The car pulled up to the corner, a gun jutting from a window, and two of the three boys on the street took off running. The third one, the fastest, a 15-year-old basketball star named Tyrek Chambers, had no time. A single shot caught him in the back. On the sidewalk, bleeding, he yelled that he had been hit.

“Nobody came back,” Tyrek said last week.

Nearly three months after the night he was shot in Brooklyn, the bullet is still lodged near his tailbone. Surgeons were able to repair his colon and attach a colostomy bag, which collects his waste. He is now 16 and playing no ball, at least until his internal injuries are healed.

Ordinarily such damage vanishes without a trace of public notice: It is both too awful to think about the long tail of violence in a single life, and too ordinary to qualify as news.