By A.C. Thompson

Sixteen. That's the number this morning. So far this year, 16 human beings have been murdered in the city and county of San Francisco. Last night two black men were shot to death in the housing projects of the Western Addition; one of the slayings occurred four blocks away from the neighborhood police station.

This grim information has yet to hit the newspapers, but already the salient facts are circulating through the black community: 23-year-old Gaylon Smith and 50-year-old Gerald "J.J." Jackson are dead.

Sixteen slayings. It is Feb. 25, 2005.

In a ramshackle, half-barren office near the Sunnydale housing projects in Visitacion Valley, a tight crew of six women is grappling with the events of the previous night.

When a homicide occurs, the cops string yellow tape around the crime scene and start scouring for evidence, collecting spent shell casings, mapping blood-spatter patterns, pounding on doors. A white van is dispatched from the morgue to pick up the body.

These women help the living pick up the pieces.

They help survivors find a safe place to live. Help them pay the bills. Help them cover funeral costs. Help them find someone to talk to.

The six women belong to the Community Leadership Academy Emergency Response (CLAER) team, a project of San Francisco State University's Urban Institute. Funded by a measly $119,000-a-year budget and propelled by a desire to stem the seemingly perpetual bloodletting in the city's forgotten southeast sector, the team members sit at the eye of the homicide hurricane. Last year, one of the most violent in recent memory, the squad responded to 88 murders, most involving black or brown victims; 2005 is already shaping up to be worse.

• • •

The team's head honcho, Sharen Hewitt, 50, a former aide to Mayor Willie Brown, sits at a table in front of a wall filled with grainy photos of dead black folks. She knows all the names, all the stories.

Hewitt, who speaks bluntly and constantly, jumping seamlessly from street slang to academic jargon, points to a photo. "This guy here, he's the brother of the guy in the green jacket you saw hugging me," she says. She points to a second photo. It's an infant. "Two months old. Nobody bothered to stand up for a two-month-old baby shot in our fine progressive city." She points to third photo. "This boy was in a car and watched as his friend's head was blown off."

"This is happening because they're black and brown and politically impotent," Hewitt spits. "Almost every black person left in San Francisco has been directly touched by homicide."

There are 80 families in CLAER's caseload. I ask team member Sonja Sawyer how she keeps from crumpling under the weight of such grief. "It's a little complicated to explain it," she replies. "Some days it pulls on your spirit."

The team helps traumatized people come up with basic necessities – making sure they have food in the pantry and can cover rent and the power bills. Finding safe housing for survivors is a key problem, Sawyer says. Picture a typical scenario: A mother living in public housing loses a twentysomething son to hostile gunmen who shoot him a block or two away from her apartment. Understandably, the grieving mom is fearful for her own well-being and wants to get as far away as possible, but she faces a nightmarishly slow-moving bureaucracy at the San Francisco Housing Authority and a District Attorney's Office with limited resources for survivors.

Sawyer steps into these dicey situations, pushing the bureaucrats to relocate the family members. Speaking of violence, Sawyer says, "You can't run away from it, but at least you don't have to be in the middle of it."

After I meet with the CLAER team, I get a call from a woman whose 27-year-old son was murdered in 2003. "Sharen is the reason I have this phone I'm talking to you on right now," says this mother, who asked to remain anonymous, fearing reprisals from the killer, who remains at large. "CLAER helped me keep my head above water."

She continues, "Almost everybody I know has had a son murdered. I'm just blown away by the insensitivity of this city. It's like it's OK. That's what really hurts." She is weeping.

Sybil Christopher, who lived in the Sunnydale housing projects for 17 years, lost her brother Andre Banks, 33, in 2002. In part it was Christopher's experiences that inspired Hewitt to create CLAER. "I kept saying people are being killed in the city and nobody is doing anything about it. Sharen took those concerns and formed them into a program," Christopher explains.

Two years on, she has high praise for CLAER. "In your time of crisis, any act of compassion makes a difference. I have nothing but respect and admiration for those women."

Don't get the wrong idea. Hewitt isn't a saint. Around the office or on the phone with city officials, the New York native is sometimes gruff, acerbic, difficult – "I can be a bitch," she says – and she's the first to admit it.

