Gun violence takes heavy, hidden toll — upending lives in Omaha and across Nebraska

Jonathan wishes a lot of things were the way they used to be.

He would like to play with his toddler.

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To pick her up and hold her.

Cook a meal for her and her mom.

Bring home a paycheck to support the family.

Those simple acts were taken from him one night last year when a passing SUV sprayed his car with bullets on an Omaha highway.

In that moment, Jonathan, a counselor and coach, became one of the 150 people shot in Omaha in 2022. Jonathan is not his real name. The Omaha man agreed to discuss his experience provided he was not identified, because of concern for his family’s safety.

Gun violence can sometimes be high profile, as with last week’s mass shooting in a Tennessee elementary school that killed six people, including three children. Other times, especially when no one is killed, it can be almost hidden from view.

Yet the reality is that shootings — fatal or not — take a heavy toll on the Omaha community and elsewhere. Like Jonathan, most victims of gun violence survive, but the damage still can upend their lives.

As with the rest of the country, Omaha saw gun violence spike at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. For the three years of 2020-2022, shootings were up about 32% over the previous three years, according to statistics from the Omaha Police Department.

On average, someone is shot every 2 or 3 days in Omaha. This includes fatal and nonfatal shootings. Added together, more than 1,000 people were shot in Omaha during the seven years from 2016 through 2022. Of those, more than 200 died.

Gun violence, experts say, drains billions from the nation’s economy, sapping the vitality of neighborhoods and hollowing out families.

Even in Nebraska, the costs are significant and various efforts have been made to quantify those costs.

The Nebraska Collaborative for Violence Intervention and Prevention has estimated the annual cost to taxpayers at $61 million and the combined cost to the public and private sector at more than $300 million a year. The collaborative is housed within the University of Nebraska at Omaha School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and College of Medicine. Its estimate includes medical and legal system expenses, employer costs and the affected person’s lost wages.

Everytown.org, a nonprofit that advocates for increased gun safety requirements, estimates that more than $45 million in annual Nebraska tax dollars are required to address costs generated by guns, from Medicaid expenses to policing to courts and prisons. Add in the indirect costs, including pain and suffering, and the price tag rises into the many hundreds of millions, according to the organization.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention values the lives of the 188 people who died in 2020 in Nebraska of gun injuries — which includes suicide as well as homicide — at nearly $1.9 billion. (That’s based on an individual’s life having an estimated value of about $10 million.)

“If you’re not living in a community that is impacted by gun violence on a daily basis, you may not realize that it does impact our community,” said Ashley Farrens, who coordinates Encompass Omaha, an intervention program offered at the Nebraska Medicine for patients who were violently injured. “The impact of violence is beyond just physical injury. It affects the mental and emotional well-being, and creates social and financial strain for the victims and their families.”

Broken marriages, broken homes, broken men — Alberto “Beto” Gonzalez has seen it all. A former gang officer with the Omaha Police Department and now a violence intervention specialist for Encompass Omaha, Gonzalez said he’s seen gun violence affect every aspect of a person’s life.

While 121 of the 150 people shot in Omaha in 2022 survived, many victims still struggle.

Men who have survived shootings find themselves dependent upon those around them for care. Girlfriends and wives sometimes will stand by their guy, while others get fed up and leave. Grandmas find themselves caring for grandsons.

Teresa Negron, executive director of YouTurn, an Omaha organization focused on reducing conflict and violence, sees that too.

“Lives are permanently altered,” said Negron, a former Omaha police sergeant in the homicide unit. Suddenly, someone who was working and providing for others is now in need of care from family members, friends or medical personnel. Perhaps for a lifetime.

“You have families that are so altered that the children that are left behind have to be raised by someone else, another family member or they are put into the foster system,” she said.

Gunshot victims can suffer debilitating injuries. Some people are left brain-damaged or paralyzed. Others, like Jonathan, lose the use of a limb. Many are psychologically scarred.

Shootings have effects well beyond individual families. Each gun assault adds to the cancer of fear that insinuates itself into neighborhoods: Parents afraid to send their children to the neighborhood playground; families and businesses afraid to buy into neighborhoods; traumatized children who struggle in school.

Negron and others say another consequence of gun violence is how it holds back economic growth and well-being in heavily affected neighborhoods.

“You don’t have the quality of life when gun violence is prominent in your area,” she said. “People are worried about a stray bullet doing harm to them, their property, their family. If they have kids, they ask themselves: Do I let my kids play outside?”

Sherman Wells, whose grassroots group Untamed is among those working to create a culture of safety and economic vitality in Omaha’s Black neighborhoods, says a sense of security is essential for the community to thrive.

