In August, at the start of the school year, Yale’s incoming freshmen were welcomed with daily parties, sunny counsel from deans and advisers, colorful flyers describing clubs and activities, and a more ominous handout: a leaflet decorated with an image of the Grim Reaper. “The incidence of crime and violence in New Haven is shockingly high, and it is getting worse,” the sheet read. A New Haven “survival guide” followed, warning students to “stay off the streets” after dusk, never “walk alone,” and “remain on campus.” The flyer had been designed by the union representing those charged with insuring the students’ safety—the Yale police.
New Haven is a compact city of a hundred and thirty-eight thousand people. But its tensions recall those in Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, or any other community where a wealthy college is situated near neighborhoods beset by poverty and crime. The flyers swiftly prompted debates about whether students were actually endangered, or if the union was exaggerating to gain favorable new terms in its next contract. (The flyer closely resembled a pamphlet titled “Welcome to Fear City” that New York police distributed, in 1975, during budget negotiations.) National media canvassed Yale students, faculty members, and officials for their opinions. Many were at pains to insist that they weren’t in serious peril. “I don’t know where this is coming from,” a 2021 graduate told me. “If you’re from New York, New Haven feels like the suburbs.”
What the coverage lacked, generally, was voices from the communities surrounding Yale, where many young people live in daily dread of being shot. In New Haven, where I grew up, post-industrial struggle exists mere blocks away from a world of wealth and opportunity. When I heard about the flyer, I thought about young men I knew who could tally the multitudes of friends and family members they’d lost, over the years, to “the violence.” At first, the numbers had seemed surreal; I couldn’t fathom them. That changed when some of the young men I knew began to die themselves, shot down on clear afternoons.
In particular, the flyer made me think about Laquvia Jones, a forty-one-year-old Black mother of three. When I first met her, in 2015, Jones was spending nearly fifty-five hours a week working two jobs, in nursing and mental-health counselling. She had grown up in New Haven, and her husband had recently left her to raise their two teen-aged boys, Da’shown and Dontae Myers, and a nine-year-old daughter by herself. Jones had a calm, open face that only rarely betrayed her anxiety about what the kids might be up to while she was working. As it turned out, her worry was justified: she would soon lose both of her sons to gunfire. It was a tragedy so drastic and unnatural that, when it happened, few knew what to say or to do. But that, too, was part of the problem.
Jones’s grandparents came to New Haven from Jim Crow South Carolina. Like the many European immigrants before them, they found jobs that they imagined would pay for homes, cars, and tuitions. Their neighborhood, Newhallville, was especially promising: since the eighteen-seventies, it had been home to the Winchester gun factory, a source of upward mobility for tens of thousands of workers. Life was peaceful. In the fifties, a thwarted burglary made headlines in the newspaper.
Then, in the early eighties, just as I was finishing high school, something happened that still seems inconceivable in America: a firearms company failed. The Winchester plant—the barrel shop, the shot tower, the benches where stocks were sanded and polished—gradually emptied. By the time that Jones was a child, a neighborhood once defined by salaried labor had slipped into generational poverty. This downturn was further emphasized by a disquieting juxtaposition. Struggling Black Newhallville was just a short walk uphill and across the street from Yale, which would soon become the second-wealthiest university in the world, with an endowment of more than forty-one billion dollars.
The irony of New Haven is that poor young men began regularly shooting one another only once the gun factory was failing. When Jones was growing up, murder was far too familiar an event. One man from the neighborhood, close in age to Jones, said that a hundred of his acquaintances had been shot to death. “I knew more than twenty people who were killed,” Jones said. “My brother was shot and injured. This is what we grew up around. We try to prevent it. So far, none of the preventive measures work.”
