoted to amusing each other with nonsense in-jokes — those ongoing conversations about whether crabs were actually real or crows were in fact all members of a cult.

His mom got it, how close the two of them were. She and Shiway’s mom, a funky home-schooler, a fearless traveler who hung maps all over the house, got on board with a plan the kids hatched to meet in person. Their moms would bring them each to New York, along with their little sisters, in June. The agenda included watching the new “Minions” movie at a theater and hanging out in an arcade, where they would compete for the privilege of smack-talking the person who lost.

He would finally meet his best friend I.R.L., see the tall girl with the longish brown hair and glasses he’d pictured in his mind’s eye. It was the thing that kept him going, knowing he would meet her soon; he knew it would be just the way it always was, only better.

On April 20, Shiway and Sadie Barry, along with their parents, were shot and killed in their home by a cousin who once lived with them, who then killed himself.

As he got older, his aunt Crystal helped nurture his love of nature. He treasured stories of day trips to Block Island with her, of making gardens at her house, of once taking a boat ride on the Connecticut River where a guide handed them binoculars and pointed out bald eagles. Most kids in New Haven probably couldn’t name a single nature preserve. Elijah could name four, and he knew two of them — Pond Lily and Long Wharf — as if they were close friends.

In September 2019, Crystal took him to an International Coastal Cleanup Day at Long Wharf, a preserve so close to the highway that engine noise intermingled with the hiss of wind snaking through the grass. That morning, he and Crystal joined more than a dozen other volunteers, collecting discarded bottle tops and other detritus half-buried in the sand. Sometimes he mistook the red seaweed on the ground for plastic.

When he wasn’t outdoors, all the typical teenage concerns bounced around in Elijah’s head. As a freshman, he wrote a note to his future self about wanting to get better grades; but he also clung to the dream of any boy who can’t scrape the rim with his fingers: getting taller. If you were in Elijah’s circle, you learned that he wasn’t above trash-talking a grown man during a game of Madden. His generosity meant that if he returned home after football practice to grab a snack, he’d make sure to get something for the teammates who tagged along with him. He was a silly kid who once, on a dare, downed a whole bowl of spicy salsa at Mezcal, his favorite local restaurant. He danced to the music in his head, and while Crystal claims that she would never catch him with a pair of headphones on, she’d sometimes turn a corner and find him bopping to tunes only he could hear. He dug Billy Ocean’s “Caribbean Queen,” a song Elijah’s Cape Verdean grandfather, Poppa Mike, introduced him to. Poppa Mike would take Elijah and his brothers Iyend’e and Trunell on his 27-foot SportCraft, “Poppa Joe Too.” They’d ride the Thames out into the Sound and deepwater fish. Elijah would sit behind the wheel and navigate the bay, turning the boat as if headed to somewhere he remembered.

Maybe that’s another way of saying Elijah was a kid with a vision. Whether it was International Clean Up Day or volunteering for Gather New Haven, a local organization charged with protecting the landscape, you could track Elijah’s growth from childhood to adolescence through his commitment to preserving the natural world. You’d see him at 12, wearing an Avengers T-shirt and holding a small plastic trash bag in his hand, staring out into the water at Long Wharf; then years later, at 15, you’d still see him there, collecting the pieces of lives nearly forgotten: broken golf clubs, plastic bottles, an occasional mattress. Sometimes he’d stumble upon things that astonished him, like the afternoon at Pond Lily, when he found a television in the woods, as if some children had ventured out and turned the trash into an opportunity to imagine another world.

On May 9, Elijah Gomez was shot while walking home from school on the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail.

Kane started riding with Crawford and a group called Big Rippers 616, after the iconic street bike. The group was part of a loose urban biking movement that seeks to divert kids from trouble and into large street “ride outs” and stunt displays that attract attention and sometimes the frustration of motorists.

A few months later, after a night ride with more than a dozen kids, Crawford asked each of them how they were getting home. Kane was evasive, until he finally said, “I stay with my Mom, but she is trying to kick me out.” Crawford asked him where he was planning to sleep that night. “I’m just going to ride around,” Kane said. It was dark, cold and late. Crawford took him home with him.

Relations between Kane and his mother were tense. He was bearing a haunting childhood memory of a 10-month-old half brother who suffocated while the infant was with his father, who was fleeing from the police. Kane’s own father was in prison for aggravated assault. His grandmother, Tonya Ferguson, had custody of Kane for five or six years when he was growing up — “Isn’t that what grandmothers are supposed to do?” she says — but eventually her house, crowded with her own children and other grandchildren, had no room for Kane.

Kane’s cousin Josiphi Coronado says that Kane may have looked to the world like a “skinny, longhair, stoner dude,” but Josiphi knew him in a more rounded way: an inveterate tinkerer who built bikes from spare parts; a guy with sly, dark humor and a strong, infectious laugh; someone with a taste for weed, for Nutty Buddy bars from his grandmother’s snack drawer and for the rapper Young Dolph; someone with an affection for young kids and small animals. “We had a three-legged turtle named Gucci,” Josiphi says.

He recalls that Kane felt people had turned their backs on him: “No one accepted him, and no one would let him into their home.” Then he met Crawford and his girlfriend, Bea Simon, who invited Kane to live with them and Simon’s 4-year-old son, KJ. When Kane arrived in November 2021, he brought his belongings with him in two plastic garbage bags.

“I never judged him,” Crawford says. But he noticed the holes in the lone pair of shoes and the clothes that Kane wore day after day. Crawford, too, grew up with little money in a small house crowded with relatives, and he says that he, like Kane, found his share of trouble. Crawford insisted that if Kane wasn’t going to go to school, he had to work. Simon waited on tables at a restaurant called New Beginnings and helped him land a job there as a dishwasher. That’s when the couple fully understood how unmoored Kane was. “He didn’t have a Social Security card,” Crawford says. “He didn’t have a birth certificate. He didn’t have a mailing address. He was a ghost.”

Soon the blank spaces in Kane’s life began to fill in. He was receiving a regular paycheck for the first time. The Big Rippers 616 looked out for him, became his family. “The first time I said, ‘I love you, bro, be safe,’ he looked at me, like, what? It was like I was speaking a different language,” Crawford says. “It was alien to him.” Kane was taking steps to become an ironworker, like Crawford. “He went through the struggle but made it out of the struggle,” Josiphi says.

And he kept riding, perfecting his stunts. In May, he wrote on Facebook a personal ode to the wheelie: “If your head ain’t up pick that wheel up get sum sun in your face make ya smile a lil.”

In October, weeks before his birthday, Crawford and Simon surprised Kane with a Blocks Flyer, a top choice of urban riders and a fitting set of wheels for a wheelie legend.

It’s a legend that continues to grow among the bikers hanging around the Freewheeler Bike Shop on Grand Rapids’ West Side. “He could wheelie in the dark!” says Travis Gross, a friend since childhood. Randy Crawford, Matt’s father, rode with him on an eight-mile bike path around Mackinac Island and says, “Kane wheelied halfway around!” And Ernesto Alonso Jr., a young biker, says that Kane shared his secret for how he maintained his balance for so long, no matter what. “Kane would say: ‘Quit looking at your tire. Look where you’re going.’”

On Nov. 1, Kane was shot and killed while riding his bike alone on Indian Mounds Drive, a wooded road along the Grand River in Wyoming, Mich., just outside Grand Rapids. The killing remains unsolved.