The killing field
Nikki Shockley knew her son Brandon was in danger if he came back home to north St Louis. No one was after him, he didn’t have any enemies, gang ties or bad blood. But young black men in north St Louis don’t need any of that to be vulnerable to gun violence. They only need be around.
Despite all the attention paid to Chicago, it was St Louis that owned the nation’s higher gun murder rate in 2015, with the most startling concentration of deadly blocks within it.
“I told him he didn’t need to come back because every night when I turn on the TV it’s another murder. And he wasn’t here four months before it happened to him,” Shockley said.
Brandon Ellington, a 35-year-old father of six had made a life for himself during years in Indiana working at a South Bend candy factory, but decided to move back St Louis to be closer to his parents, and his oldest children.
“He lived for his kids,” Shockley said. “He did everything for them.”
In March, after a birthday party for his youngest son, Ellington went out to get painkillers for his eldest daughter, India, so they could go to the mall when he got back.
But he never came back.