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Heading off the horrors of the street

Doctors are mobilizing to help the city's "disenfranchised young" break the savage cycle of despair and violence.

Dan Taylor, a West Mount Airy pediatrician, had an epiphany while reading about the murder of Jarrett Gore. It was an inspirational force behind yesterday's conference on preventing violence.
Dan Taylor, a West Mount Airy pediatrician, had an epiphany while reading about the murder of Jarrett Gore. It was an inspirational force behind yesterday's conference on preventing violence.Read more

Sitting at his kitchen table in the growing light of a July day, Dan Taylor opened his newspaper and saw a photograph of the late Jarrett Gore.

The pediatrician from West Mount Airy put down his coffee and read the caption.

"The sisters of Jarrett Gore weep over his coffin at his funeral."

Taylor wept, too.

Gore was 15 years old, shot and killed by another 15-year-old in a place called Nicetown.

Taylor asked himself a question:

"What am I doing to prevent the Jarrett Gores of Philadelphia from ending up like this?"

With at least 116 people murdered so far this year - 11 more than on the same date in 2006 - physicians of all kinds see the aftermath of city violence every day. That puts them in a unique position to combat the latest public-health crisis: violence.

But many are not prepared to deal with the intractable problems faced by urban inner-city youths.

"I felt so inadequate to do anything about it," Taylor said in an interview.

So he asked some of the nation's top experts to teach him and others about violence.

To that end, about 250 doctors, social workers and community activists met here yesterday for a youth-violence prevention conference that Taylor organized. The goal: to educate themselves about how to stop the killing.

"We have a window of time, right now, to stop this epidemic," said William F. King Jr., a pediatrician and local vice president of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

"Otherwise, until the disenfranchised young have settled their grievances, this epidemic could last 10 years," King said.

"Imagine: 2004 to 2014. Oh, my God."

King, Taylor and other pediatricians are part of a movement that aims to attack violence closer to its roots. They are starting to look for nascent signs of trouble in their patients, asking mothers if they feel safe at home, encouraging parents to read and share meals with the children.

They diagnose the health of the home as well as the child.

They believe these questions, many formulated by the American Academy of Pediatrics, are the medicine that doctors can use to help prevent violence. Healthy children have higher self esteem and feel less of a need to lash out at bullies. Good readers get better grades and more opportunities. Parents who eat with children may talk with them more.

Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Calvin B. Johnson, a pediatrician who grew up in West Philadelphia, backs a state program to intervene with victims at the hospital.

Doctors, in his mind, can help.

"There is no one answer, but it is part of the solution to solving the problem of violence in kids' lives," said Johnson. "Everyone has to play a part."

At yesterday's conference, funded by Drexel University and held at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children, Johnson introduced adolescent-medicine specialist Kenneth R. Ginsburg to the crowd.

Tap into teen patients' resilience and intelligence to help them solve their own problems, said Ginsburg, who is on staff at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

University of Pennsylvania sociologist and author Elijah Anderson described the code of the street - the way many teens survive amid poverty, crime and drugs.

Robert D. Sege of Tufts University talked about the genesis of the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines he helped develop to teach doctors how to counsel families in violence prevention.

Anthony Olmeda, 25, who not long ago was running wild in the streets, told how he'd been shot twice - and that his first positive role model was a probation officer.

Taylor wants to intervene well before youths get to that point. He has seen what happens when no one does.

As a volunteer at Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital and Nursing Facility on New York's Roosevelt Island, he met a 19-year-old man who had been hospitalized for four years after being paralyzed by a bullet. He had use of only his mouth.

"He taught me a lot more about life than I taught him," Taylor said.

Years before, at around age 6, he moved with his parents to a West Philadelphia commune to promote social change.

Walking home from a neighbor's house at 48th and Cedar a couple of years later, he saw a silhouette of a man attacking a woman. He heard shouting, saw a hand rising and falling.

"I ran home and was so scared I couldn't get my keys in the lock," he said.

The woman, he found out later, was someone he knew. She had been killed.

"I don't want those kids to feel the way I felt," he said. "There was a lot of chaos."

By the time he'd turned 11, the family had moved to West Mount Airy. He attended Germantown Friends School and eventually started his professional life as a banker.

But soon after earning a spot in a prestigious bank-training program in New York, he found himself looking for a way to align his desires with his fond memories of helping kids at camp. After work he began darting off to pre-med classes at Hunter College and later found his way to the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine.

Taylor, 42, said yesterday's conference completed an arc in his life. He had titled the event "From Awareness to Action," and action was calling.

"Where we need to go now is to have more people caring for children in Philadelphia."