ST. LOUIS — The unmistakable pop of a gunshot ricocheted through the park in the humid air, and Montez Wayne could only hope that the bullet did not have his name on it. He sprang from his seat beneath a sprawling bald cypress, ready to make his move.

Was today the day?

He had seen it play out too many times before: the blast of gunfire, the blood, the body. In Mr. Wayne’s neighborhood and others on the North Side of St. Louis, drugs, poverty and struggle go hand in hand with gun violence. He barely knows his father. His mother died when he was 14, around the time he started selling drugs. His list of dead friends grows each year.

Mr. Wayne lives in a poor, mostly black community, where, as in similar neighborhoods across America, residents are fed up with persistent gun violence. Victims die one by one, or in clusters. In Chicago, 23 people were shot in a matter of hours in September, 13 of them in a park in a gang-related attack. Three died.

Last month in North St. Louis, a 16-year-old was fatally shot in a park as he was waiting for a school bus — a month after his friend was shot to death. And last week, a 17-year-old boy was shot in the face walking to his school bus stop on the city’s North Side. He survived.