Kimberly Greer can’t sleep. Almost every night for the better part of four years, she has woken up in the dark. The numbers on her clock flash 3:30 a.m.
Greer rouses at this hour most nights, haunted by the faces of her son, Ricky, her daughter, Ryann, and her nephew, Jordan — three of the hundreds of Chicago’s victims of gun violence. One survived. Two did not. But they all come back in the hours she can’t sleep.
“I’m traumatized,” she says, thinking about the people she’s lost.
Her daughter, Ryann, was hit in the head by a bullet in March 2006. An assailant shot and killed her friend as they sat in the front seat of her friend’s car. Ryann survived the shooting, but she woke up in a medically induced coma and it took years of rehab at home with help from her mother to regain her motor skills.
Greer’s 30-year-old son, Ricky Brown, wasn’t as lucky. On March 21, 2012, while leaving for his job at the U.S. post office, Brown was shot multiple times in the chest as he descended the steps of his Englewood home.
[For more of this story, written by Ryan Connelly Holmes, go to http://www.pbs.org/newshour/up...ental-health-crisis/]
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