Amid spike in shootings of youth, Baltimore woman teaches children how to save one another: ‘We are the first responders’

In a dusty event room at Oliver Recreation Center in East Baltimore, a teenager fell back on the linoleum floor and clutched his leg.

“My leg, it’s broken!” he called out to an audience, pretending he had just been shot.

Lavon Tilghman, 9, rushed to tie a tourniquet around the leg, tightly twisting a rod on the neon orange band. “This is going to hurt,” he advised as his peers’ giggles filled the room. In this space, kids joke and laugh, but the danger outside is real — at least 105 people 19 or younger have been injured in Baltimore shootings this year. At least 30 others have been killed.

To combat the staggering spike in youth gun violence, Nicole Bryant drills lifesaving steps into young and adult minds through interactive CPR classes and “Stop the Bleed” workshops.

“Us, as a community, need to know the skills so we can help each other,” said Bryant, who teaches at summer camps, business offices and substance use programs through her nonprofit We Responders Inc. “Because when a shooting happens, who’s the first on the scene other than the people who are with them when they got shot?”

Increasingly, those people are children and teens. Baltimore is on pace to have more young homicide and shooting victims this year than any other in the past decade, according to a Baltimore Sun data analysis.

As the shootings continue, Bryant hopes to change how people respond to emergencies.

Children and adults can use shirts, socks and other materials to pack gunshot wounds on trauma victims while they wait for ambulances. They can manually pump people’shearts. They just need to learn how.

“What can you make a tourniquet out of?” Bryant asked the group of 20 kids in Oliver Recreation Center on a Saturday in May. Her sister, Shaday Dargen, assists her with the workshop.

“A shoelace,” one teen answered.

“Or a keychain,” Bryant replied, holding a lanyard over her head. She demonstrated how to wrap the cord around a boy’s skinny arm, right above his fictitious wound. The kids then took turns stuffing gauze into a Styrofoam tube shaped like an arm, applying pressure to a hole to stop the flow of red dye.

Lavon attended Bryant’s workshop in January after five teenagers were shot outside Edmondson-Westside High School, one fatally. Now, he helps Bryant with her demonstrations, showing older kids how to properly perform chest compressions and tie a tourniquet.

“It was pretty easy how to learn it. But I think other kids will need practice,” the 9-year-old said of CPR. “The thing I like most is to teach kids. Because they sound really interested in stuff and they have fun and stuff.”

Bryant, who grew up in Dolfield in West Baltimore, is trained as a certified nursing assistant and geriatric nursing assistant and works at a behavioral health clinic. She channeled her grief over the death of two baby nephews in 2020 to become CPR-certified and start her nonprofit to prevent more deaths.

Her nephew Daniel choked and aspirated from bottle feeding at 6 months old. Tyler died of a fentanyl overdose two weeks after he turned 1. Daniel’s mother tried to perform CPR. Tyler’s parents didn’t know how.

These tragedies crystallized for Bryant how many people don’t know cardiopulmonary resuscitation or other first-aid methods.

It’s an issue clinicians and organizations like the American Heart Association are also trying to tackle. In the U.S., less than half of cardiac arrest victims receive bystander CPR, said Audrey Blewer, a resuscitation scientist, epidemiologist and assistant professor at Duke University School of Medicine.

“Every minute counts. And every minute that the victim is not attended to … their chances of survival drop dramatically,” Blewer said. “So that’s why many of us view this link in the chain of survival — just getting bystanders there and pushing hard and fast in the center of the chest — as being critical and something that basically anybody in a community or anybody in the United States can do.”

People who live in predominantly Black areas are less likely to receive CPR or defibrillation from a bystander when their heart stops beating, according to a study by Duke University researchers. Counties with the lowest rates of CPR training were more likely to be rural, have a higher proportion of Black and Hispanic residents, and have a lower median household income, according to the study.

CPR training can cost around $40 to $200, which can be a barrier to access, Blewer said. Maryland schools require students to learn CPR, but the time spent on it can vary. At Baltimore City Public Schools, it’s taught in a “mini-unit” during health class.

That’s why Bryant’s trainings are free and discounted. Within a year of starting We Responders, Bryant, a single mother of three children, opened a brick-and-mortar in Northeast Baltimore’s Mayfield neighborhood. Her office is designed as a community hub on Harford Road, with yoga classes, job training and mental health resources. She also teaches teens how to resolve conflict peacefully.

Bryant hopes to attract more donors in the coming year.

Dr. Ben Lawner, the medical director for the Baltimore City Fire Department, said bystander rates in Baltimore are low compared with neighboring counties. City residents performed CPR in only 20% of all calls for resuscitation in 2022. That rate does not include calls at nursing homes or traumatic arrests from stabbings, gunshots or car accidents. Howard County had a 52% bystander rate during the same period, Lawner said.

“We are the first responders,” Bryant said. “We can stabilize a person before 911 gets there. We can do a lot. And that’s all sometimes a person needs.” Not everyone dies from their wounds, Bryant said. Instead, they die because “you can bleed out in five minutes, and we looking at the paramedics arriving within 10 [minutes].”

When multiple shootings occur in a night, on top of other time-sensitive emergencies like drownings and overdoses, it can take more time for help to arrive.

Baltimore’s EMS system is one of the busiest per capita in the country, according to fire officials. Emergency medical services receive about 525 calls daily and take about 225-250 people to the hospital each day. On top of the extreme call volume, there’s a steep shortage of paramedics, causing some firehouses to temporarily close and other working units to travel farther to reach a scene.

Brooklyn residents sprang to action in early July when a mass shooting broke out at a block party. Witnesses described how people applied pressure to others’ wounds and drove victims to a nearby hospital while police and paramedics descended on the chaotic scene. In total, 30 people were shot, the majority of whom were teenagers. Two died.

Bryant hopes to one day reach the kids who aren’t connected to programs — vulnerable teens who spend their days on the street — and people who could benefit the most from learning these first-aid methods.

At a recent training, a 17-year-old began to cry, Bryant said.

“At the end, he was like, ‘My brother got shot in front of me. If I knew this before, my brother would have survived,’” Bryant said. “He told us, ‘Ms. Nicole, I’m blessed enough to have parents to make sure I get this training. What about my friends that’s outside that really need it?’”

On a hot July afternoon, 14 children, aged 7 to 13,knelt on foam mats inside Bocek Recreation Center in East Baltimore. Their heads bobbed up and down as they pressed the weight of their small bodies on the chest of an inflatable CPR dummy.

“It hurts my hands,” a boy complained as “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees played in the background. The American Heart Association advises people to apply chest compression at the tempo of the ’70s song, which gives about 100 to 120 beats per minute.

“Twenty seconds left, y’all got this,” Bryant said.

The group of boys continued pumping pretend life into their dolls until the timer rang.

Two stood up and high-fived.

“You saved my life,” one said.