Sudden and tragic, gun violence is increasing in Madison and the surrounding area, bringing both heartbreak and a thirst for revenge. For four months, the Wisconsin State Journal has been speaking with perpetrators, victims, emergency responders, doctors and those who study the root causes of violence to understand why it’s happening and what it might take to stop it.

Sunday: Unaddressed trauma during childhood can have devastating impacts on future health and behavior, sometimes leading to violence. Meanwhile, more young people are carrying weapons.

In a bloody 2016, in a span of 23 days, three young African-American men were slain — two on consecutive days — in related, retaliatory shootings in public places in Madison.

The next year, a group of men invaded a North Side apartment in broad daylight, shooting to death a 33-year old father in front of his 3-old son and the boy's terrified mother. 

It was over in an instant.

At a party at a Far East Side motel on April 7, 2017, the young man watched as an uninvited clique forced its way into a bedroom, calling the teen’s name.

It comes in ways blunt and insidious, sometimes before birth, through childhood and on: Poverty, hunger, unemployment. Housing insecurity and eviction. Abuse, neglect, household dysfunction. Exposure to violence, parental incarceration. Racism.

It is chronic stress and trauma.

Criminologists have long known that childhood trauma can impede development and lead to health and behavioral problems later on.

Increasingly, those who study the root causes of violence nationally and in Wisconsin are turning to a common survey tool to inform public policy.

At 3:34 p.m., May 17, they gathered for a meeting none of the participants wanted.

The previous evening, with children playing outside and people around, a man fired a bullet into the back of the head of Rayshawn Jackson, 24, outside an apartment building at 9 Waunona Woods Court on the South Side.

To see little JaMichael Meaderds is to breathe in the beauty of a child. But his eyes have already seen inconceivable terror.

JaMichael, now 4, watched as three men invaded his home and gunned down his father, Michael Meaderds, in their North Side apartment on May 30, 2017.

Twenty-one people have been killed by someone with a gun in Dane County since 2016. Sixteen of those homicides occurred in Madison.

2016

On a beautiful weekday evening this spring, Madison police officers Brian Dyer and Kraig Knutson stop their squad cars and get out to walk, engaging with children and residents in an area plagued by crime on the Southwest Side.

They mingle, tossing footballs with a group of kids, then set up a portable basketball hoop and block off part of Theresa Terrace near the tiny neighborhood center there. The children like it, and the vibe is good.

Just hours after being shot at close range on Madison’s North Side, 29-year-old Eldridge L. Taylor clings to life as his mother, brother and girlfriend anxiously await word of his condition in a long hallway near the emergency room at UW Hospital.

Anthony Cooper Sr., Jerome Dillard and Aaron Hicks, members of the community-based Focused Interruption Coalition, who have been with the family at the hospital, draw near as a doctor approaches. Madison Police Lt. Tim Patton, who leads the department’s Violent Crimes Unit, is also nearby, while more officers are down the hall.

In the early evening of April 18, 2016, an incendiary mix gathered at Penn Park on the South Side.

A group including men from Chicago was hanging out and gambling at a picnic table. But there were people from a rival group at the park, too. At one point, Martez Moore, 30, part of the rival group, jumped on the picnic table. Words were spoken. Guns came out.

The hours are unpredictable, the pay low and you’re working from crisis to crisis. Welcome to the life of a crisis peer support specialist, a new city-supported position run through the nonprofit Focused Interruption Coalition.

While FIC had been providing peer support before the city contracted with its partner, the Nehemiah Center for Urban Leadership Development, starting last year, “much of it was volunteer and sometimes not at the level necessary due to time and job constraints,” said FIC assistant executive director Zandra Hagberg, who often handles dispatching duties and works with female clients. “Now, this is a job and we can focus more time to those who need us most.”

When people commit certain crimes or pose an extreme danger to others, most agree, they need to be locked up.

Incarceration can also concentrate the mind, forcing offenders to confront the alcohol and drug dependencies that often led to their crimes, allow them to address anger problems and further their education.

On Jan. 31, Leontae Porter became one of the latest 10.

On that day, Porter, 23, who completed a four-year prison term last fall for the armed robbery of a fast-food restaurant in Sun Prairie, and nine others seen as among Madison’s most prolific repeat violent offenders, were given a choice: Accept the help service providers were offering to get their lives back on track or expect swift and stern punishment if they reoffend.

On the seventh floor of the aging Dane County Jail in the City-County Building, near the long halls lined with barred cells holding the highest-risk inmates, is a small, narrow room offering hope.

There, Madison school teachers Deb Anderson and Tina Geier operate Metro High, one of the school district’s four programs for youth incarcerated, or in detention or shelter who have not earned a high school diploma or turned 21.

Amid a disturbing increase in shootings, many by teens and young adults, Madison-area leaders are calling for a broad-based approach to preventing the violence, even well before anyone picks up a gun.

Mayor Paul Soglin and Dane County Executive Joe Parisi are vowing additional funding in their 2019 budgets to build on recent initiatives such as expanding funding for peer support specialists, who help those causing or harmed by violence; continuing to collaborate with school, police, nonprofits, health care workers and the faith community; and adopting a public health approach to addressing violence.

Madison and Dane County are trying a new approach to combating violence, treating it as a public health emergency and relying on data, science and the voices of those most affected to cure it.

In coming months, Public Health Madison and Dane County will lead an effort to build a community violence prevention coalition and conduct broad outreach to forge a comprehensive plan to address violence similar to a sweeping “Blueprint for Peace” adopted in Milwaukee in 2017.

Madison is far from alone in its struggle to address escalating gun violence.

Bigger cities that have suffered jumps in gun violence now look far beyond law enforcement, employing hospital-based and public health initiatives in an attempt to slow cycles of violence.