1 of 9 Patrick Holmes, 19, describes the challenges of living in Scotlandville, a low-income neighborhood in northwest Baton Rouge, La. “It ain’t nobody down here that won’t shoot you,” he said. “The more friends you have, the more trouble you have.” Jon LaFlamme/News21

Louisiana’s murder rate has been the highest in the country, with 10.8 murders for every 100,000 people. Some have attributed Louisiana’s high murder rate to the prevalence of weapons in the state and its strong gun culture.

Holmes said he got his first gun when he was 11. He knew where a man kept it, so he stole it and sold it for $150 the same day. Stealing is just one way to get a gun in Baton Rouge — with $50, it’s easy to buy one on the street, Holmes says.

Perry Brooks, 42, is a substitute teacher in the city. He lives in Scotlandville, just across the train tracks from Southern University, and is a mentor to many former students, including Holmes. The kids in Scotlandville respect him — he’s not afraid of them. Brooks survived a gunshot wound to the head when he was 20. He says it’s not surprising to see 11-year-olds with guns. He’s seen fourth-graders bring them to class. He was disappointed when one of his 10th-grade students, who had a 3.79 GPA, was kicked out of school for selling a gun on campus.

“You’ve got to have guns to ward off people who intend to do harm with them,” Brooks said. “If I have a shotgun, someone is less likely to rob me.”

For Holmes and many of his friends, carrying a weapon is about the economics of survival. He says that most of the kids he knows are raising themselves. They might not know their parents or have a place to live. In Scotlandville, 56 percent of children under the age of 18 live below the poverty line according to U.S. Census data.

“It’s so many situations people grow up in … seeing his mother get beat or on dope and he got to get it for his family,” Holmes said. “He’s 5 years old, breaking into everybody’s cars trying to get something to eat for his little sister or something. You think he get old enough and he get a gun, you think he ain’t going to rob somebody? You think he won’t kill you to go bring that back to his people?”

“This environment don’t do nothing but just swallow you up.”

Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore says he sees kids on the witness stand, no older than 15, who have a three-page rap sheet. He often asks where they see themselves at age 18.

“There’s generally two answers,” Moore said. “The answer is either at Angola (prison) doing a life sentence for killing someone … or being dead.”

Last year, Baton Rouge received a $1.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to reduce youth violence. The grant helped the city fund the Baton Rouge Area Violence Elimination program (BRAVE), which is modeled after “Operation Ceasefire,” a crime-reduction strategy that’s effectively reduced gun crime in many American cities since it was first implemented by the Boston Gun Project in 1996.

The program’s primary goal is to get youth to put their guns down and stop shooting each other, Moore said.

The grant is directed at one ZIP code: 70805. Just north of downtown Baton Rouge, bordered on the west by the mammoth ExxonMobil refinery, the 70805 area is predominantly black, and very poor. Moore said it accounts for 13 percent of the city’s population, but 40 percent of all police calls in Baton Rouge come from there.

Moore attributes a drop in Baton Rouge murders last year — from 72 in 2012 to 61 in 2013 — to BRAVE. However, while crime fell in BRAVE’s target area, it rose in some neighboring areas.

On March, 27, Lashona Mosby’s three sons were shot in broad daylight in an area of Baton Rouge referred to as “the Jungle” — just east of 70805. Two survived: her youngest son, age 21, was shot once and the oldest, 25, was shot twice. But her 23-year-old middle son was shot three times in the head and twice in the upper torso. He did not survive.

“We are rooted and grounded in God,” Mosby said. “But I do have my moments when I’m at home, and I might scream. Like today I woke up, I went outside. About 6 o’clock in the morning I began to cry out, to shed tears, because as days go by, months go by I’m missing my son even more so.”

Recently, Mosby has been attending anti-violence events. She hopes to form a support group for mothers who have lost children to violent crime .

“We’re not speaking up enough,” Mosby said. “We’re not being those people that we used to be, whether we’re white, black, no matter what we are, just stand together, pull together.”

Isiaha Canada, 16, talks about what it’s like growing up in Flint, Mich. He was on his porch when he saw his best friend get shot in front of him. Jackie DelPilar/News21.

Flint

Around the corner from Hurley Medical Center, a teaching hospital that treats dozens of shooting victims in Flint, five men rest on the rotting wooden steps of a chipped and crooked house. They say they’re exhausted from a day of work on the streets.

“I don’t like doing that shit man. I don’t like feeding my kids with drug money,” one man says.

Flint residents say the robberies and violence stem from drugs, a lack of education, and a lack of jobs. When General Motors and other factories left, the city’s fall from grace came shortly after. For years, it topped lists as the most-violent city in the nation.

