"I trust no kids," she says, "because this same child who's going to walk up to me and be smiling in my face could be the same child that pulled the trigger and killed my son."

With no arrest in the April slaying of her son, Vincent, 17, in a Northeast Philadelphia drug house, Donna Thomas believes she has been followed. Her daughter has been jumped. "I'm always looking over my shoulder," she says. "I feel like a sitting duck."

The family of 17-year-old Robert Pierson III is as frustrated as it is frightened. Although the teen who allegedly shot and killed Pierson in the spring is in jail awaiting trial, five other youths who had set out to rob people in Fairmount with him are not, with most charges dropped.

Recently, a kid from another neighborhood pointed a gun at Pierson's younger sister, Monica, 14, who is slated to testify in the trial. Was it a random attempt to start trouble, or friends of the accused trying to intimidate a witness?

When two teens robbed Robert's other sister, 19-year-old Lauren, in September, she was "more mad than upset." She refused to give up her purse until one youth suggested they shoot her; then, when the boy with the gun fled, she chased the other, who had taken the bag. She asked him to give her back something - anything - from the purse. "I said, 'Really, my brother just died. I don't need this!' "

But he refused.

Some survivors have plunged into their jobs. Some are on antidepressants or so paralyzed, they miss months of work.

Donna Thomas is "going through the motions" - barely able to eat and sleep, much less pick up her son's belongings at the morgue.

Others have found their voices in tragedy. When no witnesses came forward to identify her son's assailant, Lawanda Welton spoke out repeatedly on television and at community events.

"That's not me," she says. Under normal circumstances, "I shy away... but my son needs justice." Even though the case is unsolved eight months later, Welton won't stop. "Believe me," she says, "I'll be back on the news again."

When Chelena Hammond, whose son, Raphael Glee, was shot in North Philadelphia, demonstrated for stronger gun laws in Harrisburg, she placed a packet in the mailbox of every state legislator. The envelopes contained accounts of his death - two days before his 18th birthday - and autopsy photos "so they could actually see it."

"I don't know what else we could do," she says. "They need to find out how it's so easy for someone so young to get a gun."

Hammond does have one consolation: an arrest. "I do feel blessed," she says, "that they have my son's murderer."

The empty desk

It took a couple of weeks for someone to tell Nache Rennick she was sitting at the dead boy's desk.

New to the school, the 17-year-old had no idea the chair had been occupied for the previous two years by Terrence Adams, killed in August by a drug dealer who police say was trying to rob people.

Martel Davis, another senior at the Parkway Northwest School for Peace and Social Justice, finally told her:

"I'm not trying to be disrespectful, but the seat you're sitting in was Terrence's, and if it wasn't a problem for you, you could move."

The horrified girl changed her seat, and the small classroom was transformed.

"After that," Martel says, "everybody just started looking at the seat and remembering that he wasn't coming back, and then everybody started getting emotional."