• • •

The deaths of Gaylon Smith and Gerald Jackson are noted in a 207-word blurb in the San Francisco Chronicle, a micro-story revealing that one of the victims had a "criminal history involving narcotics and robbery" and was "not a legal resident of the housing development." With that brief epitaph they become homicide victims 15 and 16, and most of the 800,000 or so denizens of the city promptly move on.

• • •

Hewitt and colleague Molly Iulio-Ufau are giving me a tour of the Sunnydale housing projects, statistically one of the most violent census tracts in San Francisco, a place permeated by an almost incomprehensible history of suffering – eight homicides occurred here in 2004 alone, with several more going down within blocks. The buildings themselves are charmless, two-story World War II-era concrete boxes, many of which feature boarded-over windows.

Our first stop is the Wu Yee daycare center, a collection of prefab buildings on Velasco Street. "We have three hot breakfasts a week now," says manager Tamara Brown, surveying a room buzzing with the energy of 23 animated preschoolers. Brown is smiling. She's clearly proud of the job she and her colleagues at Wu Yee are doing.

But she's also got plenty of worries. "It's hard to recruit employees because of some of the things that are happening in our community," Brown says euphemistically. Those "things" include a dad who was ambushed and slain a few blocks away while dropping off his child at another day-care program.

At the nearby Willie L. Brown Jr. Youth Center, Hewitt introduces me to Kim Mitchell, the force behind TURF, a city-funded antigang group. "Man, Kim, all kinds of shit is jumping off. Two more people are dead," Hewitt says.

"I know. [They were killed in the] Fillmore," Mitchell replies, before explaining how some Gs recently unloaded a bunch of rounds into the front of the rec center, narrowly missing the kids kicking it outside. "They hit a gas line."

In another room, Larry Jones, who lost a leg to gunfire, clutches a pool cue and eyes a shot on the pool table. He keeps himself vertical by perching his stump on the edge of the table.

Outside, Antoine Perry is pulling up in a black Chevy Tahoe. After a quick introduction, he hits a button on the stereo and asks me to slip into the front passenger seat. A smooth flow emanates from the speakers at organ-displacing volume: "It's an epidemic, the way we living. Instead of building schools, they build more prisons. In the ghetto without a pot to piss in. This ain't living."

Perry, who rhymes under the moniker Starving Artist, knows of what he raps. He grew up semihomeless, bouncing around the city, seeking shelter where he could find it, moving from couch to couch as his dad did time in the pen and his mom scrabbled for dope money. At 25, though, he's finally found a niche for himself in the straight world, counseling young people whose lives have been shredded by gunshots.

There are no grocery stores in this quadrant of Vis Valley. For caloric sustenance, locals patronize places like Little Village Market, a corner liquor store with thick diamond-plate steel bolted over the front windows. Like just about every other ghetto corner store, the market offers a paucity of nourishing food (there are a few bananas, oranges, onions, and potatoes) and a vast array of crap (alcohol, chips, cookies, and candy). Little Village features a "Wall of Shame," surveillance photos of people who've been 86ed from the premises, including a young African American man wearing a white headband. Next to his photo is a Magic Markered message: "Caught stealing a bottle of Cisco, not allowed in the store. Call 9-1-1 if he step foot in the store."

Standing outside the store, Hewitt says, "I was caught in the middle of Uzi fire right here.... I've lost 35 pounds in the past two years. And it's not crack or meth. It's the reality of the situation. It's the persistent neglect."

• • •

Twenty-three. In the days after I visit Hewitt and the CLAER team, the homicide stats climb at a rapid, terrifying, and largely unnoticed clip. As this story goes to press, the death toll stands at 23. Their names are:

Franklin Mead, Curtis Evans, Fred Haire, Lacornius Simmons, Michael Helton, Matthew Byrd, Felix Chulin, Victor Baa-Euan, William Bowden, Eddie Robinson, Andre Morgan, Celeste Amos, Theresa Madueno, Pedro Martinez, Gaylon Smith, Gerald Jackson, Gabriel Zavala-Diaz, Christine Chan, Eric Brossard, John Barkley, Yolanda West, Armond Hervey, and Justin Mendoza.

Fifteen of the dead were African American. Seventeen were under 30.

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