Swaysiana Rankin was a bit of a loner even before her brother died.
At 17, she’s worked a few jobs. She tried cheerleading, but it wasn’t her thing. The Chicago teen preferred to hang out in her neighborhood with a handful of close friends or her little brother, Swaysee.
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But the day before her senior year of high school began, her “big little brother,” as she calls him, was killed. Swaysee was shot to death at the end of their block in the South Shore neighborhood on Sept. 4.
He was 15, one of 59 children shot to death in Chicago in 2023, according to data from the Cook County medical examiner’s office through mid-November.
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Swaysiana is still here. Around her, life appears to have returned to its usual patterns, but it doesn’t feel normal, she said. She keeps to herself.
“I don’t talk to nobody,” she said. “I don’t trust no one right now.”
Sudden, violent loss reverberates through families and communities all too often in Chicago. But experts say that young people who see their siblings die are particularly vulnerable to the havoc grief can leave in its wake. Losing a sibling to violence doesn’t just disrupt the lives of that child’s family members — it can reshape the way a young person sees the world.
“Adolescence is a time where kids are creating their goals and their future vision,” said Tali Raviv, director of School Mental Health at the Center for Childhood Resilience at Lurie Children’s Hospital. “The idea that a young person could be taken and their life cut short really interferes with that process of thinking about, ‘Who do I want to be? Who do I want to become?’”
Data from the Cook County medical examiner’s office shows the city is in the midst of a sustained uptick in gun-related juvenile killings. In all of 2022, 66 juveniles were shot and killed in Chicago. In 2019, the figure was 38. The increase in gun-related youth homicides comes as the overall number of killings in Chicago is down more than 10% from 2022, according to Chicago police statistics.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker declared gun violence a public health crisis in 2021. According to The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, guns were the leading cause of death among children and teens in 2020, accounting for more deaths than COVID-19, car crashes, or cancers.
Teenagers may respond to a sibling’s violent death in a range of ways: They may isolate themselves or dramatically increase or decrease risk-taking behaviors. They may feel a sense of hopelessness, or constant fear and danger. They may ask themselves “why not me?” or disengage from their old goals or interests.
A large cutout of Swaysee Rankin is held near his casket during his burial at Homewood Memorial Gardens Cemetery in Homewood on Sept. 23, 2023. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune)
Scholars and advocates said young people grieving this kind of death need backstops in the form of mental and behavioral health assistance and adult guides to help them manage their loss and the impact it has on their lives.
“To be a teenager dealing with a major loss while you’re trying to figure out who you are as a person, what you want to do, you just need so much support,” said Christine Goggins, a violence recovery specialist at University of Chicago Medicine. “You have to slow down because it can affect so much of your trajectory from that point.”
Swaysiana wore a white dress and sunglasses to her brother’s funeral in late September. She drifted in and out of the sanctuary as friends and family took turns with the microphone telling stories about Swaysee.
That day, standing in the parking lot of the funeral home, Swaysiana said she didn’t know what to do. She said she kept waiting for him to walk through the door.
Later, at the cemetery in Homewood when it was time to lower Swaysee’s casket, Swaysiana told the crowd she didn’t want them posting pictures or videos of this.
She knelt on the ground and rested her forehead against the top of the casket as it was lowered into the ground. Beneath the shade of the trees, the crowd watched in near silence.
Swaysiana doesn’t like crowds anymore.
More than a month after his killing, she was still waiting for him to come back.
“I hear the doorbell ringing a lot, and it’s not him,” she said. “I just know he’s going to pop up, and he’s not popping up.”
She is angry and searching for physical outlets for that anger. She got a new tattoo of his name by her ear. She is considering taking up boxing. But she’s acting normally, or as normally as she can.
She keeps her distance from the friends of his who text her to check in. She doesn’t talk about him with her parents.
Raviv, of Lurie Children’s Hospital, said many young people will take cues in their grief and healing from their parents or guardians.
“So much of how children will respond and react and heal is driven by how the caregivers are doing,” she said.
But parents who have lost their children to violence are often dealing with a battery of concerns, from money problems to funeral arrangements to caring for surviving children to their own grief.
A week after Swaysee died, his mother, Ashley Jackson was “destroyed,” his stepfather Wayne Looney said.
“It’s like somebody is helping to keep her heart pumping right now,” Looney said.
Ashley Jackson becomes emotional during the wake for her 15-year-old son Swaysee Rankin at the New Beginnings Church in Chicago on Sept. 23, 2023. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune)
He and Jackson had to manage their own grief, keep up with their younger children and get the bills paid and the funeral taken care of.
“Swaysiana has been in her room with the door closed,” he said.
Raviv added that the sudden, violent loss of a sibling may produce traumatic grief for a surviving child, in which typical grief interventions aren’t as helpful because of how the loss occurred — for example, being shot in the head.
“Any thoughts of that person, even happy thoughts, can lead to upsetting images or memories about the way the person died,” she said.
People experiencing traumatic grief may become hypervigilant or feel constantly unsafe, she said. They may also try to avoid feeling their emotions, experience intrusive thoughts such as nightmares or flashbacks or begin to think about the world in a different way.
Mental health care can be an important way for young people who have lost siblings to understand their grief and continue their lives, Raviv said. But just 1 in 5 young people who need mental health care have access to the services they need.
Harmony Goss, 16, who also recently lost her brother to gun violence, said she could probably use a therapist. Demarjay Branch was shot in the head in Austin Sept. 30 and died Oct. 3. He was 16.
They are first cousins, but Harmony referred to him as her brother throughout her conversation with the Tribune.
Harmony Goss, 16, in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood on Nov. 14, 2023. Goss’ 16-year-old cousin Demarjay Branch died days after being shot on Sept. 30, 2023. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune)
She had mentioned the idea of therapy to her aunt, who’d sent her a website to check it out. But she isn’t sure about insurance and hasn’t proceeded much further than the website.