Connecticut is among the country’s most prosperous states, with a low crime rate. Isolated sections of its cities are poor and dangerous, but murder is complicated. Even in the most violent American cities, shootings are statistically uncommon. They tend to group within a small coterie of undereducated, at-risk men, all known to one another. People in New Haven’s poor neighborhoods were not getting killed every day, but the losses were frequent enough, and so intensely upsetting, that a constant level of fear blended with recursive grief. After the blood washed away, corners, porches, driveways, and walkways remained stained, part of a dire, spectral topography. Describing their state of mind, Jones, her family members, and others I knew all used the same word: “numb.”
For the first fifteen years of his life, Jones’s younger son, Da’shown, known as DaDa, was the boy many other boys wanted to be. He was joyful and impishly handsome, a quarterback and player of the guitar, a reader who earned A’s and B’s, and someone who, according to his mother, “knew the Lord.” When Jones went shopping, she didn’t have to ask Da’shown to carry the heavier sacks of groceries into the house. If Jones worked late, Da’shown cooked for his younger sister and let her style his hair. He prayed with the elderly at retirement homes, and he stuck up for his friends. “I could sit here and only tell you good things about my son,” Jones said. “It’s not the truth. At sixteen, he took a left turn. DaDa felt like the streets were giving him more.”
Between 2015 and 2020, Jones moved four times. By 2020, she lived in a neat town house on the northern edge of town, in an area colloquially known as Exit 8, where territorial tension seethed between kids from communities like Newhallville, Dwight-Kensington, and the Farnam Courts Apartments. Most young people tried to dodge such trouble. A few, like Da’shown, found thrilling the possibility of becoming street-famous by walking toward what everyone else was avoiding. “He had a name in the streets—Da-Honcho,” Jones said. “Somebody’s bothering you, they’d call Da-Honcho. His friends depended upon him to fight their battles.”
Jones was no match for the sudden power and agency that Da’shown felt in this world. So, when Da’shown broke his curfew and stayed out all night, she turned him in to the police. She did the same after she caught him with marijuana, after she learned he’d gone joyriding in a stolen car, and after he got into a fight. Once, she saw a baseball bat on the couch, took a second look, realized it was a sawed-off shotgun, and called the police. She implored them to help with her “out-of-control” son. It was Jones’s opinion that Da’shown was failed by his prosecutors and judges, who assured her that he was just a “spoiled” kid acting out in response to the end of his parents’ marriage. Jones believed that the brief juvenile sentences that Da’shown received—usually a few short weeks—gave him “the illusion that nothing happens to you.” Da’shown “loved his friends,” his mother said, and, if he was never known by police to have shot at anybody himself, he ran with kids who didn’t hesitate.
Then he seemed to pivot away from all of that. He took a job at Wendy’s, studied for his driver’s license. On the afternoon of February 23, 2020, Jones was preparing a Sunday family dinner for her three children. It was Da’shown’s request: potatoes loaded with shrimp, chicken, and vegetables. She was waiting for the steaming broccoli to soften when Da’shown’s phone began to buzz; his best friend was calling from a neighboring condominium. The sixth time this happened, Da’shown said, “I’m gonna see why he keeps calling me. I’ll be right back.”
What happened next was soon known to people all over New Haven. Da’shown walked unarmed into a snug living room where he encountered a woman, a girl, and five young men in their teens and twenties. Some kind of altercation ensued, and Da’shown was shot six times. That many bullets fired at close range, in such a crowded space, with nobody else shot, suggested to police that Da’shown had been set up by someone angry or frightened enough to arrange an execution. The house emptied, and a neighbor called 911 as Da’shown bled to death alone.
The next evening, during a candlelight vigil, Jones told a crowd about her “unbearable, indescribable pain.” The likely shooter was soon identified by detectives: a boy around Da’shown’s age, with delicate eyelashes, acne, and dimples. The police heard rumors that he’d previously been shot and injured himself, and been given a gun for protection by a relative. Jones saw him, and many of the other boys who had witnessed the murder, often, but a strong no-snitching ethic prevented any of them from talking to investigators. The boy was eventually arrested for other gun-related crimes.
