Part 3: After the trigger is pulled

He tells how the North Philadelphia 16-year-old sat down to dinner on Sept. 22, 2004, and, predicting his own death, scribbled his obituary on a napkin. "Twenty-four hours later, Lamont Adams was brought to this hospital."

The students, somber and silent, troop to the ER, where Charles asks one of them to lie on the treatment table. Cynthia watches closely as Charles pastes 23 red stickers on the boy, for each place a bullet entered or left Adams' body.

"This is what the surgeons saw, the night they brought Lamont in," Charles says.

The strapping six-footer wasn't breathing and didn't have a pulse, Temple's chief trauma surgeon, Amy Goldberg, tells the students. She directs them to feel their pulse. Some touch their wrists; others their necks.

"Unfortunately, what we had to do with no anesthesia, we had to go between the rib spaces and open up his chest."

She picks up a steel contraption used to crank open a rib cage. At that, Heather Rodriguez, 13, bolts from the room. A classmate, ashen and wobbly, follows her.

"Could he feel it when you were cutting his stomach?" asks Long Nguyen, 14.

"You hope they can't," Goldberg responds. "We can't give them any medication because that drops their blood pressure."

Goldberg lifts a white body bag. "That night, Lamont didn't make it."

In the morgue, as Charles points out eight refrigerators with "almost always someone in there," Cynthia again is hit by thoughts of her cousin and steps into the hall, crying.

"That could have been him. It was this close," she says, holding her thumb and forefinger a slit apart.

Not wanting to miss anything, she soon goes back to find Charles handing out labels like those tied on the toes of corpses.

"Write down on your toe tag the people whose hearts are going to be broken over and over again if something happens to you," he tells the class. "Keep writing until you run out of names."

Cynthia, who has seven siblings and step-siblings and lots of cousins, aunts and uncles, fills both sides of her tag.

Seeing her busily writing, Charles asks what her family would remember about her.

Cynthia thinks for a moment.

"All the songs me and my sister dance to," she says. "And all my favorite movies. They're going to think of me every time."

Charles tells students to keep the tags to remember what's at stake.

"God knows," Charles says, "this girl back here definitely has a lot of people who love her."

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