Investigations

By Lilly St. Angelo

Published Nov. 4, 2022 in the Burlington Free Press

Sarah Reed had a gut feeling something bad was going to happen the night her son was shot. 

The mother and public defender had to force herself to go to bed on Aug. 11 after calling her 18-year-old and asking him to come home without success. She was asleep when a police officer knocked on the door of her St. Albans home in the middle of the night, and she answered, unaware of the missed calls on her phone. 

"Your son has been shot," she remembers hearing the officer say. 

She nearly collapsed. 

The officer assured her that her 18-year old was OK as she gripped the doorframe for support.  He drove her to the University of Vermont Medical Center where she found her son in the surgical unit, hooked up to countless wires and tubes. Relief and frustration flooded her. 

Reed's son was shot in what she believes was an accident involving friends. The Free Press is choosing not to name Reed's son due to safety concerns following the shooting. According to the police investigation, he and other teens were in his car in the parking lot of the Market 32 shopping center when a 19-year-old, who was allegedly playing with a loaded gun in the back seat, discharged a bullet. The bullet went through the driver's seat and into Reed's son, ricocheted off his rib cage and broke and shattered a few of his ribs before lodging in his arm. 

Several teens, including the 19-year-old accused of shooting Reed's son, are now in prison after a year of increased gun violence in Burlington. Half of the 14 suspects arrested for this year's 25 gunfire incidents were 25 years old and under, according to police records. 

"They're young, they're babies," Reed said. "We have to start asking ourselves as a community, what's been there for them to help them make other choices?" 

Leaders across Burlington who work closely with teens are now reckoning with community failure while scrambling to support youth, especially youth of color. While some disagree on how involved police should be in gun violence prevention, leaders agree that community collaboration and structural shifts are desperately needed to provide teens with the spaces, trusted adults and a feeling of belonging to thrive. 

Role of police 

In the past, school resource officers were the Burlington Police Department's answer to youth safety issues. The idea: officers would build rapport with students in schools to encourage good decision-making and trust in law enforcement, handle cases when they arose and keep students safe. 

School resource officers were taken out of schools starting in 2021 because students of color reported feeling unsafe with officers present and because of a strong community push at a City Council meeting to protest school resource officers in schools, according to a Burlington School District Safety Task Force report from 2021. The school district's position on the topic has not changed, said Russ Elek, communications and public relations specialist for the Burlington School District. 

Acting Chief Jon Murad of the Burlington Police Department believed the student resource officers were effective, however, and doesn't feel like the police department and school district are as connected as they used to be. 

"We connect with the schools," Murad said. "It's just not the same level of connection, and particularly not at the ground level of having school resource officers inside the school, five days a week." 

Navigating conflict, racism and lost trust 

Kelly Ahrens has worked at the Burlington Community Justice Center for seven years. As the youth restorative programs manager, she works with youth referred to them from courts, police and the community by using restorative justice practices, an alternative approach to the criminal justice system. Ahrens' team focuses on the youth offender's responsibility to the victim and community to repair the harm they have caused. 

Ahrens said in her seven years at the Community Justice Center, there would be a case here and there involving fake guns getting mistaken for real guns, but never real gun violence until the past two years. Ahrens doesn't feel like her staff is equipped. The standard approach to addressing gun violence with youth right now at the Community Justice Center is to have a police officer sit down with the youth and talk about gun safety, which Ahrens sees as ineffective because youth don't want to talk to a police officer they don't know. 

What Ahrens and her staff can do is address the reasons and conflicts that led to the youth pulling the trigger in the first place. LeVar Barrino, dean of students at Burlington High School, is doing the same thing with teens at his school using restorative practices as well. 

Barrino said some of the recent conflicts in and out of school have stemmed from teens who have formed groups based on common cultural or racial backgrounds fighting with each other. He said the school is now trying to intervene directly to try to create peace. 

"We're getting those groups together," Barrino said. "We're getting the leaders of each group and having them meet and seeking to understand and figure out, how can we stop this? How can we shut this down?" 

Barrino said there's no one group on whom to place the blame: students and community members of many backgrounds are contributing to the harm, whether it's New Americans and Black students fighting over whose family deserves to be better off financially, or adults in the community calling students racial slurs. All of his students of color also experience systemic racism, adding another layer of harm to the picture. 

Burlington schools are significantly more diverse than the city as a whole. According to a Burlington School District 2021 demographic report, 61.8% of students are white, compared to 84.8% of the Burlington population.

The Vermont New American Advisory Council recently received $20,000 from the City of Burlington to put together a youth safety initiative to address gun violence in six of Burlington's New American communities. The money will go towards therapists of color, some of whom are New American themselves and others who have experience working with New American communities, working with families and victims of gun violence to process the trauma and heal, as well as working with groups who have conflict with one another. The Burlington Police and the Burlington School District will participate in explaining how certain aspects of the criminal justice system and school system work to build understanding among parents. 

"The state of Vermont is doing so well in bringing people here to settle. And the AALV is doing well to help them access food stamps, governmental services," said Ali Dieng, secretary of the Vermont New American Advisory Council. "But there are so many underlying issues that these New Americans are dealing with on a daily basis without proper support or attention." 

At the end of the initiative, the Vermont New American Advisory Council will submit a report to the city highlighting what gaps of support New American communities face. 

