user: Chicago Teenager in Video Against Gun Violence Is Shot and Wounded

A 13-year-old Chicago boy who appeared in an award-winning public service video about the effect of gun violence on the city’s black youth was shot in the back and critically wounded, officials said Monday.

The boy, Zarriel Trotter, was struck by a stray bullet after two groups of youths began a “heated argument” Friday night on the city’s West Side and one person pulled out a handgun and started firing, Officer Jose Estrada said.

“He was not the intended target,” Officer Estrada said. “He was standing on the sidewalk.”

No one else was injured, and there have been no arrests so far, he added.

Zarriel, known to his friends and family as Zari, was one of several students who took part in a series of social media videos last year intended to highlight the toll that gun violence was taking on the black population.

The youths were picked from the third to eighth grades at Catalyst Circle Rock Charter School on the West Side, said Lewis Williams, the chief creative officer of Burrell Communications Group, which produced the videos.

In the videos, which were part of a YouTube and Facebook campaign called “Black Is Human,” teenagers spoke one by one about their fears of someday being counted in the unrelenting scroll of gunfire statistics, and of their sadness abut the violence in their neighborhoods.

“I don’t want to live around my community where I got to keep on hearing and hearing people keep on getting shot, people keep on getting killed,” Zarriel says about halfway through the video.

A grim statistic appears at the start of the one-minute video in which he appears: “The leading cause of death for black boys and teens: homicide.”

The video ends with the statement, “The loss of a black boy is a loss for America.”

Elizabeth Jamison-Dunn, the principal of Catalyst Circle Rock Charter School, where Zarriel is in the seventh grade, said in an interview with The Chicago Tribune over the weekend that the boy was recovering in the hospital and had not been able to speak yet.

“It was disheartening,” she said about the shooting, adding that it was the second time in about a week that gun violence had erupted near the school. “Every morning he greets me with a big smile on his face, which makes my day,” Ms. Jamison-Dunn said.

There have been 46 shootings from Jan. 1 through March 26 in the district where Zarriel was wounded, compared with 19 in the same period last year and 18 in the same period in 2014, Officer Estrada said.

“There has been a substantial increase,” he said in a telephone interview, adding that the reason for the increase was not immediately clear. “Unfortunately, when you see crime, there are so many factors. It would be impossible to narrow it down.”

Burrell Communications Group, which develops productions that focus on social problems affecting the black population, was recognized with an Advocacy Media award from the American Advertising Federation this month for “Black Is Human.”

“Our hearts go out to Zarriel and his family,” the company said on its Facebook page. “We wish him a speedy recovery.”
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assistant: Zarriel Trotter, 13, who appeared in an award-winning video about the effect of gun violence on the city’s black youth, was hit in the back by a stray bullet, the police said.