“I'm no different, I mean, if I can make it, anybody can make it,” DeSean Graham said. “There's change in me. There’s change in anybody else.”
Standing outside the CT Violence Intervention and Prevention headquarters on Ashmun Street in New Haven, Graham is a lifetime away from Jan. 6, 2021.
When the country was watching the U.S. Capitol, Graham, then 15, and another teen tried to steal a police car during a stop in West Haven.
They tried to get away by driving through a cemetery. An officer was injured, and Graham was sentenced to 24 months in prison.
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“That was a changing event for me because I learned how to take accountability and responsibility for certain actions and things that were done,” Graham said.
While incarcerated, he built a relationship with Tyrone “Tiger” Whitaker from CT-VIP. It’s part of the group’s prison outreach program.
“And I just wanted to give him the tools to be able to come home and be able to survive and have that mentality of, you know, leaving that bad stuff behind him,” Whitaker said.
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Between 2020 and 2021, the teen lost his best friend and his brother. Both were gunned down.
Then he lost his grandmother and lost his home in an apartment complex fire - all during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Through Whitaker’s mentoring, he learned about mental health and how to address what he was feeling. The pair still have a bond today.
“Tiger was on me heavy, like day in day out, you know what I’m saying? Like, ‘yo bro, you gotta get this done, bro go to school.’ I was able to graduate from high school,” Graham said.
That’s the mission of CT-VIP: building relationships with at-risk young people and those who commit violence through mentorship, prison outreach and community engagement.
“So, we're trying to change the belief system of youth,” Leonard Jahad, executive director of CT-VIP, said.
One way they go about that change is to use clinical therapy techniques in their mentorship, including in their group sessions with inmates at Cheshire prisons.
Jahad said they often find abandonment as an underlying issue, and that frustration can lead to acting out.
“As a young man in society, it’s like everybody is angry in their early teens,” Graham said. “Everybody has anger nobody knows how to deal with them.”
Unfortunately, that anger can show up in deadly violence. Friends and Riverside Academy students Uzziah Shell and Daily Jackson were also involved in CT-VIP.
Alivia Langly works for CT-VIP and said the back-to-back losses have been tough.
“This a 24-hour job, it’s not something that is 9 to 5 and we go home. We were at the hospital until 11-12 o’clock at night,” Langly said.
The teens were gunned down in separate shootings less than two weeks apart. Police are investigating potential rivalries that might have led to their deaths.
“It's everywhere, you know, this whole opposition thing, this vulnerability. And that's what we're trying to decrease here at the program,” Jahad said.
Graham’s success and the teens' deaths highlight the difficult nature of their work.
“If someone was re-arrested, or someone was harmed, or someone harmed someone, and they were on our caseload, you know, the staff was taking it hard, and they were owning it,” Jahad said.
In those situations, they have to check on each other, regroup and go back out in the community to continue the work.
And when they can get rivals to agree to do sit-down mediations, young people feel heard.
“When we do it, we've had zero resulting violence when we talk to both sides,” Jahad said.
Both youth pre-trial detention rates and court cases in Connecticut are each down more than 60% in the last 20 years, but data shows those numbers have been on the rise since their lowest points in 2021.
NBC Connecticut met with William Outlaw and CT-VIP staff at McDonald’s on Whalley Avenue where they keep a presence and do some of their community outreach work.
“Since we’ve been here, we’ve engaged over 100 kids we didn’t even know,” Outlaw said.
This is where high schoolers hang out, and where CT-VIP is working on building relationships with young people who are potentially heading for trouble.
They’re also keeping the peace. The restaurant often draws large crowds and sometimes police attention.
“There's really nowhere for them to go, so that's why they congregate here,” Gramen Wilson, COO Golden Arch, said.
The New Haven native was having trouble with the behavior and crowds of teens, so he invited CT-VIP to come in.
Outlaw said he doesn’t mind the kids being at the restaurant. He knows where they are and that they aren’t getting into trouble. But he said that should exist at a community center.
“I think the city needs to think about creating more after school with some type of recreation, with some type of tutor, some type of rules,” he said.
CT-VIP continues trying to fill the gaps for young people in the greater New Haven area through mentorship, mediation, prison outreach and community engagement.
Their programs are expanding. They’ve started a girls’ group for seventh and eighth graders at seven schools in New Haven and Hamden.
Jahad said they want to expand, but they are looking for more grant funds to support more staff and more programs.
He said he knows what they’re doing is working and they’re reaching young people who are ready to accept them. Graham now says he wants to join the staff.
“So, if it got through to me, then I'm sure the same skills to get through to somebody else," Graham said.
And he said out of everyone who’s supporting him in his journey, he’s dedicated to doing it for his mother.
“Ten toes,” Graham said. “All the time. Every night to see me make it home, that's her happiness right there. Being successful, being productive. That's what she needs.”
