Lorin Shields lies in the crib with his 4-month-old son, Lorin Jr., at their Allegheny Dwellings apartment.(Haley Nelson/Post-Gazette)

Lorin Shields lies in the crib with his 4-month-old son, Lorin Jr., at their Allegheny Dwellings apartment.
(Haley Nelson/Post-Gazette)

Statistically, about a third of juveniles who experience trauma will develop symptoms of post-traumatic stress, said Anthony Mannarino, director of the Allegheny Center for Traumatic Stress in Children and Adolescents.

“That’s the good news, bad news,” he said. “The good news is these kids are resilient, they bounce back and two thirds don’t develop significant psychiatric problems secondary to these events. But the bad news is that about a third do and the third that do don’t recover unless they get help.”

Children who suffer more than one trauma — any type of trauma, from sexual abuse to bullying — are more likely to develop long-term symptoms, he said. They may become hypervigilant, always on the lookout for danger, which can lead to difficulty concentrating, sleeping, sitting still. They face a higher risk for the development of psychiatric disorders like depression, suicidality or drug and alcohol problems, Mr. Mannarino said.

“Think about these kids,” he said. “They’re really aroused because of what happened. They can’t calm their mind down. They can’t calm their body down. They’re always on the alert for bad things. So what do these kids do? They turn to marijuana, they turn to alcohol to self-medicate.”

Research shows that adverse childhood experiences — including verbal, physical or sexual abuse, family member incarceration, mental illness, substance abuse or the absence of a parent — increase the risk for health and well-being problems in adulthood.

In 1999, the seminal Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study of 17,000 adults found that the more adverse childhood experiences the adult reported, the higher the risk of alcoholism, heart disease, liver disease, financial stress, depression, sexual violence and a variety of other conditions during adulthood.

The original study surveyed a mostly white, middle-class population with health insurance. It found that 13 percent of the people surveyed reported experiencing four or more adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).

When 28 residents of the Hill District answered the same survey questions in 2016 as part of a University of Pittsburgh student’s dissertation, 61 percent reported four or more adverse childhood experiences.

“As a child, being hit with this kind of trauma can change your biology in a way that affects you as an adult,” said Kimberly Peterson, who wrote the dissertation. She’s now an assistant visiting professor at the university. “What we’ve learned is the higher number of ACEs, the more these people will suffer as adults.”

She was surprised by the large percentage of people who reported a high number of ACEs in the Hill District. But she thinks some in the community expected the results.

Rev. Abernathy, who was involved in the survey, said explaining the trauma to community members helps residents understand “why things are they way they are.”

“[There is] this reality of historical, complex, multi-generational trauma,” Rev. Abernathy said. “When there is gun violence in our community, it’s not in the context of just one event, it’s in the context of this sea of trauma we have been swimming in for generations.”

456 1/2 Hays Ave., the location where C.J. Mikula-Conrad was shot at age 16 and his brother, David McIntyre, was killed at age 11. A gunman entered the home while the boys were playing video games and began shooting.
(Haley Nelson/Post-Gazette)

After a gunman pumped six bullets into 16-year-old C.J. Mikula-Conrad, the teenager lay on the floor next to his 11-year-old brother, noticed blood coming from his brother’s mouth and turned away.

He heard his grandfather say, ‘He’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone.’

Saw his own thumb hanging by a fishing-line thin string of tissue, watched his grandfather cradling his brother’s head.

He felt blood spurting from his back.

And all he wanted to do was sleep.

“I was almost asleep,” he said. “And then the paramedics came in and started cutting off my clothes, and they’re like, ‘You have to turn. Turn with us.’ And I’m like, ‘What?!’ I felt no pain until I turned. They put me on a board. It was stiff and cold and it hurt.”

His brother, David McIntyre, died that day, Nov. 1, 2015. The case is unsolved.

The wounded hand that C.J. Mikula-Conrad, of Mt. Oliver, suffered in the shooting that injured him and killed his 11-year-old brother David McIntyre in 2015.
(Antonella Crescimbeni/Post-Gazette)

C.J. spent 10 days in the hospital and underwent multiple surgeries. Now 18, he’s still got a bullet in his liver and one in his forearm.

