This story was produced by Philly Youth Radio, a project started in response to bullying and violence in Philadelphia schools.

By Luis Lopez

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Have you ever lost anybody you were close to?

I have.

Recently, my friend Anthony was shot four times over a drug deal gone bad. He didn’t deserve this. Anthony was ten years older than me and he was the guy I would go to if I had a problem. I couldn’t believe that people hated him enough to kill him.

I remember when I was seven, on a hot sunny day, Anthony and I hanging out with the others from the block. They would all come to my house – sitting on the stoop telling jokes. Anthony told the funniest ones. He was the ‘funny man’ of the block. He had voices that at times, were as deep as a movie super villain or as screechy as a cat. People walking by would squint, grin, and laugh.

Today the block I used to live on in North Philly looks deserted, except for dealers lurking for drug fiends. When I visit my uncle, who still lives on the block, I don’t stay outside, I just go straight in. The block isn’t the same ever since Anthony’s death.

But it’s not just my community that changed. My school is also different. To me school feels numb. It’s like time has been frozen. I sit there at my small brown desk and put my head into the comfort of my arms and just replay the good old days in my head.

I want to ask him: Anthony, my friend and brother. Why? I heard that the shooter wanted a single twenty dollar bag of marijuana, but instead, you gave them four five dollar bags. For that, they took your life?

Anthony, I miss you. I miss the laughter you brought into my life, my school, and my neighborhood.

Today is may 27, 2011 and we’re still alive. Read more...

By Zachary Valdez

Early Monday morning the news of Osama Bin Laden's death arrived here in Paris, along with the reactions of a rejoicing America -- scenes of celebration in D.C. and New York. But the jubilation in the United States, for American university students like me, raises the difficult question of how to react to the news on foreign soil: what is the appropriate response? 

Like many Parisians, I learned of Bin Laden's death on the radio Monday morning. And like all Americans, the remainder of the day was filled with bizarre moments of disbelief.  After a final exam where our professor made no mention of this news, I met with other American students to mull over the events.   However, instead of a reaction to the death of Bin Laden, we were reacting to those  initial images captured in D.C. and New York.

One student even described her shock seeing video of baseball fans who burst into chanting "U-S-A!" at a game Sunday, presumably after hearing the president's address.   Another student mused about how he would have imagined his response to be much stronger when this day, the death of Bin Laden, finally came. Instead, he feels that any celebration is almost certainly in vain, since there will undoubtedly be a new head to Al Qaeda.  

In fact, if the American students in Paris are not celebrating, it is perhaps because we are a world away from the US, unsure of how to react with our anchors back home -- the people we spoke to, the media we consulted -- now temporarily absent.  

In America, we go about our lives believing that our deaths will be properly recorded. To most of us, it seems a pretty basic job of local government to fill out death certificates accurately, using medical science to parse out fatalities due to homicide, suicide and natural causes. I mean, that’s something about the afterlife we all believe in.

Three month old Dylan Lee Edmonson is dead. His mother, 22-year-old Alexandra V. Tobias of Jacksonville, plead guilty to second degree murder in Dylan’s death. This is one of many deaths connected to an excessive amount of time on the internet.

Farmville is an online application/game that allows users to have their own virtual farm where they harvest crops and raise their own animals. Tobias told investigators that she became angry when Dylan began crying as she was busy playing the game. So she shook him.

Tobias said the baby could have potentially hit his head on the computer during the first shaking. The arrest report says Tobias put the baby on the couch, and stepped out to smoke a cigarette in order to regain her composure. By the time Tobias returned, the family dog had knocked Dylan off the couch causing him to cry once again. The crying caused Tobias to become even angrier and she shook the baby for second time. Afterward, Tobias realized that her son might be seriously injured, so she called an ambulance. Dylan died a short while after being hospitalized.

This is not the first time something like this has happened. A similar story occurred in Seoul, South Korea, when a couple’s newborn daughter died due to starvation. The couple had an internet addiction and were playing games online for an average of 10 hours a day. Ironically, one of the online games they played involved raising a virtual child.

The following originally aired on 11/07/10  KCBS.

By Ross Andrews

I learned about my friend’s death during a lifesaving class.

My friend was telling me about this crazy party he’d been to the night before where he performed CPR on a passed out sophomore who later died. It wasn’t until he told me that the guy’s name was Joe that everything clicked.

Joe was not only a neighbor, a fellow boy scout, and a teammate, but one of my best friends.

The Boy Scout motto is ‘Be Prepared.’ A scout should never walk into a situation with uncertainty. But how could I possibly have prepared for this? It’s not like I need to know how to build an emergency wilderness shelter, but having that knowledge had always comforted me. Unfortunately there’s no merit badge for dealing with death.

It wasn’t until I climbed 12,000 feet to the top of Mount Baldy with my scout troop, that I realized you must be prepared to be unprepared. There are things in life which are impossible to predict, and how you deal with them defines who you are. I still miss Joe, but recognizing this simple fact has helped me deal with his departure.

Previously:

• Quitting Football and Falling In Love
• When Is Ambition Dangerous
• Marijuana Education

I wanted to be a gang member until my cousin got killed.

by Anonymous

This story was originally published by LA Youth. The writer's name is withheld to protect her identity. Names have been changed.

