Maria Miller’s graduation from the University of Missouri - St. Louis in May was more than a decade in the making. Her studies towards her bachelor’s degree in criminal justice were interrupted by the deaths of her brother, Harrol Berry, and her son, Courtney Williams. Both men were shot and killed weeks apart in 2014.
In the wake of their deaths, Miller struggled with deep grief and anxiety. The stigma around therapy and a lack of readily available mental health resources made her feel like she couldn’t ask for help, she said.
Miller withdrew from family and friends. She stopped going to church. Eventually, she couldn’t keep up with her college studies. The only thing that got her out of bed each day, she said, was the responsibility of caring for her one remaining son. She feared what might happen to him if she didn’t.
“We’re taught to be strong, even when we’re weak. That's a big problem,” Miller said. “I learned to suppress a lot, just for the sake of not seeming so broke down.”
Miller’s experience is all too common in St. Louis, where there were nearly 2,000 homicides in from 2014 through 2023. More than half of those killings went unsolved, an investigation by St. Louis Public Radio, APM Reports and The Marshall Project found. Williams’ death is among the lengthy list of unsolved homicides.
When no one is held accountable for a person’s death, several families of homicide victims told The Marshall Project that it not only warps their sense of justice — it also complicates their grief. Many said they struggle to find a sense of closure, a struggle exacerbated by a shortage of grief-support resources. Unlike grieving an expected death, traumatic grief is an intense, prolonged mourning following a sudden, often violent, loss. Researchers say it shares symptoms with post-traumatic stress disorder and is also known as complex grief.
The toll of so much loss is unevenly distributed across the city. Homicides tend to happen in geographic clusters, the investigation found. Fairground, for example, a working-class neighborhood just a few blocks wide near Fairground Park, had more than three dozen homicides, and the majority remain unsolved. The city’s Black residents also bear a disproportionate burden. Police resolve far fewer cases involving Black victims than White ones.
The cost borne by these communities is staggering. The Giffords Center for Violence Intervention estimated that the cost of violence in the city of St. Louis in 2020 was more than $1.5 billion, including healthcare, law enforcement, lost wages and other related expenses.
“While community violence is often viewed as a problem of ‘public safety,’ and therefore an issue for the criminal legal system to address, in reality, community violence is a public health issue that impacts every aspect of life in St. Louis,” the Giffords Center researchers wrote in their report.
That estimate, however, doesn’t capture the full picture. The Giffords Center’s analysis only factored in the financial impact of the suspect and the victim, including medical and legal expenses, as well as lost wages. It did not consider the cost to families and their communities. It did not count the lost income from jobs that felt impossible to return to after a death, or degrees abandoned because anxiety and depression made it too hard to get out of bed, nor the empty church pews, struggling marriages or substance abuse issues.
Those effects, researchers say, are much harder to quantify, although they are highly visible in qualitative studies of communities with high rates of gun violence, particularly those that are already under-resourced.
Monthane Miller-Jones, whose 26-year old son Mario was shot and killed in 2018, said the grief from her son’s death tore her marriage apart. Her husband struggled to cope, she said, while she became fixated on helping police track down the person who killed her son.
“I was married to my high school sweetheart, and when we lost Mario, we just could not find common ground with each other,” she recalled. “We blamed each other. We just argued – it could be [about] a crumb on the floor, it could have been anything.”
Neither she nor her husband had the tools to support one another through their grief, Miller-Jones said, adding that she desperately wished more low-cost resources to support grieving couples were widely available in her community.
Across St. Louis, support groups do exist for parents and children grieving the death of a family member or friend, but the demand far outpaces the supply, and there are even fewer couples-specific resources. The Crime Victims Center, which offers some of the most robust free counseling and trauma therapy in the city, has a consistent waiting list, according to its executive director. (Individuals can receive up to three psychological first aid sessions while on the waitlist, and the center works with couples and families on an as-needed basis.)
Miller-Jones said she especially yearned for resources that acknowledge the myriad ways people grieve and that could teach couples and families how to support one another through each person’s distinct approach to grief.
“Families are not getting the help that they need … and they need different kinds of things, because my hurt and your hurt may be different,” she said. “My husband, his hurt caused him to really hurt himself. My hurt caused me to push for justice for my son … but his grief was just as much as mine.”
