I met Laura Madeleine at the opening of the latest Soul Shots Portrait Project exhibit, featuring artist renderings of 24 gun violence victims. Most of the portraits, on display at Episcopal Cathedral in West Philadelphia, look straight into your eye as if they were present. They are still with us, in a way, and it feels like they’re holding our gaze, not just so that we’ll remember, but also to demand that we do something about gun violence.
Madeleine’s story of starting Soul Shots — and how it helps survivors and co-victims heal — is the first in a new podcast series for The Philadelphia Citizen, featuring the people left behind after fatal shootings, including parents, grandparents, siblings, children and friends. “Many of these people get asked about the death a lot and feel like they’re made to feel guilty,” Madeleine says. “Our artists ask about the lives.”
More than 3,300 Philadelphians have lost their lives to gun violence in Philadelphia since 2015; another 12,700 survived a shooting. While shootings are down for the second year in a row, Philadelphia is still on track to record about 200 fatal shootings by the end of 2024.
“What traditional media miss is the vast number of people indirectly impacted by firearm violence,” says Dr. Vivek Ashok, from the Center for Violence Prevention at CHOP. “A single neighborhood murder can affect as many as 200 people in the community.” The victims’ lives are cut short, but those of their loved ones carry on; they grieve, they rage, they remember, they love, they call for change.
This podcast is intended to talk about what happens to survivors and co-victims when the police tape comes down, the news cameras leave and the flowers wilt. How are they doing now? What are they still going through? If one of our civic goals as Philadelphians is to curb local gun violence, we need to listen to their voices, to hear their stories of loss and healing.
Julien Suaudeau is a French American writer. He has lived in Philadelphia since 2006 and teaches at Bryn Mawr College.
