Like 50,000 others who stood at the starting line for the New York Marathon on Nov. 3, Trevon Bosley of Chicago was prepared to push his body to the limit over the course’s 26.2 miles. Unlike them, however, Bosley dedicated his run to deceased family members and preventing the gun violence that took their lives.
According to NBC News, Bosley’s cousin, Vincent Avant, was shot and killed down the street from his family’s home in 2005.
Then, in 2021, Bosley’s brother, 18-year-old Terrell, was fatally shot outside of Lights of Zion Church in Chicago’s West Pullman neighborhood.
“It really shook up everything in the family,” Bosley told NBC News. The family stopped celebrating holidays and even listening to music. “We only started finding relief through doing prevention work.”
Bosley was a mentor for a Chicago organization, Bold Resistance Against Violence Everywhere (B.R.A.V.E), which organizes talent shows, basketball tournaments, and other programs. This work led him to a meeting with victims of the 2018 Parkland, Florida, school shooting where he shared stories about members of his group’s experience of gun violence in Chicago.
The Parkland school shooting eventually spawned the creation of March For Our Lives, a gun violence advocacy group founded by the youth who survived the shooting, of which Bosley is now the co-chair.
Bosley told NBC News that in order to help him deal with the aftermath of his brother’s death, he turned to running.
“I needed something to bring me comfort and take my mind off of it,” he said. “I heard people talk about running like that was relaxing for them, and that helped them.” Running regularly, Bosley said, “really started to clear my head and it was just doing positive things for me.”
Bosley participated in the New York Marathon as part of a group of runners representing Team Inspire, a group of 26 runners with varying levels of marathon experience which was facilitated by the group organizing the marathon, New York Road Runners.
Although his mind was on his brother during the race, ahead of the race, his thoughts were also focused on Chicago, which has earned a spot in the national imagination as a place where gun violence is rampant.
Although gun violence has decreased in recent years, Bosley told NBC News that gun violence in Chicago is due to “a multitude of problems,” which include a lack of funding for the education of the city’s youth, a lack of workforce programs, and an influx of guns from gun-friendly states.
“Indiana is only a 15-minute drive,” Bosley told NBC News. “So, we have all these other problems that we are trying to decrease in our community and now we have the influx of guns just flooding in. That’s created the gun violence that we see in Chicago.”
According to a 2022 research article published in Science Advances, Chicago is one city where community violence interventionists are utilized.
The city spent $50 million on these programs in 2022 due to a national $5 billion commitment to community violence intervention programs from President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act.
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