Continued gun violence can rip apart the fabric of a city, as Trenton is learning.
It's an all too common occurrence: A gun is fired and another shooting victim becomes a numbing crime statistic that gets a brief mention in the news along with a host of other police activity.
But behind every one of those shootings there are tragic stories that we often don't get to hear about: stories about family members and friends who are left to grieve; left to carry on without a wage earner; left to deal with life without a husband, a wife, a mother, a father or a child; left with heartache and pain.
We got a glimpse of that personal anguish in the account of a Trenton father who lost his daughter to gun violence and three years later became a shooting victim himself.
A day after he turned 52, Elliott Simon, Jr. was shot just a few doors away from his own home on the 100 block of Boudinot Street on April 8. He died later that day in the hospital.
Simon certainly was no stranger to gun violence. His 19-year-old daughter, Tierra Green, was shot and killed in Trenton in 2013. She was standing in a group of about 30 people when a man started firing at the group, killing the teen. Alton Jones, 22, was later charged with the crime.
Murder victim was father of slain teen
Her death weighed heavily upon her mother, Tia Green, according to family friend and city activist Darren Green (no relation to the teen).
Tia Green died after she lost her daughter.
"The coroner's report won't put it in there, but Tia died of a broken heart," Darren Green told The Times.
Here is a family that lived in a neighborhood racked with violence and who, ultimately, succumbed to it.
Simon's death, the fourth homicide in the city this year, was the culmination of a week of shootings that left eight people injured in seven different incidents in the city.
The city's murder rate has been falling for the past two years, but that doesn't blunt the impact each violent death has, particularly in neighborhoods where the violence is a way of life and law-abiding residents feel unsafe and under siege.
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Police are trying to be as pro-active as possible. They have taken several initiatives that have helped tamp down crime. Cooperative law enforcement programs such as Mercer County's Shooting Response Team and Homicide Task Force, the state's Targeted Anti-Gun program and Trenton's Violence Reduction Strategy have helped take illegal guns off the street and combat crime.
But as long as the root causes of crime - poverty, lack of jobs, poor schools, broken families - are present, violence will flourish if we let it.
Residents don't have to accept gun violence and other crimes as a way of life. We have to speak up and send a message it won't be tolerated.
Spare us the grief of another victim of murder.