NEW ORLEANS — The violence across New Orleans impacts people every day, and in different ways. Experts say children who experience violence can carry that trauma into their adult life, and without access to resources, that trauma could be life or death.
Calvin Pep shared with Eyewitness News how witnessing violent crime and being subject to trauma, set him on a trajectory that impacted his whole life. A trajectory that's still impacting him to this day.
Pep says his life of crime began when he was just 10 years old.
"I grew up in the seventh ward of New Orleans...A community that had a lot of violence," Pep said. "Breaking in cars, you know, fighting real violent... abuse in the home being abused by my stepfather, you know, all these things were shaped, you know, me."
As a teen, he was sentenced to juvenile life for burglary.
"When I got out, is when it got real bad with the gun violence, right. Because now I understood this at a young age on the street. If I don't protect myself, then I end up like the first person that I ever seen laying on the ground."
At the intersection of N Rocheblave and Allen, Calvin Pep says he was shot in 1992. In 1993 he was stabbed at the very same intersection. The trauma and violence he experienced, he documented in his book. On the cover, he stands at the intersection he nearly lost his life.
"I was on a course that was, you know, that was destroying me," he said.
His upbringing is a familiar story in New Orleans, where children sometimes witness violent crimes.
Dr. Elliott Alexander with UNO's Department of Psychology says people who witness violence deal with it differently.
"Seeing someone be injured or being hurt, or even hearing about it can be quite traumatic to a young child," Dr. Alexander said. "There's gonna be an increased likelihood that those children be pulled into criminal activity themselves, just because of survival, not necessarily because they're bad kids."
He says seeing violent crime alters a child's brain development.
"It's going to affect their ability to pay attention in school, it's going to affect the way they can regulate their emotions, it's going to affect their social, emotional, interactions with others," Dr. Alexander said.
Pep turned his life around, he believes it takes a village to raise a child but says our village is sick.
Pep said, "I'm a seventh-grade dropout...I have a master's degree now in criminal justice. I have a degree in addictive behavior counseling and prevention."
As a community, we need to put our heart into saving our young people, because he says circumstances can change someone's whole life.
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