Barrino's biggest goal within the school to prevent violence is forming relationships with students and building trust. He said before he was hired three years ago, there was a feeling among older students of color that staff didn't care about them, which led to a loss of trust in adults at school. He thinks this stemmed from staff fearing accusations of racism and therefore not engaging with students of color. Through anti-racism trainings and other work, he's trying to heal this relationship while also keeping track of students' academic and behavioral records to try to catch kids who may be falling through the cracks. 

"The majority of these kids, when they were in elementary, they had that spark, like adults care about them, especially white adults, you know, and then at some point they lost that spark and they're like, 'Adults don't care about me no more, the people that advocate don't care,'" Barrino said. "That's a lot of triage my team is doing right now." 

'A space to feel celebrated' 

When Sarah Reed was a teen, she would go to 242 Main to get out her angst at punk rock concerts. The music venue, a project started by the mayor's youth office in the mid '80s, was a city-funded, adult-supervised youth gathering place. Reed remembers her parents not worrying about her when she'd go to 242 Main because they knew it was a safe place. She wishes there was a similar place for teens now, especially for teens of color like her son. 

"I think about the places where kids are congregating now, it's the top of parking garages or like random parking lots or the bus station," Reed said. "They don't have a space to be in, and they don't have a space to feel celebrated or to find purpose in." 

King McMillan, a boxer, business owner and nonprofit director, is trying to create a space like this for youth in Winooski. His organization, Fight for Kids, is focused on giving kids a sense of purpose, building self-confidence and encouraging academic success and healthy decision-making. 

Right now, he runs a gym where he trains youth and adults in martial arts and boxing. His current program for kids also includes meditation and centering classes at the gym. Some kids pay for the training and some don't. He was running the youth programs out of his own pocket until he made Fight for Kids an official nonprofit this year. McMillan's big dream is to raise enough money to build a youth center where kids and teens can go to work out, do homework and center themselves in a world where they are constantly stimulated by social media and sometimes difficult home situations. 

"It will be the time to detach and focus on the present and the moment and yourself and your body," McMillan said. 

Organizations including the Boys and Girls Club of Burlington and the King Street Youth Center fill this need for younger kids in the Burlington area. Teens, however, often have more agency over where they spend their time and most don't choose to spend it in places geared toward younger children. 

Before Barrino worked in the school system, he worked for the Boys and Girls Club of Burlington for 18 years. He observed that once teens hit 18, they began feeling like the club wasn't for them anymore and formed their own groups after school. This led to disconnection from supportive adults and sometimes bad decisions. 

Recently, Barrino has been meeting with the parents of the teens getting into conflicts, many of them New Americans still learning English and aspects of American culture, but as concerned as any parents about their children. He said the number one thing the parents said they needed was more support for their teens after school hours. 

"The stretch between that 3:15 and that 6:15 mark really scares me, that is three hours where families don't know where their kids are," Barrino said. "If they're not going to Sarah Holbrook, King Street, Boys and Girls Club or the YMCA, then what are they doing?" 

Healing wounds and moving forward 

Reed's son's gunshot wounds have healed, but the scars still remain. She catches herself staring at them sometimes when he walks around the house without a shirt on, her mind going to what could have happened. 

The mother and son are also both are suffering from the mental effects of the traumatic event. Recently, the 18-year-old left the house to see a friend and a police car raced by shortly after, sirens blaring. Reed immediately called her son in a panic. At the same moment, the 18-year-old thought he heard gunshots and called his mom, also in a panic. Reed was out walking their dog on another day when a car backfired, the sound triggering another worried phone call. 

"I think it's going to be a long time before I stop having that reaction," she said. 

Kelly Ahrens from the Community Justice Center sees collaboration as the solution to the gun violence plaguing the city. She hopes Burlington organizations and institutions who serve youth, as well as youth leaders, can form an official collaboration that meets to discuss issues, share perspectives and form solutions. She also believes collective community care is needed to heal from and prevent more gun violence. She sees America's individualistic culture as a barrier to this. 

"We're not necessarily seeing everyone's kids as our kids," Ahrens said. "Like 'it's your kids, it's your family problem.'" 

Barrino hopes Burlingtonians will see youth gun violence as a community issue, not an issue relegated to one ethnic group or race. As a mentor of youth, he feels the weight of responsibility when tragedy strikes. He knew two young adults who were killed by guns this summer from the his days at the Boys and Girls Club: Hussein Mubarak, a victim of murder and Mikal Dixon, the perpetrator of a murder-suicide. 

"I'm sitting with with that type of guilt being like, what could I have done as an adult, as a mentor more to better support these young adults who are no longer here that got caught up in this violence," he said. 

Barrino tries to catch students who are making poor decisions before they get arrested by talking through the possible consequences of their actions, but some need more mental health support than he can provide. He said when kids become dangerous to themselves and the community, they move beyond his reach and into law enforcement's hands. 

"The worst fear is young adults who don't care, who don't know the law or respect it, to just react," Barrino said. "That is a dangerous person to have on the streets. And without the mental support, without the mentors, the coaching, the connection and relationship piece, I don't know how we're gonna stop it." 

As an attorney and a mother, Reed is angry about what happened, and at the same her heart breaks for the teenager who allegedly shot her son. The 19-year-old is facing two charges of attempted murder in a separate case. 

Reed doesn't believe people are born bad. 

"I guess what I always see is, what's going on in the background? What's the backstory?" Reed said. "Nothing happens in a vacuum."