When Madison Hahamy’s editor assigned her to write a profile of a 16-year-old shooting victim named David A. Thomas, she was stumped for almost a year. Her subject presented many obstacles to investigation: He had a common name, lived in a populous area, and the police investigation into his murder was stalled. When the Chicago Sun Times reported Thomas’s death in May 2018, it noted only that he had been walking down the street in the city’s Lawndale neighborhood on a Sunday afternoon when someone walked up and shot him in the face. The item was accompanied by a photo of the empty street.

When Hahamy got the police report on Thomas’s killing through a Freedom of Information Act request several months later, Thomas’s name was listed as “David Harrison.” A high school she found listed as his had no record of Thomas as a student. Hahamy searched for other local schools with similar acronyms, and was finally able to match a rendering of a hallway on one school’s website with the background of a post about a “David A. Thomas” on gunmemorial.org, a site commemorating victims of gun violence. She cold-messaged students on Facebook until she found Thomas’s friends, and was able to interview one of them by phone.

Gradually, David A. Thomas came to life. He loved basketball. He and his best friend had started their own clothing line. Because Hahamy had been searching for Thomas for so long, every new detail felt revelatory. “Sweatpants was their main thing,” she told me as she described Thomas’s fledgling company. “He was a really creative person.”

The digging Hahamy did—the process of turning a cipher into a human being—will be familiar to any investigative journalist tasked with covering the impact of America’s gun violence epidemic. The difference is that Hahamy was only 17 years old herself when she started her profile of Thomas in the fall of 2018, while working on her college applications.

Hahamy’s article was part of an unprecedented nationwide student journalism project called Since Parkland. The initiative was launched nearly two years ago by the nonprofit gun violence news outlet The Trace in collaboration with The Miami Herald and the McClatchy newspaper group; under their auspices, teenagers have researched and written pieces on the lives of each of the 1,200 children shot to death in the United States in the year since the Parkland mass shooting in Florida in February 2018. In addition to Thomas, Hahamy wrote about a pair of curly-haired 10-year-old twins named Addison and Mason Sanders, who had been nicknamed “The Twinkies”; Lohki Bloom, a two-year-old who relished truck rides; and Kianna Rowe, an 18-year-old shooting guard with plans to play basketball in college. In total, 214 student journalists participated in the project.