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 dispatch of Orange June — a month in which this paper files one piece a day on guns — and like the letter we sent to Louisville last week, it is one of the soft ones. *There is no politician at the top of this page and no bill in it. There is a boulevard, a line of orange signs, a number the news will call good — and a mother who knows exactly what the number is made of, because one piece of it has her son's face on it.*

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## § THE BOULEVARD.

On June 6, for National Gun Violence Awareness Weekend, the grass median of North Sherman Boulevard across from Sherman Park filled with orange yard signs — each one a face, each one a name, each one a Milwaukeean killed by gunfire. *Cars slowed and rolled past sign after sign after sign: a drive-through memorial, built so the city would have to read its number one name at a time.* You organized it with Trinika Walker, the founder of Stop the Violence 53206, and you told the Neighborhood News Service why, in a sentence we are keeping exactly as you said it: *"Every memorial sign represents a life that mattered and a family forever changed."* *Among the mothers on that boulevard 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. That is what the signs are for.*

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## § AMAREON.

Your son's name was Amareon Allen, and we want the record on this page to hold more than the way he died. *He was nineteen. He was a running back — Milwaukee high-school football, then a college roster in Iowa, a kid in the middle of chasing the dream version of his own life — when he was killed in November 2021.* Your words, kept as you said them: *"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 have built since — that after losing him, you realized how much families need a space to honor their loved ones, share their stories, and feel supported* *"in a new community they didn't ask to be in."* A new community they didn't ask to be in. We have read a great deal of writing about gun violence this month, Ms. Allen, and no one has named the membership more precisely than that.

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## § THE NUMBER.

Now the number, because the news this week will tell it as a good story, and it is one — and it is 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 is a drop of about a quarter, and a quarter is real: it is thirteen families this year who did not join the community nobody asks to be in.* When the man who runs this paper read the story, he sent this desk one line, and we are publishing it the way he typed it: *"down is great... that's still 43 signs though."* *And then we found that you had already said the same thing, better, standing 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 cannot. Either there is a sign with a child's face on it or there is not, and this year, so far, there are 43.

The picture above this letter is not a photograph of your memorial — we drew it, because the real signs carry real faces, and those belong to the families who printed them, not to us. *But we drew it with one sign too many. At the end of the line stands a forty-fourth sign, blank orange, holding nothing but a question mark.* That sign is the entire month, Ms. Allen. *Every law this paper has spent June asking for, every walk, every safe, every phone call a mother makes at 9:41 instead of 9:42, every scholarship your foundation hands a kid with a football under his arm — all of it is one project: keeping the forty-fourth sign blank.*

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## § WHERE YOU CAN HELP.

Out of the worst thing that can happen to a parent, you built the Amareon Allen Foundation — and before we put it at the bottom of this page, we did what a newspaper should do and checked. *It is a registered Milwaukee 501(c)(3); the IRS record is real and public, and we have linked it below so you can check it too.* The work is exactly what the boulevard was: scholarships for young football players still chasing the dream Amareon did not get to finish, healing circles and trauma support for the families nobody asked, and food for neighbors who need it. *If the orange this month has made you want to do one concrete thing, here is one, and it is not us — we take no money, this month or ever. It is her.*

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

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## § WHY THIS COMES FROM US.

You should know who is thanking you, because it is a stranger. *We are a small newspaper from out of state. We have never stood on Sherman Boulevard, and we found you the way the whole country should be finding its neighbors — through a local nonprofit newsroom doing its job.* We do not know Milwaukee the way you do, and we will not pretend to. *What we know is that you took the worst day of your life and turned it into a median strip full of other families' children, honored by name, in the one month a year the country agrees to look — and somebody outside Wisconsin should say that back to you, out loud, with your own words in it.*

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Thank you, Ms. Allen — for the signs, for the foundation, for the sentence about success that this paper intends to keep. *Milwaukee's number is down, and down is great, and you are one of the reasons it is down.* Forty-three signs this year. The whole job — yours, ours, everyone's — is the blank one at the end of the line.

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— Harper Garcia

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

*harper@spotlightdispatch.com*