Baltimore City leaders and community members honored the lives of six students killed this past year while calling for an end to gun violence at an annual remembrance event Friday.
Standing outside the school district’s central office, friends and family held signs with the names of the students, who range in age from four-years-old to 17. In 2023, 19 students died by gun violence. Last year, that number dropped to 11.
But Mayor Brandon Scott said even one life lost is too many.
“These six young people should be here with us, smiling, either preparing for graduation or preparing for summer break and just having fun as children do with full lives,” he said. “That’s why we don’t celebrate reductions, we acknowledge them.”
Scott said the belief that change is possible keeps him going.
“We'll continue to break the cycle of trauma,” he said. “We can see a year where we lose no young people to violence, no lives.”
Western High School senior Brooke Bourne recited a spoken word poem, saying Baltimore children and teenagers are forced to be “scholars of survival, students of sorrow.”
“To the mother who hums lullabies to a gravestone, to the teacher who tapes a report card to a desk that will never be filled, to the city that loves hard but bleeds harder,” she said, “We don't need no more lessons in silence. We need healing in the curriculum.”
A bell rang as CEO Sonja Santelises read the names of the students lost to gun violence in the past year:
Denzel Johnson, 17, from Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts.
Breunna Cormley, 12, from the National Academy Foundation.
Jasper Davis, 14, a rising freshman at Patterson High School.
Jacobi Jones, 4, a pre-kindergarten student at Moravia Park Elementary School.
William Gardner, 17, a student at Excel Academy.
Cortez Lemon Jr., 14, from Leith Walk Elementary/Middle School.
Santelises urged attendees to “hold the name of that student, the profile of that student, close and remember that they were each gems that we were given.”
“As adults, we need to sit with how our young people are processing what is happening around them,” she said. “How they take it in, how they interpret what this is doing to them.”
