In 2024, a Baton Rouge teenager named Markel Lee was filmed for a violence-prevention program. Louisiana defunded the program. Two years later, a 17-year-old named Martha Odom is dead. The state would like us to file those two stories in separate folders. We will not.
Watch him at sixteen.
A boy from Baton Rouge sits in front of a news camera in 2024. He is enrolled in the Baton Rouge Community Street Team — a violence-prevention program operating in zip codes 70802 and 70805, where prevention has to fight harder than the violence to keep its footing. The reporter asks him about his music. He tells her music became his therapy after his mother was shot, his aunt was incarcerated, and — in his own teenage translation — “a lot of people died.”…