One night in April last year, Dolores Munoz was jolted awake by a barrage of bullets ricocheting off her home. The rounds crashed through her living room window and tore through the bedroom wall of her 15-year-old daughter, who was spending the night at her cousin’s house.
Instinctively, Munoz ran to check on her five other children who were in the home with her. Thankfully, none of them were harmed. “Thank God my daughter wasn’t here,” Munoz, 35, said through a translator days later, as her children sat quietly in the living room. Bullet holes in the wall had recently been patched and the shattered front window had been covered up with plywood. “If she was home, she could have been killed.”
Nearly four dozen shots had been reported fired that night in what authorities called a shootout between rival gangs. It all happened right outside the building where Munoz lives, the Jordan Downs public housing development in Watts, a neighborhood in south Los Angeles.
Today, south Los Angeles has the highest level of gun violence in Los Angeles county. While violent crime, including homicides, decreased last year, Los Angeles police department data shows that south Los Angeles still had 455 shooting victims in 2023, and more than 1,000 shots fired – an average of almost three a day.
Even for those who aren’t shot, witnessing gun violence, as Munoz’s family did, can be profoundly damaging to kids. Experts say that the resulting trauma can lead to behavioral issues, impede academic achievement and even interfere with the development of children’s brains. This, in turn, can also lead to continued cycles of gun violence. And it’s an issue the Watts community, together with law enforcement, has been working to address.
To help families exposed to chronic gun violence, the city attorney’s office built a partnership between the Los Angeles police department (LAPD) community policing bureau, known as the community safety partnership; local non-profits; and the Children’s Institute, a Los Angeles organization that offers services to families grappling with the effects of gun violence. The collective, known as the Reach team, provides timely interventions, crisis response and mental health services to families like Munoz’s that have encountered gun violence.
The goal is to prevent the long-term health, emotional, behavioral and learning struggles that often accompany gun violence.
In the first four years of the program, the LAPD has referred 1,656 children for services with the Reach team, and 845 have received crisis counseling or long-term therapy. Identifying and providing support early on after being affected by gun violence is imperative, says Lara Drino, deputy city attorney and Reach team program director. “Any symptoms caused by trauma during the critical stages of development may become embedded in the child’s core personality structure,” she said.
Quincy Reese, 36, says his family has been helped by the program. When he was 16, he was shot. Then last year, his son, Quincy Reese Jr – a gifted athlete who had dozens of colleges trying to recruit him – was shot and killed while leaving a prom party. He was also 16. The two shootings occurred down the street from one another in south Los Angeles.
After his own shooting, Reese said he became “more violent”. “I sometimes would attack first – if I felt threatened – versus taking a breath to de-escalate a situation,” he said. “I didn’t have any counseling at all. I didn’t know what that was.” He said he doesn’t want this to happen to his four surviving children. So in the aftermath of his son’s killing, when he was approached by an LAPD officer who told him about the Reach team, Reese agreed to get his kids trauma counseling.
Now he says his youngest son, six-year-old Dallas, can talk about how he’s feeling. “I didn’t have that, so I kept a lot of things bottled up inside, because there was no one there to help me get through being shot,” Reese said. And while the family is still reeling from the pain of losing Quincy Jr, Reese says he’s comforted knowing that his other kids are on the path to healing.
This healing can prevent even more gun violence, says Lawanda Hawkins, co-founder Justice for Murdered Children, a Los Angeles-based non-profit that works regularly with the Reach team. Nearly three decades ago, her only child, Reginald, was shot and killed at age 19. But Hawkins believes in “healing as prevention”, she said: “We don’t need our traumatized children growing up to hurt people because society ignored their pain.”
Jacob Rice, senior lead officer with the LAPD’s community safety partnership (CSP), in Jordan Downs, agreed. “When it becomes normal for a person to experience gun violence, they don’t believe help is needed and will deal with it on their own because that’s how it always has been done,” he said. “With no outlet to help with their pain, they will sometimes turn to substance abuse or gang activity to help cope with what they have been through.”
Emada Tingirides, a commanding officer of the LAPD’s operation south bureau who was appointed in 2011 to create the CSP, says the program has been important for law enforcement, too, helping officers to recognize the long-term effects of trauma on a community.
“When police understand and begin to humanize the youth and families, barriers are broken, trust is built and we begin to make long-lasting change in the communities that need it most,” she said.
Tingirides grew up in Watts herself in the 1970s. “In the early ’80s, gangs began to infiltrate south Los Angeles, the crack cocaine epidemic began to infiltrate our community, and gun violence destroyed our neighborhoods, creating trauma and fear in our communities,” she said.
Lorraine Aguilera’s son Matthew was 20 when he was wounded by a bullet that was fired through their front door mail slot in retaliation for an earlier dispute in the community of Nickerson Gardens in Watts. The gunfire narrowly missed Aguilera’s four-year-old daughter. Afterward, while the shooter was still on the loose, Aguilera felt afraid to stay in her home.
“I honestly felt like I was on the run,” she said. The program reached out to donors who covered the expenses for temporary emergency housing – support Aguilera said made her feel safe.
On a blistering afternoon last August, months after bullets flew through Dolores Munoz’s home, the community of her 700-unit public housing development joined hands at a peace rally. The event, which was also attended by local community leaders, members of the Reach team and the LAPD, was intended as a counterweight to the spate of gun battles that had erupted between rival gangs. Together they walked to send a united message that they wouldn’t tolerate violence.
Munoz and her children worked with the Reach team after the shooting, which has helped some. Eight months later, her 13-year-old daughter, Emma, said the counseling gave her the “tools to cope with my fear” and that she now feels like “a different person”. Still, Emma and her sister, Guadalupe, 12, said they have trouble focusing on school. Both watch television while sitting on the floor of their apartment, fearing they might get shot if they sit on the couch, inches from where bullets pierced the living room wall.
Munoz herself has also gone to counseling, but says she’s still wary of going outdoors. She also has recurring nightmares that the shooters will return and harm her children.
She knows it will take time to feel normal again.
