© 2024 Milwaukee Public Media is a service of UW-Milwaukee's College of Letters & Science
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Stories about kids, guns and how to stop the violence. Precious Lives, created by 371 Productions, is a 2-year, 100-part weekly radio series about gun violence and young people in the Milwaukee area. The series applies a public health lens to each story to help listeners understand the full scope of the problem: who are the victims and the shooters; how are the weapons obtained; and what can we change about the environment that contributes to violence in Milwaukee?

#014 Precious Lives: Violence Intervention Starts in the ER

Emily Forman
21-year-old Matt Voit (right) was 16 when violent injuries landed him in the ER. Jermaine Belcher works for Project Ujima and helped Matt recover.

When kids get shot in Milwaukee, they go to Children's Hospital of Wisconsin. A sea of things meet them when they arrive... nurses drawing blood, doctors getting ready for surgery, frantic family members. Adding to the tension, the perpetrator might still be on the loose, so the cops are there too. And then there’s Jermaine.

Jermaine Belcher works for Project Ujima, a children’s hospital violence intervention program. It started when a nurse kept treating the same kid for violent injuries. After three or four trips the kid stopped coming back ­ because he had died on the street.

Jermaine is breaking the cycle of violence in Milwaukee one kid at a time.

> Listen to all of our Precious Lives stories here.

Related Content