One of the men, who calls himself “Big Hurt,” has lived in the city his whole life and laments how much it has changed and how violent it has become. “I just got shot, around June 5 of last year, like right here,” he says, while pointing at the corner right in front of the home. “Over a whole bunch of bullshit. But I ain’t crying over it…it is what it is.”

In 2012, there were 64 murders in the city, which had 101,632 residents that year, 13 times higher than the national murder rate. Nearly 90 percent of those homicides were firearm-related.

The numbers don’t surprise these men, whose conversations are strewn with murder stories. A man who called himself “Boobie Dawg” said his nephew went to prison because of a $32 gun.

“Him and another friend, they went half on it. Him and another friend were running around going ‘I got you, I got you’ with the gun …. My nephew was f—ing around, he pulled it and he killed somebody. He’s in prison right now. He didn’t mean to shoot him, but he shot him.”

It’s Porsha Fluker’s 21st birthday. She’s trying to enjoy a rare day off work, to celebrate with family and friends. But she can’t help thinking about her older brother, now dead. It’s her first birthday without him and the trial of his accused killer is set to start in the weeks to come.

“There is not a day when I’m not thinking about him. I think what hurts more is that I’ll never see him again,” Fluker said, fighting to hold back tears until she no longer can.

He brother, Terience Demonte Johnson, was 26 when he was shot and killed on Oct. 12, 2013. Shortly after his death, Fluker got a tattoo in his memory. It’s a lifeline, like one from a cardiac monitor, intended to represent the peaks and valleys during his short life.

The peaks include the times Johnson cheered on Fluker at her basketball games, and the birth of his two daughters, now 6 and 8 years old.

The low points are run-ins with the law. Johnson did some time in jail for selling drugs, but his grandmother, Star Kelly, said, “He was trying to turn his life around and we thought things were going good.”

A suspect is in custody, but Johnson’s family still doesn’t know why he was killed, or exactly how it happened. No witnesses have come forward. Kelly says it’s difficult to find people willing to speak to police or in court in Flint, as they fear retaliation.

“We’ve seen people try to tell what they’ve seen and the next day they’re dead,” she said.

Although she may never know why her brother had to die, Fluker hopes the trial will bring her peace, and her brother justice.

“I hope that he do life in prison and whoever else was involved I hope they go down too,” she said of her brother’s killer.

If there’s redemption to be found, it comes at the Foss Avenue Baptist church where the Brothers Battling Bloodshed are trying keep young men from killing and dying.

“Thank you Lord for everything you’ve done for us,” they pray at their meeting. “Thank you for motivating us to move past any situation or any wrong, Father, that may try to hold us back.”

In a city where little is sacred, Foss Avenue Baptist’s basketball court and community garden are sanctuaries. All of the youth in Brothers Battling Bloodshed live in close proximity to the church, making it easy for them to meet, garden, talk politics and go to theater performances together.

The program director, Roderick Green, hopes he can keep kids from picking up guns by keeping their minds on other things.

Isiaha Canada’s best friend encouraged him to join the outreach group. The 16-year-old had some close calls — including having a gun pointed to his head — and his friend thought that the group might be able to protect him.

“My friend got shot in front of me on my porch,” Canada said. “You see that happen you be like, ‘Oh, shit, it’s a body in front of me, it’s bleeding.’ You don’t know what to do … I was scared.”

Canada says it’s common to see kids as young as 14 carrying guns. He used to be one of them, and reluctantly admits he once shot someone he didn’t like.

“I did what I did,” he said. “I can’t go back in time and stop what I did, but I was young and dumb. Just seeing older people do it, I do it.”

According to Canada, guns in Flint are “dirt cheap” and he says they mostly come from predominantly white suburbs like nearby Grand Blanc, Michigan.

Throughout his first term in office, U.S. Congressman Dan Kildee has fought to secure federal resources for cities like Flint to combat violent crime. In May, Kildee introduced an amendment that would add $15 million to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives budget to fund partnerships of local and federal organizations to “go after these basically bad guys with guns” as he puts it.

The bill failed, and Kildee says many in the government don’t believe there’s “a legitimate federal role” in supporting cash-strapped cities like Flint. But Kildee, a Democrat who was born and raised in Flint, believes the city can only improve if given federal assistance and that it’s the government’s “most significant” responsibility to provide for the basic safety of its citizens.

“The thing to keep in mind is that the people who live in Flint, they’re not any different than the people who live anywhere else,” Kildee said. “They have the same aspirations that anyone else does. They just need to be given the same opportunities. And we, as a society, have a responsibility to them.”