Name: After nearly 50 shootings in 7 weeks, Hartford’s crisis and violence prevention workers are frustrated, worn thin
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After nearly 50 shootings in 7 weeks, Hartford’s crisis and violence prevention workers are frustrated, worn thin

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AdvertisementBy Hartford CourantOct 15, 2020 at 7:30 pmHartford — Weeks of unrelenting gunfire in Hartford are overwhelming the small circle of violence prevention workers who respond at all hours to meet shooting victims in their hospital beds.Larry Johnson spent three hours at St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center on Wednesday afternoon working with a victim of violence, only to return at about 10 p.m. that night when two others were wounded. As he was still talking with those victims, Jones watched another man walk into the emergency department bleeding from a gunshot wound to his arm, and he began his process over again.AdvertisementJohnson leads the Hartford Care Response Team program at Hartford Communities That Care, one of three nonprofits in the city that immediately respond to support and offer services to victims of violent crime and their families.Between the response team, Compass Peacebuilders and Mothers United Against Violence, there are about 25 such crisis response workers in the city serving victims of gun violence, including suburban residents injured in Hartford and victims injured in surrounding communities who are then transported to a hospital in the city.AdvertisementThey could use triple that, says Andrew Woods, executive director of Hartford Communities that Care. While the work may be less visible during the pandemic, the workload has only increased.“These men and women are out here doing everything they can to interrupt and get ahead of it,” Woods said. “Unfortunately, it’s just we’re seeing more than we’ve ever experienced in years at this sustained level.”There were a total of six shooting victims injured in a 24-hour period from Tuesday to Wednesday. And in just the past six days, 13 people have been shot, one fatally.But that spate of shootings came amid a sustained increase in gun violence in Hartford, police and city leaders say.“Quite frankly, it wasn’t just last night,” Woods said Thursday. “It’s almost every night that we’re mobilizing our forces so we can get to families and get a handle on this.“The constant, constant, unrelenting victims that are flying into these hospitals and being shot in our streets, you can imagine the impact it’s having on the morale of the workers, the sense of frustration we’re all feeling.”Shootings typically rise in the summer, but this year, violent crime ticked up early — at the height of the pandemic in April — and has surged in the fall.Since Sept. 1, police have responded to nearly 50 shootings with injuries, including three gun homicides and 10 double shootings. That’s nearly triple the number of such incidents in any of the past three years, according to police data on the same six-week period.AdvertisementPolice Chief Jason Thody and Mayor Luke Bronin have said the increase may be in part because of the instability COVID-19 has brought to bear on education, entertainment and court services. Police unions have accused both leaders of politicizing the spike by invoking the pandemic, although they cast blame on the recent police reform legislation passed by state lawmakers in the wake of nationwide protests this summer.Woods agrees that the pandemic is one of a number of forces behind the incidents, which often involve drugs and sometimes retaliation, but also consist of one-off disputes and bullets striking unintended targets.From July 1 to Sept. 30, the Hartford Care Response Team served 71 new victims who were injured or treated in Hartford, most of whom were connected to services. So far this month, the team has reached 19 more victims.Those include a 32-year-old man who was shot five times while he was leaving a club in Bristol on Oct. 3, and transported to St. Francis. Despite three gunshots to the head, he survived with minimal lasting damage, mostly trouble speaking.“Only God works like that,” his mother, Wyolene Haslam-Brown, said Thursday as she sat doing paperwork in the response team’s office in the North End of Hartford. “I look at where he started from and where he is now ...”Haslam-Brown, who owns a sober house in East Hartford, is still hoping to get help for her younger son, who witnessed his brother’s shooting and drove him to the hospital. The 29-year-old is bothered by the images that have stuck with him from that night.Advertisement“He’s going through trauma,” Haslam-Brown said.She and Johnson think they will be able to connect him with services in time. The response team and Compass Peacebuilders provide at least six months of case management to every victim and their family, and they make multiple passes at victims who initially decline help.That’s how this month’s count of new clients came to include five victims who were injured prior to October.The organizations have always been strained, but the shootings are coming faster now, nearly every day. And Woods estimates that it takes 20 hours of case management to begin helping every victim.Woods and Johnson say they’ve worked 16-18-hour days ever since they formed their partnership with St. Francis to bring violence intervention directly to the hospital.DailyCatch up on the day’s top headlines sent directly to your inbox weekdays at 3 p.m &gt; What spurs Johnson on are moments like this one Thursday, walking 58-year-old Haslam-Brown through pamphlets on services and the application they share with every family for the state’s victims’ compensation fund.AdvertisementHe recalled how hard she’d prayed for her son just two weeks ago, standing by her as nurses and surgeons flurried around them.“You prayed and it hit my soul so hard,” he told Haslam-Brown. “As you prayed, I became faithful in just knowing he was going to be all right.”She smiled back at him behind a pink face mask and mustered the same fervor from the night she almost lost her son.“God is so good,” she said.Courant staff writer Zach Murdock contributed to this report.Rebecca Lurye can be reached at . 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AdvertisementBy Hartford CourantOct 15, 2020 at 7:30 pmHartford — Weeks of unrelenting gunfire in Hartford are overwhelming the small circle of violence prevention workers who respond at all hours to meet shooting victims in their hospital beds.Larry Johnson spent three hours at St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center on Wednesday afternoon working with a victim of violence, only to return at about 10 p.m. that night when two others were wounded. As he was still talking with those victims, Jones watched another man walk into the emergency department bleeding from a gunshot wound to his arm,...

After nearly 50 shootings in 7 weeks, Hartford’s crisis and violence prevention workers are frustrated, worn thin

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