Jones wanted badly to move away, but, because she had a vivid feeling that leaving the last place Da’shown had been would feel like leaving him, she stayed. She got a gun permit and purchased two handguns, a Glock and a Sig Sauer. She began taking Dontae and her daughter to a shooting range for regular sessions, “so they’d understand this is not a toy, and at some point in your life you might have to use it,” she said. Then, concluding that she was no match for a culture of vendetta, in which young men allied with Da’shown’s killer might well consider her remaining son obligated to avenge his brother’s death, Jones decided to “get out of this town.” She found a new home twenty-five miles away, in Middletown. “I have to leave,” she said. “Otherwise, I’ll lose the only son I have left. So I’m going to a community I don’t know.”
Nearly three years passed. In 2023, Dontae was twenty-three, the father of three children, a tall, serene adult, perpetually lean despite his appetite for his grandmother’s mac and cheese. He’d held jobs at McDonald’s, Target, Amazon, and Walmart, where he met the mother of his daughter when both worked as cashiers. On New Year’s Day—her birthday—it was another bright Sunday afternoon. Dontae had visited a great aunt, then planned to join his daughter and her mother for a celebratory dinner. The great aunt lived not far from the Fair Haven apartment where I’d first met the family, in 2015. Jones said she understood this area to be a “neutral” part of the city. But now, as Dontae emerged from a store, someone in a car raised a handgun and used it.
Dontae had been “lost” after his brother died, his mother said. “He never was a drinker, but he started to drink after Da’shown’s death, and get high smoking weed. That was his coping mechanism.” Jones and the police agree that he was never involved in street violence. “Dontae was totally different,” Jones said. “He was quiet. I’m so confused why he was killed. He stayed away. So confusing to me.”
After her sons’ deaths, Jones spent her free time questioning what she could have done differently as a parent. “I did not play around with my kids,” she said. “They knew right from wrong. They knew about the streets. I explained, pull the trigger, there’s no coming back. So I can’t understand how I lost my kids to gun violence. Every time DaDa did something bad, I would call the police. It’s a painful thing. I wish he talked to me about this. He could have talked to me about this.”
Jones also thought about firearms’ place in society. She wasn’t interested in party politics; she was a grief-stricken mom seeking objective understanding. This perhaps made her unusual in our country, where people’s opinions about guns often veer into the certainty of ideology. (She wasn’t against legally owned guns, for example, which are almost never fired at people by those with the permits to use them.) Jones noticed that wealthy and poor people alike find identity and status in a gun. Among her children’s peers, she said, “It became a trend, like sneakers. It’s ‘I have to have the latest sneakers.’ They make it so cool to have a gun.” In New Haven, that status had a long history. When Winchester was thriving, the company marketed itself to children as young as twelve: “There isn’t a boy in your town who doesn’t want to own a Winchester rifle.”
Jones, for her part, carried a gun “because of fear,” even as she remained incredulous that her life had come to this. One day, while at the shooting range, she met a white woman with an AK-47. “This lady had a nine-year-old daughter,” Jones said. “She’s shooting also. Why’s a nine-year-old girl shooting? I asked her [mother] that. She said, ‘That’s the difference. We teach them about guns. You don’t. So your kids think guns are toys.’ ” This was a sweeping claim, and didn’t quite describe Jones’s parenting, but “there’s truth there,” she told me. “Kids think it’s a video game. They don’t understand the true meaning of a gun until it’s too late.”
After Dontae died, Jones moved closer to New Haven. Leaving hadn’t solved anything. She began to talk to young men who were “pledged” to the streets, hoping to change their minds and convince them not to pick up a gun. “Nobody knows the real reasons for their beefs,” she said.
