One woman's struggles after bloody night in St. Louis reveal the haunting impact of gun violence.

On a muggy night in August 2015, Charisse Young and her extended family gathered for a sendoff for a college-bound relative. To escape the hot and crowded house, the party moved to the front porch.

Young paid little attention to the tan car as it drove slowly down Semple Avenue. Then a blast of bullets tore into the close-knit family. Young was hit. So was her niece, a nephew and a family friend. After the gunman fled, Young found her son, Dominique, 21, collapsed in the back yard, bleeding from bullet wounds in his chest, arm and abdomen. Covered in blood from her own wound, Young rushed to his side and tried desperately to get him to talk to her.

“He was trying. I held his face and was like, ‘Dominique, everybody is going to be all right,’” she said.

“I am lying to him.”

Young still doesn’t know the identity or the motive of the two men who stepped out with guns and sent her life down the path of coping with injury, loss and fear. Her story illustrates the mostly invisible trauma shared by too many St. Louis families after the crime scene tape comes down.

Charisse Young was babysitting her 1-year-old great-niece, Mylee, when the shooting began. Bullets had already struck Young’s niece. Still the gunfire continued.

Young dove to protect the baby. “I fell on top of (Mylee) in the grass. He was still shooting at us. You could see the bullets coming across the grass,” Young said. “I just clenched down my arm and held her and like, ‘God, please, please God, let us get up out of here.'”

When she scooped up Mylee and ran for the house, Young realized her right arm wasn’t working correctly. Inside, Young's mother dialed 911. Young handed Mylee to a nephew who hid in a closet with his child and Mylee. They could still hear gunfire. Young looked around.

“Where’s Dominique?” she thought. Where was her son?

Several hours after the shootings, Young woke up from surgery at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, where doctors pieced her arm back together. They placed a metal rod and eight screws in her right arm.

She had earned a license in cosmetology before the shooting but now cannot cut hair because her fingers cramp up and two fingers are numb. Her niece, Brittany Muldrow, who was shot three times that night, returned to work in February 2016.

Why were they targeted? Police say the crime remains unsolved. The family said they don’t know. Young’s mother, Edna Black, had recently moved in. Were the shooters looking for someone else? Was the wrong red house hit?

“We had no guns,” Young said. “We had God and love and that’s how we lived.”

More than 15 months after Young was shot, doctors approved surgery to graft a nerve to Young’s lower arm to try to relieve the numbness in her fingers.

Healing her heart will be more arduous.

“I don’t have nothing to offer nobody,” she said. “I feel so helpless.”

Since the day men fired shots into Young’s family party, 244 people have died in shootings in St. Louis. But as with Dominique’s shooting, the tally barely scrapes the surface of the tragedies. There’s no clear measure of the toll from injuries, lost wages, stress, fear, grief.

“I know I need help,” Young said. “When I start crying, I can’t stop. I am all alone in this life.”

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