You lined a Milwaukee boulevard with orange signs so the city would look its number in the face. The number is down this year. It is still 43 signs.

Dear Ms. Allen,

This is the eighth letter of Orange June — a month where I file one piece a day about guns — and like the one I sent to Louisville last week, it's one of the soft ones. There's no politician at the top of this page, and no bill in it. There's a boulevard, a line of orange signs, a number the news is calling good this week, and a mother who knows exactly what that number is made of, because one piece of it has her son's face on it.

On June 6, for National Gun Violence Awareness Weekend, the grass median of North Sherman Boulevard, across from Sherman Park, filled up with orange yard signs. Each one a face. Each one a name. Each one a Milwaukeean killed by gunfire. Cars slowed and rolled past them, sign after sign after sign — a drive-through memorial, built so the city would have to read its own number one name at a time.

You put it together with Trinika Walker, who founded Stop the Violence 53206, and you told the Neighborhood News Service why in a sentence I'm not going to touch: "Every memorial sign represents a life that mattered and a family forever changed."

One of the mothers out there with you was Marilyn Thomas, whose son Brandon was twenty-one when he was killed in October 2024. Every sign on that median has a Marilyn Thomas standing behind it. That's what the signs are for.

Your son's name was Amareon Allen, and I want this page to hold more than the way he died. He was nineteen. A running back — Milwaukee high-school football, then a college roster in Iowa — a kid right in the middle of chasing the dream version of his own life when he was killed in November 2021.

You described him the way only his mother could, and I'm keeping your words too: "He was a son, brother, grandson and friend who was deeply loved by his family and community." And then you said the thing that explains everything you've built since — that after losing him, you understood how badly families need somewhere to honor the person they lost, to tell their stories, to feel held, "in a new community they didn't ask to be in."

A new community they didn't ask to be in. I've read a lot of writing about gun violence this month, Ms. Allen, and nobody has named that membership better than you just did.

Now the number — because the news this week is going to tell it as a good story, and it is one, it's just not only one. Through June 7, Milwaukee has recorded 43 homicides and 160 nonfatal shootings. By the same date last year it was 56 and 215. That's a drop of about a quarter, and a quarter is real: it's thirteen families this year who didn't have to join the community nobody asks to be in.

When I read the story, the first thing I typed was one line, and I'm going to leave it exactly the way it came out: "down is great... that's still 43 signs though." Then I found out you'd already said the same thing, and said it better, standing right there on the boulevard: "Real success isn't just seeing the numbers go down — it's seeing more young people thrive."

A statistic can fall 23 percent. A median strip can't. Either there's a sign with a child's face on it or there isn't — and this year, so far, there are 43.

The picture at the top of this letter isn't a photograph of your memorial. I drew it, because the real signs carry real faces, and those belong to the families who printed them, not to me. But I drew it with one sign too many. At the end of the line there's a forty-fourth sign — blank orange, holding nothing but a question mark.

That sign is the whole month, Ms. Allen. Every law I've spent June asking for, every walk, every call a mother makes at 9:41 instead of 9:42, every scholarship your foundation hands a kid with a football under his arm — it's all the same one job. Keep the forty-fourth sign blank.

Out of the worst thing that can happen to a parent, you built the Amareon Allen Foundation. Before I put it at the bottom of this page, I did what I'm supposed to do, and checked. It's a registered Milwaukee 501(c)(3); the IRS record is real and public, and I've linked it below so you can see it too.

The work is exactly what the boulevard was: scholarships for young football players still chasing the dream Amareon didn't get to finish, healing circles and trauma support for the families nobody asked, food for neighbors who need it. If the orange this month has made you want to do one concrete thing, here's one — and it isn't me. I don't take money, this month or ever. It's her.

And if you're reading this from inside the number — a Milwaukee family carrying a loss, or a fear about someone you love — the place the families themselves point to is Safe & Sound. They've been doing violence-prevention work in the city for more than twenty-five years, and they answer.

You should know who's thanking you, because it's a stranger. I run a small paper from out of state. I've never stood on Sherman Boulevard, and I found you the way the whole country should be finding its neighbors — through a local nonprofit newsroom doing its job.

I don't know Milwaukee the way you do, and I won't pretend to. What I know is that you took the worst day of your life and turned it into a median strip full of other families' children, every one of them named, in the one month a year the country agrees to look. Somebody outside Wisconsin should say that back to you, out loud, with your own words in it.

So — thank you, Ms. Allen. For the signs. For the foundation. For the sentence about success that I intend to keep. Milwaukee's number is down, and down is great, and you're one of the reasons it's down. Forty-three signs this year. The whole job — yours, mine, everyone's — is the blank one at the end of the line.

— Michael

Spotlight Dispatch · Orange June · Day 8 · June 11, 2026

michael@spotlightdispatch.com