The story was published in partnership with The Trace , a nonprofit newsroom covering guns in America.
On a rainy day in October 2022, K.G. Wilson rolled down Colfax Avenue in his burgundy Cadillac between the makeshift memorials to children who’ve been shot in North Minneapolis. He pointed to the street that was dedicated to a 12-year-old boy who was shot to death in front of his mother by a teenager after a fight. Farther north, he tended to the plastic flowers on a pole at Lowry and Penn, marking the spot where a 2-year-old was shot in the chest and killed in 2016 by shooters aiming for his stepfather. The boy’s younger sister was also shot, but she survived.
On 26th and Colfax, Wilson got out and touched the 11-year-old bullet holes in the gray clapboard house where 3-year-old Terrell Mayes, Jr. was killed by a stray bullet the day after Christmas. He had been climbing the carpeted stairs with his siblings, holding a bowl of spaghetti. Around the corner, as we passed Terrell’s memorial garden, Wilson recalled how, at the time, he’d told the boy’s mom that he’d be there for her when the community moved on, as he knew it would and which it did six months later , when a 5-year-old was shot in the back and killed as he slept on his grandmother’s couch; Wilson carried the blood-stained furniture out of the house.