Revisiting The Lost Class

The first thing Daran Wiley wanted to be was an astrophysicist, according to his mother Rashawn McKenzie. He even dressed as one for a school event one year.

“He came home and he was like, ‘Mom, I want to be an astrophysicist and if you don’t know what it means, it’s okay, I can tell you,’’’ McKenzie said. Wiley was struck and killed by a train over the summer and was just 14 at the time of his death, leaving a hole in the worlds of people around him.

He’s one of 63 children in Milwaukee between the ages of four and 17 who died from September 2024 to September 2025.

In one workshop, Ajamou Butler, founder of Heal the Hood, asked a room full of 150 kids to raise their hands if they knew someone who had been killed. Almost every hand went up. Some kids raised multiple hands. Nearly 100 students eventually admitted they knew five or more people killed by guns.

“What we then analyzed was that five to 600 people in this room alone, that we have all lost,” he said. “That’s a whole generation of potential change makers, potential UWM graduates, students, or potential business owners. And when I looked at that, it shook me to my core. I never really thought about it like that.”

It’s not just homicide. Milwaukee’s youth are dying of everything from asthma to reckless driving.

Over the course of a semester, three UW-Milwaukee students committed themselves to a three-month investigation into the deaths of Milwaukee youth. Their focus was urgent: children and teenagers, ages four to 17, all who were school-aged.

While the team drew initial inspiration from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s “The Lost Class,” their project quickly evolved into something broader and more personal. While the Journal Sentinel’s project only focused on gun-related deaths in MPS, the student reporters expanded the dataset to include all children from Milwaukee County who died from natural causes, self-inflicted harm, accidents, and reckless driving losses that often go unnoticed in public conversations about youth mortality.

Dr. Brenda Cassellius, Akira Quinn, and Brooke Hargraves.

What began as a class assignment soon turned into a collective responsibility. Each student brought a different skill set to the project: data analysis, interviewing, and archival reading, but they shared the same question: What does it mean for a community to keep losing its young people, year after year?

To seek those answers, the students widened their circle far beyond data sheets. The student journalists, two of whom graduated from Milwaukee Public Schools, interviewed the Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent, leaders of local organizations, parents, grief-support group leaders, professors, MPS teachers, and anyone who could help them understand the layers of loss affecting Milwaukee’s youth. Each conversation added a new dimension to the project, revealing not only the circumstances surrounding each death but also the emotional, institutional, and community responses that followed.

“I was completely floored, and very saddened,” MPS Superintendent Dr. Brenda Cassellius said. “I was sitting in a board meeting, and I was listening to them say all the names in the memorial, and it was like one of my first board meetings, and I think that was late March or early April, and I was just shocked to continue to hear the names.”

As the student reporters sifted through news reports, school statements, and social media memorials, they found themselves piecing together not just numbers but stories of children whose futures ended before they began, and of families and classmates living within the echoes of their absence.

The deeper they researched, the clearer their purpose became. This project was not simply about documenting death; it was about understanding patterns of vulnerability, examining the systems that fail young people, and giving voice to the stories that rarely make the front page. In tracing these losses, the students set out to uncover what the city’s data could not show on its own: the human impact behind every statistic, and the urgent need to ask why these names continue to accumulate.

They split this project into four parts, each covering different topics. Each topic covers a different angle of this project. They focused on health and wellness in Milwaukee, violence, families, and education. They also recorded an audio segment explaining why they wanted to be involved in this project.

Who is a part of the Lost Class?

With the project, the team initially obtained, through an open records request with the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office, a list of 167 children who had died from September 2024 to September 2025. They sorted through this in an effort to retain the concept of a “Lost Class,” leaving out children who were not school age, did not reside in the Milwaukee County area, or whose deaths were related to genetic conditions.

This narrowed that list down to 63 children. Among the findings, there were a total of 42 males and 21 females. The categories of deaths are as follows:

There were 28 homicide victims making up 44.44% of the deaths of the lost class. Twenty-six, 41.23%, of these were gunshot victims. For example, Bryant Triplett was just 14 when he was shot and killed last December.
There were four suicide victims, making up 6.35% of the deaths of the lost class. For example, Amere Brewer was 12 when he died by suicide last April.
There were four deaths caused by reckless driving, making up 6.35% of the deaths in the lost class. For example, Raki Henderson was 17 when he died from a reckless driving incident in August.
There were three accidental deaths, making up 6.35% of the deaths of the lost class. For example, Daran Wiley was 14 when he was struck and killed by a train over the summer in an accident.
There were two deaths caused by complications from asthma, making up 3.17% of the lost class deaths. For example, Caleigh Thompson was 11 when she died in July due to asthma complications.
Other causes include cancer, drowning, and other health-related deaths. There were 22 children who fit into this category, making up 35.51% of the lost class. For example, Donovan McLemore was five when he died due to complications of infection with influenza A (H1N1 ’09) virus last December.

Out of the 144 homicide deaths in Milwaukee from September 2024 to September 2025, our lost class makes up 19.44% of those. This is a big jump compared to 2023 where data from The Journal Sentinel’s Homicide Database states, in Milwaukee there were 183 homicides, but 12.02% of those were school-aged children and in 2022 where school-aged children made up 10.71% of homicide victims.

In addition, the team found that there are many things that could be contributing to these deaths. Lead, lack of resources, the presence of trauma, conflict resolution, parental absence or lack of responsibility, social media, and lack of guidance were all things experts named in interviews that are contributing to these death rates within children.

“I can only speak on our youth, our kids, you know, because they are our future and they aren’t even getting a future,” Kamid Everett, mother of Bryant Triplett, who was killed when he was just 14 due to gun violence last December, said in an interview with the student reporters.

Bryant was described by his mother as a cook, peacemaker, gamer, Milwaukee Bucks enthusiast, and goofy. He was loved by his family.

Our youth are our future – what is causing them not to get there?