Content area
Full text
In December 1989, Sherman Spears, then 19 years old, was visiting a friend in his native Oakland, California, when an argument broke out between the friend and two other young men. The altercation ended in heated words; sometime later, the pair returned armed for vengeance.
Spears was alone. They leveled a pistol at him and demanded to know the whereabouts of his friend. Spears had no idea.
Frustrated at his failure to answer satisfactorily, the gunman pulled the trigger.
Spears is now 23 and confined to a wheelchair, having lost the use of his legs as a result of that bullet wound. "As a youth, I had built up this reputation like I was this big, bad person," recalls Spears in a deceptively soft, gentle voice. "I guess they figured that they couldn't pull a gun on me and walk away and just leave it at that. In reality, the reputation I'd built up to protect myself is what ended up getting me shot."
These days, Spears busies himself in an office at Oakland's Summit Medical Center helping to organize presentations, conferences, and workshops. He has become a key strategist for Teens on Target, or TNT, the classroom-oriented component of a broader adolescent advocacy program known as Youth ALIVE! Founded by health planner Deane Calhoun five years ago in the wake of two shootings in Oakland junior high schools, Youth ALIVE!'s message--composed and delivered to any audience that will listen, by "at-risk kids" speaking from their own harsh experience--is that concerted action is necessary now to stem the deadly epidemic of violence ravaging American society.
Under the sponsorship of Vernon Henderson, MD, a faculty member of the University of California-Davis School of Medicine and a surgeon at Highland General Hospital, Oakland's primary trauma-care facility, Spears has also begun paying calls at the bedsides of youthful victims of knifings, beatings, and shootings. He and other TNT members trained by Henderson help those recovering from violent attacks to "assess how they got there and what they can do in the future to prevent it from happening again."
Unfortunately, happening again is all too likely.
A CHRONIC DISEASE
Weary emergency physicians have come to regard urban violence as a "chronic, recurrent disease." Indeed, a study by the...