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The Lives They Lived

This episode contains descriptions of violence. At the end of every year, The New York Times Magazine devotes an issue to remembering those who have died in the past year. This year’s focus is gun violence, which is now the leading cause of death for American children, and the short lives that ended far too soon because of it. Today, we remember three of them: Lavonte’e Williams, Elijah Gomez and Shiway Barry.
Duration
28m
Broadcast on
21 Dec 2022
Audio Format
other

This episode contains descriptions of violence. 

At the end of every year, The New York Times Magazine devotes an issue to remembering those who have died in the past year.

This year’s focus is gun violence, which is now the leading cause of death for American children, and the short lives that ended far too soon because of it.

Today, we remember three of them: Lavonte’e Williams, Elijah Gomez and Shiway Barry.

On today’s episode: The voices of Cheese, Shiway Barry's best friend; Crystal Cathcart, Elijah Gomez’s aunt, and his mother, Jennifer Cathcart; and Lavonte’e Williams’s mother, Miracle Jones, and Michael Jones and Tanika Jones, his grandparents.

Background reading: 

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.


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For New York Times, I'm Michael Bobaro. This is a Daily. Every December, our colleagues at the Times magazine devote an issue to remembering those who died during the previous year. We call him "Lemmy" because he is like like a living here. He was going to listening to like when I wanted to talk about something. He was just a wild child. I always called him "My Tarzan" because he had like really long hair. With gun violence, now the number one cause of death for American children, the magazine decided to remember those whose lives ended far too soon. He skipped the walking and crawling face. He went straight to running. He ran everywhere. I never understood. I was like, "Why is he laughing?" I remember the day his voice came and I heard him in the background. I'm like, "Who is that in your house?" Kids from every corner of the country. She was very shy actually. She didn't want us to be 16. She was telling me how he was like, "Yeah, I want to work out, I want to get taller." A disproportionate number of them, black boys. He just had this big old smile and when he smiled, it's like, you remember that, you know? Today, the stories of three of those children told not through their deaths, but through the lives that they lived. It's Wednesday, December 21st. So, maybe I could just start by asking you, when you met her and how you first met her. So, I met her two years ago, when I was around 12, actually, it has just been my 12th birthday. In September of 2020, a 12-year-old boy in Indiana fired up his laptop so he could play his favorite video game. So, I was on a Minecraft server, which is something that was probably a really big thing for me back then, and even now, I think I've spent most of my time on Minecraft. And within minutes, he found someone he'd never met before. So, I got on, and there was only two people on the server. Me and another player named Guinea Pickard. So, you might hear me referring to shy ways Guinea a lot, but for a pretty big part of our friendship, I knew her as Guinea. Do people intend to keep their real names? A secret or just, like, never came up? Uh, well, it never really came up, because it's the Internet no one really, like, goes around saying, "This is my real name. Hello." And what was your observer name? So, I was Cheese. Any reason for that? Uh, I just liked Cheese. Cheese needed an ally that day. Me and Pickard was 11, a year younger than him, and lived in Minnesota. He asked if she would be on his team, and she said yes.

Transcription truncated.

This episode contains descriptions of violence. At the end of every year, The New York Times Magazine devotes an issue to remembering those who have died in the past year. This year’s focus is gun violence, which is now the leading cause of death for American children, and the short lives that ended far too soon because of it. Today, we remember three of them: Lavonte’e Williams, Elijah Gomez and Shiway Barry.