This Is the Face of Brooklyn Gun Violence

Screenshot via the New York Times

Once the swarm of cops and reporters and neighbors and rubberneckers leave a crime scene, this is what’s left.

In a short film for the New York Times, documentary filmmaker Shiho Fukada revisits one of Bed-Stuy’s youngest victims of street violence — Tayloni “Tutu“ Mazyck, who was just 11 years old when she was hit by a bullet outside of her home near Gates and Throop avenues in May 2013. She’s been paralyzed since.

“When I heard about this tragedy, I feared that whatever happened to Tayloni and her family next might get lost, their story buried among the ceaseless incidents of gun violence in this country,” Fukada writes in the Times.

So the filmmaker spent some time with Mazyck and her family in their Harlem apartment, where they moved after the shooting.

Two-and-a-half years after Mazyck was shot and paralyzed, we’re faced with the real effects of Brooklyn gun violence: a young, bed-ridden girl’s daily restlessness, her boredom, her unshakable depression. All punctuated by bouts of panic and frustration.

“Tayloni was a very independent little girl,” her mother tells the filmmaker. “She liked to go outside. She liked to go places. She liked to dance. She liked to run track. She’s always been an outgoing girl — and now, not so much.”

“She tends to crawl back into her own little world and just sit there,” Mazyck’s mother says.

And then there are the panic attacks. “I’ve run up in there, and her heart be racing,” her mother says. “And she was like, ‘I can’t deal with this, I can’t deal with this, I can’t do this.’ And then she starts saying, ‘I should have ducked down and laid on the floor.’ She keeps saying what she should have did, what she should have did, what she should have did.”

Watch the mini-doc below, and read Fukada’s full takeaway over at the Times.