She remembered getting the call from her aunt, who told her not to panic but to get to the hospital. Demarjay had FaceTimed her the night before.
She has a few buttons with pictures of him that she wears everywhere. But she doesn’t talk about him. Friends check in on her, “but I never let the conversation go past the ‘You OK?’”
She wants to be a cosmetologist and social media star. She wants to move to Houston when she gets older because she thinks there is more opportunity for that kind of work there than in Chicago. Her favorite subject is English and she likes to write. She’s particularly interested in poetry.
She hasn’t written anything about this — “yet,” she said.
In elementary school, they’d do their homework together — though Harmony remembers she was the one pulling most of the weight. They had a joint graduation party in eighth grade. They’d been set on graduating high school together.
She’d give Demarjay girl advice. He went to all of her birthday parties, which she hated when she was younger “because he’d try to talk to all my friends.”
But when she turned 16 this past April, “he stayed with me my whole birthday,” she said.
Harmony Goss holds up one of two pins she now wears regularly that features her cousin Demarjay Branch who was shot in September and later died. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune)
She’s putting as much distance as she can between herself and her emotions about his death. That makes it hard to be around her family: “I don’t want to think about it and they can’t stop thinking about it,” she said. “So it makes me not want to be in the house or around them.”
Her grandfather’s house in Austin was the family’s home base for barbecues, parties, games. But she said it’s hard to be inside because there are pictures everywhere.
Their family begins their Christmas celebration at midnight and she is not looking forward to opening gifts without him.
“We were so close that it’s to the point where holidays are going to be weird,” she said.
Chicago Survivors Director JaShawn Hill said detachment, desensitization and difficulty processing are common responses in young people who lose close relatives like a sibling to violent crime.
She said teens who have lost siblings need “consistency and someone who is really committed to giving the service and support that they need to treat post-traumatic stress, and someone who is really informed and educated about how those symptoms present.”
For Zadrain Evans, 20, mentors from school and a spoken word poetry program as well as mental health support from Chicago Survivors helped him grieve the death of his brother, Tre’Velle Washington.
Evans added that focusing on things he enjoyed, such as music, was helpful, as was talking about Tre’Velle with their mother, Zheine Washington.
He was 15 when Tre’Velle, 26, was shot to death in front of their family home in Garfield Park.
He lived in the house for five years after his brother died.
“That was a period in time where I had to kind of figure out how I wanted to deal with the traumatic event that happened,” he said. “It was so hard that I couldn’t really even talk to my mother about it.”
Communicating accurately was difficult enough to begin with, he said.
“I always had this problem where I feel like you can’t really fully explain yourself to someone; you can’t really communicate perfectly with somebody, even though we all speak the same language,” he said.
After the pandemic broke out, he stopped speaking almost wholesale. He wasn’t playing the guitar or video games as much. He had a hard time drinking enough water. There was a crack in a brick outside where he thought he saw his brother’s face.
“It was like he wanted to say something, but he couldn’t get it, couldn’t say it,” their mother, Zheine, said of that period. “And he was just looking at me and I’m like, Oh my goodness. What’s wrong with my son?”
His mother took him to the hospital shortly afterward. It had been two or three years since Tre’Velle had died.
Evans is doing better these days. He said if he could tell himself at age 15 anything, “I would tell myself to work harder. Work harder at school, at everything: the guitar, my friends, relationships.”
His mother said Evans worked hard then, and does now.
Goggins, of the University of Chicago Violence Recovery Program, lost her best friend to a spray of gunfire on a CTA bus in May 2007 and almost immediately channeled her grief into work.
She got involved in anti-violence activism, which gave her a positive outlet for her emotions after her friend’s death and also introduced her to other young survivors of crime victims. She said it was less common for teenagers to lose people close to them to gun violence in 2007 — “It was unheard of, really, high school students being shot and killed,” she said.
These days it’s common enough that UChicago has a pediatric violence recovery specialist.
When Goggins worked with teenagers, she said she offers them her own story and tries to make sure they know that there’s something after this.
She described that as “the grief is never going to go away; you kind of learn to live with it.”
She remembered she went to school the day after her friend was shot. Years later, she has no idea why she did that. She remembers how isolated she felt.
“I felt I was on an island,” she said. “It happened around the time that we were taking AP tests. I had to get accommodations to move my tests back, and I remember people not knowing what to say to me.”
She remembered working through college applications and attending prom. She remembered cutting a lot of school and quitting the basketball team.
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“I was still trying to be a teenager,” Goggins said. “I don’t even think I met with a counselor at my school. I didn’t want to be a Debbie Downer by thinking about my friend who was not here.”
She said if she could tell her 17-year-old self anything, it would be to get help with her mental health sooner and to not rush any choices while she was grieving.
“I wish I had had somebody tell me, ‘You don’t have to make major life decisions while you’re in the immediacy of this trauma,’” she said.
Swaysiana Rankin, 17, sits atop a car parked on East 75th Street in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood as friends and family hold a vigil for her brother Swaysee on Sept. 7, 2023. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune)
Swaysiana had planned to start a nursing program for her senior year, but missed the first month of school after Swaysee died and wasn’t able to enroll. She isn’t sure about that path now anyway. In mid-November, she said she was thinking about directing more toward criminal justice.
It has been about two months since Swaysee died. She’s still contemplating outlets for her anger at South Shore Hospital, at the person who shot him, at Swaysee himself for leaving the house on Sept. 4. She’s spending more time at her parents’ house.
“It’s getting to me more that he’s gone,” she said. “I just feel alone.”
She said she’s taking the days as they come. But she still doesn’t know what to do.