Sometimes in quiet moments, when he’s watching TV or listening to music, his mind drifts to the shooting. Sometimes, he feels full of rage.

“I’m listening to music, and it’s not even an angry song but I just want to go outside and start fighting someone for no reason,” he said.

He never used to feel that way before the shooting. A lot was different then: he was on the wrestling team, worked part-time as a dishwasher, was a popular student at Pittsburgh Carrick High School.

C.J. went back to 10th grade after the shooting, leaving early three days a week so he could go to physical therapy. He knew kids would have questions, and he didn’t mind talking about the shooting. But he found school wasn’t the same, especially during his junior year.

“I just felt really weird,” he said. “I felt like [other students] were staring. I’m not going to sit in class, checking around me 24/7. I’m not going to sit in class and be paranoid. So I just stopped going.”

He started skipping, spending his time on the basketball court, staying for hours on end at friends’ houses. He made it look like he was going to school — he’d grab his backpack, dress the part, head out in the mornings. Sometimes he even went to homeroom before he bailed.

But his attendance plummeted, and eventually he stopped going to school altogether. He went to therapy regularly for several months, learned about coping skills, about the triangle of feelings, thoughts and behaviors.

“Your feelings go to your thoughts and your thoughts trigger behaviors and that’s how the triangle works,” he said in June. “Basically basketball is how I solve everything. If I get angry I can take it out on the basketball. I can even stab it if I want. I can go buy a new basketball. A cheap one is like five bucks. It’s better than being home and getting irritated for no reason.”

C.J. Mikula-Conrad, of Mt. Oliver, recounts what happened the day of the shooting that injured him and killed his 11-year-old brother David McIntyre in 2015.
(Antonella Crescimbeni/Post-Gazette)

Recently his therapist moved to a different job, and he stopped going. C.J. resumed regular attendance at school, and he left Pittsburgh in November, moving in with his father out of state.

It’s not uncommon for teenagers to struggle in school after surviving a shooting, said Stephanie Walsh, executive in residence at Pittsburgh’s Center for Victims. When someone’s sense of safety is stripped away by violence and the person is thrust into the hypervigilance and stress that can follow trauma, it’s harder to handle daily life, she said.

“When we’re under stress, our brains categorize instantly: You’re either helping or hindering,” she said. “So when a professional approaches a kid who may have fallen asleep or may not be paying attention, the kid may come across as verbally aggressive. If you don’t have a trauma lens, you see an out-of-compliance kid.”

“If you have a trauma lens, you can start to have a conversation about what just happened,” she continued. “You can say, ‘You were good, you were sitting there quietly, and then what happened?’ Rather than, ‘What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you sit still?’”

Teenagers who have been shot often have one of two reactions, said Cynthia Snyder, clinical director at the Center for Victims.

“They get this sense of invincibility, like, ‘I’ve been shot, I survived, nothing is taking me down,’” she said. “Or on the flip side, teens get very scared and skittish and just want to stay home and not go to school. It’s polarized, and the polarization itself is the problem.”

It’s also common to see teenagers numb themselves to the trauma and try to avoid dealing with it, Mr. Mannarino said.

Lorin Shields places a hand on the head of his stepson, Cayden Smith, 5, at their Allegheny Dwellings apartment in Fineview. A scar on Shields’ torso shows where doctors went in to remove shrapnel when he was shot in the side at age 18.
(Haley Nelson/Post-Gazette)

“The experience is so difficult and painful that kids avoid talking about it,” he said. “Kids have this back and forth between intrusive thoughts, they can’t get it out of their minds, but at the same time they don’t want to talk about it, it’s too painful, it’s too hard.”

Teenagers who have strong family support systems, positive relationships and well-developed coping skills can more easily overcome the trauma, Ms. Snyder said.

The way a community responds to a young shooting victim is also critical, she said.

