Tyshaun’s eyes fixed on the red and blue flashing lights. Through an expansive glass window, he saw yellow tape and police cars. He didn’t think much more about the latest commotion in his neighborhood until he passed by the school’s front lobby.
“The Cat in the Hat,” it declared next to an image of the character, “does not like that violence.” Eagle had been through one just a week earlier, so as class time approached, he headed out of the cafeteria, where a seven-foot-high red poster hung on the wall.
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Tyshaun was at lunch, trying to avoid the day’s free serving of beefaroni, when he overheard a teacher mention that the school had been locked down. But inside, Tyshaun couldn’t hear the five shots that would thrust the violence circling him for years into the center of his life. on the first day of March, someone raised a gun one block from Tyshaun’s home and a dozen steps from the front gate to his school, Eagle Academy Public Charter. Four people were wounded in one evening less than half a mile away, and another was hit four nights later. The bloodshed intensified in late February.
In November, five days before Tyshaun’s eighth birthday, another of his dad’s friends was killed, and one more died in January after being shot 500 feet from their house. He came home one day to discover that a bullet had punched a dime-sized hole in their steel front door - just below his eye level - before tearing into the back of the living-room TV. His mother, relatives, teachers and friends all agreed to talk about him.Īs he prepared to start second grade in the weeks after the shooting outside his house, the danger around him only crept closer. She wanted Tyshaun’s story told so people who live in far-safer places would understand his world. Tyshaun’s mom, Donna Johnson, had worried since he was born about how that environment would affect her boy, who had both a deep well of compassion for people he sensed were suffering and a tendency to explode in anger, often with his fists, when he was being teased or challenged. But on their side of the Anacostia River, where more than half of the city’s homicides occur and nearly every other child grows up in poverty, many boys and girls learn to navigate peril before they learn to read.įor kids in Tyshaun’s neighborhood, and millions of others in high-crime communities across the country, the unrelenting threat of violence shapes almost every aspect of their lives: The streets they walk down, the parks they visit, the pictures they draw, the nightmares they have, the number of parents they come home to. Tyshaun lived part time with his father, Andrew McPhatter, along a row of 70-year-old, red-brick duplexes in Congress Heights, just three miles from million-dollar townhouses and $14 cocktails. “I’m not scared of nothing,” he started telling himself. Tyshaun figured all kids heard gunfire outside their homes, so he might as well learn to be brave, like his dad. He was afraid, but not as much as he had been a year earlier when someone started shooting near a playground just as he skidded down a red plastic slide. Chest throbbing, he hid behind the footboard and covered his head with his hands.
Tyshaun didn’t want to get hurt like that, so he dropped the Xbox controller and leapt down to the worn hardwood floor of their aging three-bedroom house in Southeast Washington. On his dad’s dresser was a reminder: a three-inch button inscribed with “Rest in Peace” that honored a family friend shot two blocks away.
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“Get down on the floor,” he screamed, and the 7-year-old knew what that meant: more gunshots.īullets, Tyshaun had learned by then, could break glass and rip through skin and bone. Tyshaun McPhatter’s father burst through the open doorway, crouching. Pop, pop, pop, from just outside the second-floor window on that warm summer afternoon. The boy was sitting in his favorite spot, atop his dad’s bed, playing their favorite game, “NBA 2K16” on the Xbox One, when he heard the sound.