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.

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."

ONLINE EXTRA

For multimedia shows of Cynthia Vega and other eighth graders, as well as their teacher, talking about how the diary project changed the class, go to http://go.philly.com/writing