Editor’s note: We’re making this story free for all to read. Read more from the Shots Fired series here.
On a Friday evening in late April, 10-year-old Keontre Thornhill was in his bedroom in Portsmouth, relaxing with his favorite video game, Fortnite.
Teenage girls were arguing outside. Drawn to the commotion, Keontre looked out his window of the home on Farragut Street in Cradock.
And then the shooting began. A bullet sailed through Keontre’s open window, striking him in the torso.
He died in the ambulance.
The exuberant boy — the second of five siblings and a student at Cradock Elementary School — loved action movies such as “Fast and Furious” and was about to begin a lawn mowing business with his stepfather.
“Bubbly, outgoing, happy, adventurous,” Arvis Scott, 31, said when asked about the boy he helped raise since he was 2 months old. “He was a pretty sweet boy, man. He was a pretty cool kid. His friends loved him. People loved him.”
Keontre is one of nearly 3,000 Hampton Roads residents who lost their lives to gunfire over the past 10 years, according to numbers from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner at the Virginia Department of Health. Their deaths have altered countless lives.
“I just want my son back,” said Keontre’s mother, Kevina Thornhill. “I just want him back.”
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Shots Fired
The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press are launching “Shots Fired: Combating a culture of gun violence in Hampton Roads,” a yearlong series that will explore why this issue is so prevalent here and what can be done about it. The project will include stories on victims, conversations with leaders — from government officials to community activists — and detailed looks at the data.
“We didn’t get here overnight,” said Portsmouth Police Chief Stephen Jenkins, who serves on the community advisory panel for the project. “This has been a slow, slow process, a slow deterioration. And it’s going to take a lot of effort from a lot of people to change the course.”
Total gun deaths in Hampton Roads — including homicides, suicides and a small number of accidental and undetermined deaths — jumped 49% over the past 10 years, the State Medical Examiner’s Office numbers show. They hit an all-time high of 383 two years ago before falling 12% last year to 336.
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Killings here twice the national average
With 205 killings last year — 189 of them by gun — Hampton Roads had a total 2023 homicide rate of about 11.7 per 100,000 residents, preliminary numbers from the State Medical Examiner’s Office show.
That’s more than twice the national homicide rate, projected at about 5.5 slayings per 100,000 people for the year. It’s also well above Virginia’s 2023 homicide rate of about 6.8, according to calculations using the state data.
There also were 141 suicides by firearm in the region last year, accounting for 61% of all suicides in Hampton Roads. Many more were left wounded by nearly 600 nonfatal shootings in the region last year, according to police department numbers.
Any examination of gun violence will delve into political lightning rods — including gun laws and gun prosecutions — and will touch on difficult issues pertaining to race, poverty and where people live. Even schools are affected, with many students walking through metal detectors every day.
Different communities are affected in starkly different ways. Black men, for example, were the victims in 76% of the region’s gun homicides, while 65% of those who died by gun-related suicide were white men, state numbers show.
Some local cities have it worse: Portsmouth, for example, finished 2023 at 36 killings per 100,000 people, or more than five times the state average, according to Daily Press and Virginian-Pilot calculations using state data.
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Kids with guns
Experts cite myriad reasons for gun violence — from poverty to childhood trauma to an increasing prevalence of guns in the hands of young people — while others cite lax enforcement of existing gun laws or various ways police are hamstrung in enforcement.
Among the biggest problems: Children with guns.
In one Newport News case, several teens shared a “community gun” that they stuck in a tree: Whoever wanted it could get it, then return it to the tree. In several other cases, the same gun was used multiple times in multiple cities.
“If you have access to a gun, and there’s a conflict, the inclination is to reach for the gun,” said Newport News’ top prosecutor, Commonwealth’s Attorney Howard Gwynn. “And we’ve got a lot of people who just don’t know how to resolve conflict short of violence. And that’s a problem.”
The Portsmouth shooting that killed Keontre began when a group of teens arrived at a home on Farragut Street — the one next door to where the 10-year-old’s family lived — to fight a 14-year-old girl. The altercation began at school that day.
When that girl’s mother was on the phone with 911, dispatchers could hear gunshots, with a stray bullet going through Keontre’s bedroom window and striking him. A Ring video shows several teens running away.
“The whole city should be outraged,” Jenkins said. “Just a totally senseless loss of life. We never will know what that young man could potentially have become. Because somebody decided that a fight between girls should turn into a death sentence for somebody.
“Just let that sink in.”
Nearly half of the homicide victims in Hampton Roads last year were younger than 30.
About 10% were juveniles, according to a spreadsheet tabulated by The Pilot and Daily Press. Another 10% were 18 or 19, while about 25% were in their 20s. The rest ranged in age from 30 to 84.
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People quick to fire
Newport News Police Chief Steve Drew contends that young people are quicker on the trigger these days, asserting that social media pressures help drive shootings.
“When I was growing up, you got into a fistfight or maybe walk away,” he said. “I think social media also plays a role in it. Things get ratcheted up and ratcheted up.”
Editor’s note: Why we began a long-term series on gun violence
While a fight might previously have ended in one day, social media disputes now go on longer, and people are quicker to display their guns.
“You could have people say, ‘I can’t believe you let him say that to you,'” Drew said. “And they say that over and over and over again, until the point where you say ‘I finally got to stand up for myself.’ And how do I do that? Oh, well, here’s a firearm.”