In some neighborhoods, the violence is so common that it’s become normal, said Valerie Dixon, a victim’s advocate at the Center for Victims. She once walked Broad Street in East Liberty and asked residents if they’d been impacted by gun violence. About every third house said yes, she said.

“It’s generational trauma that we’re dealing with,” she said. “They think this is the norm, and new generations come in and think this is normal. It’s normal to hear gunshots every day, it’s normal that so-and-so’s cousin died.”

Ms. Dixon, whose 22-year-old son was murdered in 2001 by a 19-year-old man, remembers going to an anti-violence community meeting in the Hill District with roughly 150 other people about 10 years ago.

“And a 14-year-old stood up and we asked him, ‘What is your dream, what is your hope?’ ” Ms. Dixon said. “And he said, ‘I just want to be 18. All we want is to make it to 18.’ ”

Ms. Snyder believes any approach to quell violence must include an early intervention with families when children are very young.

“It has to start by having conversations with caregivers about what kids’ emotional needs are, what healthy attachment looks like, how to maximize growth and development so that kids and their brains get wired to control impulses and moderate feelings of anger and all that stuff that as teenagers goes into being shot or shooting,” she said. “We have to pay attention after it happens, but the long-term solution, the cure, is paying attention when they’re very young.”

Three days in a coma, 17 surgeries and 40 lost pounds followed Mr. Shields’ shooting.

Hundreds of shotgun pellets burned hot in his side, still fresh. A tattoo of a cross on his right arm with the words “Only God can judge Renny,” was sliced up and rearranged, skin grafted to cover his wounds. He thought of suicide.

“There is no therapy out here, nothing to help people like me, trying to function back in society,” he said. “You just have to see what you see. It’s like a dark tunnel or a maze. You can’t see what you’re touching, you just have to push forward.”

Watching his grandmother helped him get through. His whole life, she’d had one arm; the other had been shot off.

“My mom used to tell me to stop complaining,” he said. “’You don’t got nothing compared to your grandma.’ Her whole arm was gone. It was motivation. How dare I?”

The 27-year-old man who Mr. Shields said shot him was arrested a few days after the shooting and charged with attempted homicide. The case went to trial. Mr. Shields took the stand. He showed jurors his scars. The man was acquitted.

One juror, who asked not to be named, said in November that he believed Mr. Shields but that a lack of evidence and vague testimony made it impossible to be sure the man on trial was guilty.

“What it boiled down to when we were deliberating was I couldn’t have gone to bed at night knowing I convicted a person that I wasn’t 100 percent sure I should have convicted,” he said.

Mr. Shields has no faith in the justice system, and no patience for police officers.

“To find out that the person who tried to kill me was going back to his normal life, whereas no matter how hard I try, truthfully I’ll never be 100 percent again…They made me stand up there and look at his face,” he said. “The DA told me we had it.”

Still, he said he no longer holds any ill will toward the man who shot him.

As he recovered after the shooting, Mr. Shields went back to high school, but dropped out quickly.

“Other people were taking advantage of me,” he said. “They knew I couldn’t do nothing. I went back to school and enemies that I’d had previously, you could tell, they were waiting for their moment, waiting. So I let school go.”

He worked odd jobs in construction, factories, maintenance and most recently for a junk-hauling business. He married in March, and his wife gave birth to a boy in July.

Being shot at 18 was “God’s wake-up call,” Mr. Shields said.

“It gave me a lot of motivation,” he said. “I owned getting shot. I don’t make an excuse for it. And to tell you the truth, me getting shot put more ambition in my mind. It made me not want to finish last, just because I got shot.”

The family is still living in Allegheny Dwellings, but Mr. Shields says they’re planning to move, and soon. Nine days after the June 9 shooting wounded a man next door, gunfire erupted again, hitting a man in the hip and a woman in the hand.

One bullet whizzed through Mr. Shields’ front awning, feet away from his pregnant wife.

Shelly Bradbury: 412-263-1999, sbradbury@post-gazette.com or follow @ShellyBradbury on Twitter.