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A Young Chicago Woman Has Lost 23 Loved Ones to Gun Violence. She Wants You To See Their Faces. from The Trace.
Williams has more than 3,000 Facebook friends. Amid the reminders of loved ones she's lost, periodically she comes across people that she knows have carried out a shooting. Some of those same people circulate stop-the-violence messages, to her disbelief. "I'm like, dude, you're killing people," Williams says.Not so long ago, gun violence could have consumed her life as well. Williams joined a gang in elementary school, bought her first handgun in sixth grade, and began dealing drugs in high school. It wasn't until she was 19, when she was pregnant with her child, that she decided to break away from the dangerous trajectory that she had set herself upon as a girl on the city's South Side. Her path from street life to graduate school has taken ten years."If I didn't have my son," Williams says, "I don't know where my life would have been." But she can guess. Either the gang disputes she often encountered might have lead her to kill someone. Or someone would have tried to kill her.Williams was born in South Shore, an economically struggling neighborhood in the city's South Side with stately red-brick apartment buildings that recall more prosperous times. Even as a young child, she was aware of the area's problems. But until she was seven, she says, "life was perfect."
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