“There’s definitely a lack of trust, lack of love, a lack of unity, which, in turn, is lack of commerce and engagement,” he said. “When talking about spending your money, you don’t want to go to a Black neighborhood and spend your money on a Black business if you don’t feel safe. You might have the best food in Omaha, but if you’re in a place that has gun violence, people aren’t going to come.”

When shootings happen, it affects the character of the community by causing people to retreat, said Gaylene Armstrong, director of the School of Criminology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and co-director of the Nebraska Collaborative for Violence Intervention and Prevention.

“In a safe neighborhood, you’ll see people in their yards, tending to their flowers, knowing their neighbors, knowing who is coming and going,” Armstrong said. “That level of trust can help offset the opportunity for crime and violent incidents. When something traumatic happens, you retreat indoors, don’t send the kids outside to play because you are fearful. You lose that neighborhood connection.”

“One house can make a difference,” she said. “If you get one individual on a different path of offsetting retaliatory violence, it can have a ripple effect. A little shift starts to grow.”

While areas of North Omaha have a higher concentration of crime than some other parts of the city, there’s a mistaken notion, Negron said, that the area is too dangerous to live or run a business.

“There are people who believe that to be true, which disenfranchises a neighborhood or community and creates that economic barrier,“ she said. “North Omaha generally has less investment, but it’s hard to invest when you have a community with higher crime, poverty. To remove the stigma of poverty and crime, you need to have investment, but the investment does not come because of the crime. There’s a cycle there and we need to break it.”

Yes, more shootings happen in Omaha’s disadvantaged neighborhoods, but as Negron said, “they can happen anywhere, and it can happen to anyone.”

Crime reports across the state are a testament:

Last summer, a boat owner was fatally shot at the marina of the popular Branched Oak State Recreation Area near Lincoln.

In August, four people were killed in tiny Laurel, Nebraska, when, according to court records, one of the alleged shooters said simmering neighborhood tensions had boiled over.

Three people were shot last summer in a parking lot in Omaha’s Old Market, a popular entertainment district.

And then there was the 2021 random shooting of a woman — a 33-year-old law school graduate — as she walked at Standing Bear Lake in northwest Omaha.

Like others who have been shot, Jonathan’s injuries have changed the trajectory of his life, piling up costs hard to calculate.

Bullets struck his back, right arm and left hand. He can no longer use his right arm and still carries two bullets in it. He lost his job at a residential treatment center for troubled girls because he could no longer help restrain combative clients. Now, time that should be spent building a life with his young family is instead occupied by rounds of doctor’s visits and therapy.

“I can’t use my right arm for almost nothing,” he said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever get full movement back from my (right) hand. That’s the craziest part about the whole situation, that my hand is messed up.”

So Jonathan focuses on what he does have: His life.

“Now I’m just sitting here trying to think positive, that I’m still here,” he said.

He’s luckier than some.

Some Nebraskans have been paralyzed or brain-damaged from gun injuries. That was the case with the law student enjoying a walk at an Omaha lake.

And it was the case for a college student standing on a corner a few years ago.

The young man’s family asked that they not be identified. His family said the then-teenager had done everything right, staying out of trouble, getting good grades and excelling in athletics. He was a kid who brought laughter to family get-togethers.

But that day, another young man who was gunning for someone else aimed and missed. The bullet struck the student in the neck. Paralyzed, he gets around in a wheelchair but is unable to care for himself, and he struggles with daily headaches, depression and hopelessness.

“The bullet wasn’t meant for him, but he took it,” his cousin said. “Although he lived, his life is completely different.”

The shooting fueled despair and rage within the extended family, which has since contributed to others taking up guns, his cousin said.

“You talk about residual effects. Everybody in the family was affected by this,” he said. “Seeing him in this kind of trauma, knowing he wasn’t in a gang — his brothers could give an (expletive) less about anyone else.”

Dr. Charity Evans, chief of acute care surgery at Nebraska Medical Center and medical director for Encompass Omaha, said her trauma teams see all types of gunshot injuries, but the majority of severe gunshot injuries are to the head or torso.

“With injuries to the head, the person is not the same because of the brain injury that occurred. When the torso is hit, all bets are off. It could affect the small bowel, the large bowel, the stomach, and the kidney.”

Multiple surgeries may be required and recovery could take a year or more. Some patients wind up paraplegic or quadriplegic. Some lose a kidney, or use of an arm or leg. Others develop difficulty breathing.

Even when the physical wounds have healed, the psychological, economic, familial and social costs continue, she said.

The Nebraska Medical Center has developed the Encompass program to help gunshot victims recover and reclaim their lives. It helps the patient get health insurance so that health care is affordable, and it helps with housing, jobs and mental health care.

