Part 3: After the trigger is pulled

Third in the series

Tuesday, March 14 - In a lecture room at Temple University Hospital, a color slide flashes on the screen: It's a close-up of a throat slashed open, the windpipe still visible in the bloody scene.

Cynthia Vega, 13, whose eighth-grade class is studying violence and writing about it in diaries, looks down and begins to cry and rock in her seat.

"You OK, baby?" asks Temple staffer Scott Charles.

Cynthia nods but does not look up. She is thinking of her 20-year-old cousin, shot in the neck two months earlier. He can barely speak now.

A classmate turns around in his seat and hands her a tissue.

Charles continues: "I don't care how many memorials you get, how many spray-painted murals they put in your name, this can't really be worth it, can it?"

Less than two weeks after sharing poignant diary entries about their absent fathers, the "Freedom Writers" of Grover Washington Jr. Middle School are seeing the blood-and-guts aftermath of violence.

"I wanted them to get a better perspective on the finality - or the desperate reality - that occurs when things turn from a little conflict into guns so quickly," explained their eighth-grade teacher, Michael Galbraith.

He also planned to have them meet a genocide survivor from Sudan and read about the Holocaust.

Cynthia, who had been absent a lot - stomachaches and headaches, she says - had raced for the bus this morning, determined to make the trip. Her stepmother forgot to set her alarm, she explains. Her dad, who works in a hat factory, couldn't give her a ride.

She is grappling to understand violence. Not only had her cousin been shot, a friend of hers had killed himself. And while she lives in a close-knit Olney neighborhood where her stepmother is a block captain, she worries.

In February, she'd written:

"My mom kisses me good-night and every night I pray for my life... . In my culture when a young lady turns 15 she'll have a sweet 15 to introduce them to womanhood, but I'm not sure if I'll make it... . But I'm still glad that I'm alive for now with my beloved friends and family."

Charles, Temple's outreach and trauma coordinator, continues his slide show.

Click. A man shot in the heart, his chest ripped open.

"This is what disputes look like to us," Charles says.

Click. A victim with an opening in his gut, where a colostomy bag will be attached.

"I don't know how gangsta you were before that, but it's kind of hard to be gangsta like that with a bag full of poop," Charles says.

Click. The last three slides: a smiling child, the boy a bit older, then as a teen. "This is Lamont Adams," Charles says.