One day, she was asked by local law enforcement to address a group of young New Haven men who had been deemed at risk for being perpetrators or victims of gun violence. “If I couldn’t save my own kids, maybe I could help somebody else’s,” Jones said. Standing in a sweater, leggings, and boots before a line of blank young faces, Jones described her sorrow. She asked the men to examine the point of shooting other people’s kids, because it was a mystery to her. “Afterwards,” she said, “one of the kids came up to me and explained he didn’t like my son. He didn’t like Da’shown. He told me, ‘I didn’t know him, but he’s from the other side.’ I asked, ‘What did Da’shown do to you?’ ‘Nothing. He was just from the other side.’ Can you imagine? He said, ‘I listened to you. I’m gonna try.’ ”
Even after such conversations, Jones didn’t think guns should be banned. “Everybody’s not doing wrong with guns,” she said. “I do think there should be more rules. Some legal gun owners are giving these kids their guns. How else are they getting them? At the candy store? They should be more accountable.” She supported more imaginative safeguards for owners—perhaps handgun analogues to anti-lock brakes and reckless-driving citations.
When Jones spoke publicly of her sons’ deaths, she described them as a loss for the community, not just her family. Jones recalled the abundant support for grieving parents that followed the horrific murder, in 2012, of twenty children and six school employees at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in nearby Newtown. Jones knew that, statistically, mass shootings are a disturbing aberration; the far greater majority of American gun deaths involve the thousands of young, poor city men who are shot every year, and also suicides. “Mass shootings are bad, don’t get me wrong,” she said. “But there you have a community backup, where everybody worldwide hears about it, comes together. When there are inner-city or suicide shootings, there’s really no awareness. If you take Dontae, after a couple of months it’s no longer talked about. It’s on to the next one. It’s a kind of pandemic, but it’s not looked at that way.”
Travelling around New Haven, Jones could see that Yale lined its well-lit campus with blue “panic” telephones. There were no such stations in her neighborhood, where it’s “second nature,” she said, for kids to know the difference between the reports of gunshots and those of firecrackers. When I asked her about the police union’s flyer, she said, “It’s wrong, and it’s cruel. That’s not the group of people who would be targeted.” Throughout her life, she’d seen university researchers enter the city’s poor neighborhoods to conduct studies that were of no apparent benefit to the residents. “Yale needs to understand there is a public-health crisis,” she said. “New Haven is not big. We’re so little, and there’s so much violence. Why don’t they study violence more?”
Yale was New Haven’s leading institution, and perhaps what Jones most wanted was for those with authority in her city to support her and other mothers in their suffering. One person who has is Karl Jacobson, New Haven’s chief of police. At fifty-three, Jacobson is a tall, muscular white man with a shaved head; from a distance, he resembles a full armoire. A revered homicide investigator, he was known for identifying and deterring sources of gun violence. He also had a reputation for immersing himself in the community, making him an esteemed figure in New Haven. People liked how readily this large man wept. He took over the department in the summer of 2022, soon after a handcuffed Black prisoner, Richard (Randy) Cox, was paralyzed when a police transport van sharply braked and flung Cox into a van wall. Cox’s pleas for help were mocked and dismissed; that was captured on video, and public outrage ensued. It was a watershed moment for police legitimacy in New Haven, and Jacobson responded with unwavering demands for accountability, recommending a series of arrests and firings. Now, under his watch, shootings were down; homicides had increased, but the department was solving them at a suddenly high rate.
Da’shown and Dontae’s likely murderers are well known to Jacobson, but nobody with the information to fortify a prosecution has come forward. (Jones noted that, when a Yale graduate student was allegedly murdered by a romantic rival, in 2021, “everybody came together and helped the police.”) Both suspects are now incarcerated for other gun crimes, and Jacobson says he’s confident that the cases will eventually break. In the meantime, he’s given his cell number to Jones, and encouraged her to call him when sadness overwhelms her. “You don’t always want to call your family and burden them, or want them to know how much you’re suffering,” Jones said. “He’ll listen. Not your average police chief.”
Jacobson considers Jones “the voice of pain,” a reminder of his purpose. He’s used their conversations to deepen his understanding of the community. But, for all his knowledge of no-snitching culture and gun-supply chains, Jacobson is most concerned by the epidemic of despair that seems to afflict those who commit violent gun crimes. The chief has never met a happy shooter, and Jones says the same. ♦
