At St Joseph's Cemetery in Franklin County, Ohio, a range of small pamphlets to assist the bereaved are lined up on a stand in the reception. They contain pretty much every permutation of grief: 'Losing Your Mom', 'Losing Your Dad', 'Losing Your Husband', 'Losing Your Wife', 'Talking with Your Kids about Funerals', 'When Death Comes Unexpectedly', and 'Grieving the Death of a Grown Son or Daughter'. The only one that's missing is: 'Losing Your Young Child'. Because that's not supposed to happen.
But it happened to Nicole Fitzsimmons. Her nine-year-old son, Jaiden, lies in St Joseph's Cemetery. On 22 November 2013, Jaiden answered the door before school and Nicole's former partner, and the father of one of her children, shot him in the head at point-blank range. He then sped off, shot a former partner at work (but didn't kill her) and was finally killed in a shoot-out with police.
Jaiden, a sweet-natured boy with a smile almost too big for his face, died the next day. Every day on average seven children or teens are shot dead in America. I picked a day at random and spent almost two years finding out everything I could about them. This was the day that Jaiden died.
When I first met Nicole, four months after her son's death, she was wearing a hoodie bearing Jaiden's name and face and the word 'Legendary'; she wore one of a different colour every day. She also wore a necklace spelling Jaiden's name in curly script. She has another made from his thumbprint, which was taken at the funeral home. It was her birthday, but she hadn't let on to her co-workers and had no plans to do anything special that night. She still wasn't going out much.
When I met up with her again five months later she was still struggling. If she slept the nightmares came; if she didn't she couldn't get up for work. 'It was like before then I was in a theater watching this movie, and since then it's been like walking into a parking lot and trying to adjust to the bright lights from being so engrossed in this movie for so long. It's like the places I used to go to look different to me because it's this post-movie kind of thing.'
Around seven hours later and 1,000 miles away in Dallas, another mother would lose her son to a gun. