Invisibles, Stories of Teenagers who Committed homicide (Prologue)

Prologue

This book is based on interviews I conducted with young people who committed homicide during their teenage years—most of them boys (because boys kill more than girls).

Sometimes, as I listened to their stories, I would picture a life unlike my own—walking through those same neighborhoods, maybe standing on a street corner with them, smoking crack or a joint. But it was chance that placed me elsewhere, in a different set of circumstances that led me to become a researcher.

What do I investigate? The things I can’t understand.

For example, I don’t understand how a sixteen-year-old can kill another person. That’s what moves me. I want to know what happened in between—between the boy he once was and the teenager who pulled the trigger. I want to trace that journey, listen closely to what broke, what got lost, what was never there to begin with. I want to understand—not to justify, but to shed light, to give form and meaning to stories that are usually silenced, ignored, or reduced to a headline.

So I go into prisons and ask. And they tell me about their lives.

From those conversations, hundreds of pages have emerged, and I don’t want them to sit on a hard drive or get lost in a folder at the bottom of some old drawer. I want them to reach you. What I share is my version of the version they gave me. Sometimes it’s my voice speaking through these pages. Other times, it’s theirs—the voices of the boys who shared their stories with me.

What part is real and what part is fiction? The whole book is both—reality and fiction at once.

I present to you what I put together.

Load. Aim. Fire.