Growing up, every house in my neighborhood seemed like it had one or two gang members. My cousin Ricky was in a gang, too. And his gang ruled the neighborhood. In 1994, Ricky was paralyzed after getting shot in a drive-by. After that he tried to get out of the gang, but a couple months later he was hanging out with his gang friends almost every day and they were planning to get revenge. This made me think that gangs would be there to protect you.

I loved the way people treated my cousin and his friends in the gang. They got free food at restaurants and people in the neighborhood would give them money for protection from rival gangs. So as I got older my dream was to join a gang.

In sixth grade some of my friends and I started a tagging crew, which is what some kids join if they’re too young to join a gang. A crew is a group of people who tag walls to mark their territory. To join, each person had to let the others in the crew hit them for 60 seconds without hitting back. This is one of the requirements for joining gangs, and since most of us had family members who were in gangs, we wanted to model ourselves after them. This was called getting “jumped in.”

I got punched and kicked all over my body, face, arms and legs. The pain hurt like fire, but I wasn’t allowed to cry. If I cried or fought back the minute would start over. Not crying was how I proved I would be strong enough to fight anyone for my crew. After the minute was over, I felt strong and that I could handle any pain without crying.

When I got home, I hid my bruises under the sweater I was wearing. I stayed in my room all night, listening to music and lying completely still in bed. I was in so much pain that I didn’t want to move.

Being young in today’s society, means finding any way possible to communicate with your peers. Be it blogging, Facebook, texting, twittering... youth get inspired by what other youth have to say. And in many parts of the world, youth have important things to say. The role of new forms of media is growing.

Camera Phones in Kashmir
A documentary was created by Suvojit Bagchi, a correspondent with BBC World Service based in India, called, “New Media in Kashmir.” It tells the story of cyber activists - young people in Kashmir who use their camera phones to film violent protests, and then post them on YouTube to spread the images beyond their borders.

According to an article in the New York Times, there were three landmark moments in Kashmiri cyber-activism:
- A YouTube video of protest images set to the song, “Revolution,” by Chris de Burgh in 2008.
- A YouTube video posted by a 15-year-old boy of the shooting of a salesman.
- A YouTube video of protest footage set to Everlast’s song, “Stone in My Hand” (see below). The creator was sought after by the police.

Who are these cyber-activists? According to the article, Indian police try to make them out to be: “illiterate pawns of jihadist forces across the Pakistan border and have suggested that economic development and jobs are the key to getting young people off the streets.”

By: Mario Hammond

Originally aired on KQED-FM. An alternate version aired on KCBS-AM/FM.

Today instead of going to class at a continuation school where he’s been getting A’s in math, my friend and Youth Radio co-worker, is laying in the Intensive Care Unit at Highland Hospital.

On Sunday 17 year-old Daron Ducote was driving home with his cousins, when a car chased by BART police crashed into them in a neighborhood near the Oakland Coliseum.

Daron was thrown through the window, and he landed on a fence in front of a nearby home. He has blood on his brain which doctors say might cause brain damage. He has a broken collar bone, cuts and gashes across his body, and injuries to his spleen.

At Youth Radio, Daron works on the Boss Of Me campaign, to raise awareness about teen dating violence. He has a natural ability to connect with people, which I’ve always admired. He’s one of those people who has so much to say-- And right now I’m praying that he gets more time to say it.

It seems like the violence in Oakland will never stop. Last Friday, right down the street from Youth Radio, 59 year-old Tian Sheng Yu was attacked in broad daylight. Crazy thing about it, I was working with Daron that day and we both looked out the window and saw Mr. Yu on the stretcher.

Who would have known that two days later Daron would be in the same Intensive Care Unit as Mr. Yu? And on Tuesday, that Mr. Yu would be removed from life support.

Next time it could be me, or someone else I know. You can try your best to stay out of trouble in Oakland, but somehow violence finds its way to the innocent.

I’m wondering why the police and public officials are failing to keep our streets safe.

Oakland is my first and only home; I have lived here all my life, 19 years to be exact. I can remember a time when Oakland wasn’t a war zone, but a source of originality and love for community. I remember when the worst thing that could occur during school was a fist fight.

As of today, I could not honestly tell you that I want to raise a family here. Which is sad, because even with all of the chaos, I still love Oakland to the fullest. But I can’t let my child go through what I am going through currently.

 By Vivian Ponte-Fritz

According to foxy news.com the legend, the genius, the creepy, Michael Jackson has returned to our living, breathing world. Doctors around the globe are stunned by his revival and have kept him in a lab, inspecting him to try to find the cause for this amazing miracle recovery. 100 % of the doctors on his case believed that death was a fatal ailment, until now. During a small scale memorial service being run by some fans of his in Sweden, Jackson arose from the ground and began to jerk around to his hit song, Thriller that was being played, in solidarity.  The melancholy event was broken up by the police when five of the twelve Swedish fans fainted with excitement. The police thought that Jackson was another obsessed fan performing an odd ritual, but after various tests the “zombie” was genetically identical to the real “king of pop”. Read more...