The long-term effects of grief can also impact people’s professional and academic lives, altering their productivity and motivation, said Rachel Wamser, a clinical psychologist and complex trauma researcher at the University of Missouri - St. Louis.
Atif Mahr said he struggled both at home and with work after his 19-year old daughter Isis Mahr was killed in 2021. He and his wife seemed to have opposite ways of grieving: she made their house a memorial to their daughter, while he found it so hard to be surrounded by those memories, he stopped spending time at home. While she threw herself into her work, he said, he ultimately left his six-figure job with the city.
“I just couldn’t supervise 120 people anymore. I couldn’t deal with it,” he said. “Has money changed in our family now? Yes. These are the fallout effects of all of this.”
Living in a neighborhood affected by violence is associated with a greater prevalence of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, said Mohammed Musa Abba-Aji, an epidemiology research fellow at the Boston University School of Public Health. Those conditions, which often go undiagnosed, can manifest as feelings of hopelessness, isolation and difficulty returning to one’s previous rhythms and activities, whether with work, hobbies or relationships.
“There is a ripple effect, where not only the individuals or the survivors but also their families and the broader community is affected,” Abba-Aji said. Over time, he added, “ the social connections in communities tend to tear.”
The U.S. Census reported earlier this year that St. Louis had the most severe population loss of any major city in the country, between 2020 and 2024, driven largely by an exodus of families with children. In 2020, the city’s homicide rate soared, reaching a 50-year high. In North St. Louis, where the vast majority of homicides are concentrated, the population dropped by 40 percent between 1990 to 2019, according to the Economic Innovation Group, a national public policy research group. Meanwhile, nearby suburban neighborhoods in St. Louis County grew by 39% in that same time frame.
Erica Jones is among those who left the city for the suburbs in recent years. She said her entire family’s sense of safety was destroyed after her eldest daughter, Whitney Brown, was shot in 2015, and the killer was never found.
“Everything that I used to do, I’ve completely changed every bit of it,” said Jones. “I don’t let nobody sit behind me when I’m in a car. I don’t give people rides home when they need it.”
Jones said she and her three living children all carry guns now, and are wary of being approached by anyone who isn’t family or a close friend. Jones works with at-risk youth and said she often has to explain the reason for her mistrust. Some think she’s being overly cautious, but she said many of the kids understand.
“It’s crazy that I have to live like that, because I don’t know: Did you kill her? Did you?” Jones said. “Some people do say I’m crazy for doing it, but that’s my piece of security at this moment.”
The violence in St. Louis has drawn national attention. Last year, the U.S. Department of Justice pledged more resources to improve the city’s crime-fighting tools. And the state has already taken steps to expand violence prevention and intervention, including a new statewide Blue Shield program to fund technology and training to solve violent crimes. However, St. Louis city is not among the 201 municipalities who received the Blue Shield designation, intended to recognize a community’s dedication to “building sustainable public safety partnerships.”
When it comes to supporting the families of homicide victims, resources are often limited. The city’s Office of Violence Prevention offers a brief list of recommended services for people impacted by trauma, but those organizations face high demand. And researchers noted that many of the programs that exist are geared towards people who have directly experienced violence and their communities, rather than those left behind after a death.
The Life Outside of Violence program, for example, launched by Washington University’s Institute of Public Health in 2018, provides comprehensive mental health and social services to victims of violent crime and their families. The program specifically targets people who survive violent incidents. Program manager Melik Coffey said his team is “acutely aware that on the spectrum of community violence are also those that lose their lives.” But because of limited resources, Coffey said the program’s goal is to focus on people looking to rebuild their lives in the wake of violent crime.
Families who have lost someone to a homicide are included in the list of people eligible to receive money from crime victims’ compensation funds. Missouri’s Department of Public Safety said that over the last two years, it has paid out less than a third of the roughly $8 million allocated in its budget for compensation. The fund provides money for counseling, lost wages and funeral expenses. But there are limitations that can prevent grieving families from accessing the money. Family members, for example, cannot request money to cover the cost of counseling unless they were living with the homicide victim.
While some families are able to find help in the short-term, it can be challenging to find a support system to address the complexity of the grief. Four years after his daughter Isis died, Mahr said he still relies heavily on his support group of other grieving fathers. Her death is more than just a personal heartbreak, he said. The pain impacts families and communities, too.
“Not only do you lose a child, it tears up your family,” Mahr said. “It’s a life sentence of grief.”
