PHILADELPHIA — Philadelphia has recorded its 500th homicide this year, surpassing a bleak milestone for the second year in a row as the city’s gun violence epidemic continues at an unrelenting pace, leaving devastating loss and trauma in its wake.
While the total number of homicides recorded so far this year is slightly lower than last year’s record-breaking total, it’s a loss of human life the city has only twice recorded in its known history and matches the record of 500 killings set in 1990, at the height of the crack-cocaine epidemic.
Within this tragic total are mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, entrepreneurs and students. The victims were as young as 9 — like little Jamel Parks, fatally shot alongside his father, Jerry, on their way home from a Memorial Day barbecue — and as old as 78.