“We need to go back to being able to walk away. Because if someone calls you a name, it’s not a reason to pick up a firearm and point it at someone.”
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More guns in circulation
There are now nearly 400 million guns in the United States. And one rough indicator of gun sales — the number of federal gun background checks conducted at purchase — shows a dramatic jump in Virginia over the past 20 years.
There were 823,000 gun background checks in Virginia in 2020 — the highest year on record — compared with fewer than 200,000 such checks annually in the early 2000s, according to FBI numbers. They fell back to about 540,000 by 2023.
Most of the guns used in homicides and shootings have been stolen, according to recent report by Everytown Research & Policy, a gun policy reform group. And half of those are stolen out of cars, the report said, citing FBI statistics.
The report said Richmond ranked fourth in the nation in the car theft rate per capita in 2022, while Portsmouth ranked sixth and Norfolk was eighth, with Hampton and Newport News also on the list.
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Poverty
Norfolk Commonwealth’s Attorney Ramin Fatehi maintains that Hampton Roads’ gun violence problem can be traced to “an easy availability of guns and the concentration of poverty in places where poverty has always been concentrated.”
The region decades ago “experimented with so-called slum clearance, which was really just the reinforcement of residential segregation,” Fatehi said.
“And when you concentrate poverty, you get violence. It’s not because poor people are more prone to violence than rich people — it’s just because they live under conditions that promote violence, economic insecurity, substandard housing.”
Among the biggest violence reduction programs underway in Hampton Roads, he said, is the St. Paul’s Transformation Project. It’s designed to redevelop a notorious downtown federally subsidized housing project into a mixed income community.”
“Even if you don’t reduce the aggregate amount of poverty, when you de-concentrate it, that makes a dramatic difference in violence,” Fatehi said.
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More single-parent households
About a quarter of U.S. minors now grow up in single-parent households — 80% of them headed by women — compared with a worldwide rate of 7%, according to a 2019 report from the Pew Research Center. While most single-parent households work just fine, economic challenges are more likely with only one income. And there’s only one set of eyes to guide the young.
“I was raised by a single parent, so I know you can be successful being raised by a single parent,” said Hampton Commonwealth’s Attorney Anton Bell. “However, there are more obstacles and more challenges. And because of that, then you need a village at that point.”
“But that village has broken down,” he said. “People don’t know their neighbors, they don’t know the people that live next door to them. And so you don’t have that same village mindset. We’re trying to bring it back. But it’s not the way it used to be.”
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Tough on crime
Throughout it all, Gwynn said, being tough on gun crimes is crucial.
He cites his office’s policy to get involved in any case in which a gun is involved, be it a felony or misdemeanor. State law carries mandatory sentences of three or five years for using guns during felonies, on top of the punishment for the underlying crime. Gwynn’s office also meets regularly with federal prosecutors on gun cases to determine which venue will result in stiffer punishments.
Jenkins asserts that several reforms passed by the General Assembly in recent years have hampered police and emboldened criminals, such as bail reform, blocks on pulling cars over on various vehicle equipment violations, and bars to searching cars for the “odor of marijuana.”
The goal of some of the reforms was to block police from engaging in race-based policing, using pretexts to stop and search cars. But many in law enforcement — including Jenkins — say the past practice helped police find stolen guns and fugitives wanted on warrants.
“Society has to really at some point figure out what it is that law enforcement looks like,” Jenkins said.
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Early childhood intervention
James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston, said children in many areas clearly need more to do to keep them engaged and supervised.
Fox said he’s done significant research showing that the prime time for juvenile crime is in the afterschool hours, when many young people are home unsupervised.
“When kids are on their own, that whole thing about idle minds,” he said, referring to the adage, “Idle minds are the devil’s workshop.”
Programs are needed, he said, to keep kids engaged and to teach such things as empathy and self-control. The problem, Fox said, is that it can take years for such an investment in programs to make their mark.
“You will not see the results for several years — when these kids are older, and not involved in gangs and crime,” he said. That’s too long for many politicians “because you may not be in office by then.”
Keontre’s stepdad also wants investment in community programs, saying he “came up as a bad kid” in Portsmouth, and can relate to the youth there.
“They’re running around with no guidance,” Scott said. “Long story short, we just need more stuff for the youth out here.”
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Will 2024 be better?
There are hopeful signs that gun violence is slowing in Hampton Roads in 2024.
Slayings are down sharply to start the year. The region’s seven largest cities have tallied 60 slayings through June 1, compared with 90 at the same point in 2023. Hampton, for example, has only six homicides this year, down from 20 at the same point a year ago.
Portsmouth, however, is bucking that trend. The city has counted 22 killings so far this year, up from the 19 it had at this point in 2023 on its way to its second-highest all-time homicide count.
No one has so far been charged with killing Keontre, but Jenkins said he has suspects and “plans to prosecute everyone involved.”
Scott wants his stepson’s case solved soon. But he also said he’s trying to use the 10-year-old’s death to make positive change. He doesn’t know exactly what’s entailed in that, but knows plenty of people and wants to be a leader in helping people do good.
“People followed me to do the wrong things, so they’re definitely gonna follow me to do the right things,” Scott said. “I got to get power out of my pain, and purpose out of my pain. I can’t change the world, but I can change what’s going on in my city.”
Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, pdujardin@dailypress.com
Do you have a question or comment about our series? Send an email to shotsfired@pilotonline.com.