The hospital staff members, in turn, benefit by seeing their patients embark on a stronger journey toward recovery and the hospital avoids some of the the expense of providing uninsured care.

“There is no way an individual can get shot and say they don’t have problems,” said Gonzalez, the former Omaha police officer who now works with Encompass. “We tell them a week, a month, three months down the road, you’ll start having night sweats, find you can’t sleep, find yourself getting angry, using more substances, can’t deal with the playback of getting shot. When that happens, you better come and talk to us.”

The increase in pandemic-era gun violence in Omaha has been mirrored by increases nationally.

According to the CDC, gun-related homicides rose 35% during the first year of the pandemic, reaching the highest rate in more than 25 years. In 2020, 79% of all homicides and 53% of all suicides involved firearms, according to the CDC.

Evans said the pandemic appears to have ushered in another troubling statistic: younger victims.

“We are seeing younger patients. In the last two years I’ve seen many 17, 18, 19-year-olds who have been shot,” she said. “Prior to that, the average age was around 24, 25.”

Illness aside, gun violence was the second-leading cause of death among young people in Nebraska in 2020, according to the CDC. Car crashes ranked first. For adults, illness aside, guns ranked fourth after falls, poisonings/overdoses and crashes, according to the CDC. (Nationally, gunshot wounds have eclipsed motor vehicle crashes as a cause of death in the majority of states.)

Suicide is the leading reason for gun deaths among young people in Nebraska, a sharp difference from national statistics. For the years 2016-2020, about 55% of gun deaths among youths in Nebraska were suicide, while the national average was 35%, according to the CDC. The reverse is was true for homicides: In Nebraska, about 33% of youth gun deaths were homicides during those years while nationally it was 60%. Those trends generally reflect the difference in gun deaths between rural and urban states.

The Uvalde school massacre has galvanized groups promoting gun safety, including in Nebraska.

Jennifer Hodge of the Nebraska chapter of Moms Demand Action, said chapter membership jumped to more than 200, up from 30, after Uvalde.

“We’re not anti-firearms by any means, we are completely pro-Second Amendment,” said Hodge, who grew up with guns. ”We just want guns stored safely, either in the home or in a vehicle.”

Negron of YouTurn agreed.

“No one is talking about taking away guns,” she said.

Negron said YouTurn views gun violence as an infectious disease that requires a multi-faceted cure, including relationship building, conflict resolution and economic opportunity.

While stronger gun safety measures would deter some types of shootings, Negron says broader changes are needed to reduce gun violence.

Parents need safer neighborhoods for their children. Teachers need more support as they deal with a chaotic range in students’ skills and temperament. Mental health care is needed for children who grow up traumatized, either from conflict in the home or violence in their neighborhoods. Unemployed people need skills training and accessible jobs.

While solutions to gun violence are elusive, Wells says part of the problem is that guns have become embedded in our culture.

“We are living in an age where gun violence has become a way to solve problems,” Wells said. The mentality is that the other guy might have one, so you have to get one, Wells said.

“It’s to the effect that now it’s ‘Who is the fastest to draw a gun?’” he said.

Evans said she’s come to understand how people coming through her emergency room became ensnared in violence.

“Some are in pure survival mode, so I personally don’t find it surprising why certain decisions are being made,” she said.

She’s seen people who started using marijuana at age 6, whose moms taught them to fight so they could survive on the streets, who have seen their dad kill their mom.

“That’s a type of trauma very difficult to recover from,” she said, referring to a client who saw his mother die.

“Some of these neighborhoods, these kids can’t go out at night, there’s no public lighting, there’s nowhere to play, the school is unstable, the parents work two to three jobs.”

Evans doesn’t wade into the debate over gun safety regulations except to echo Negron: It’s a complex problem requiring equally complex solutions. She has hope that Omaha is small enough that by working together, the city’s residents can turn the cycle of violence around.

She’s also well aware of the National Rifle Association’s criticism of trauma surgeons who decry the carnage they see.

“Stay in your lane,” the organization has tweeted to surgeons who speak out.

“This is our lane,” she said. “You ought to see our trauma bay after we try to resuscitate someone. There is blood all over the floor, the team is devastated, it’s exhausting. We are on the receiving end. We are as downstream as it gets, this is where you go when you get shot.”

No one’s been arrested in Jonathan’s shooting, and that’s not something he dwells on.

“It happened,” Jonathan said. “I can’t do anything about it. If they get away, they get away.

“If they get caught, I’m still going to be messed up. It’s life, you just got to go on. So I’m here. I’m moving on, trying to heal, trying to get better so that I can go on and do better.”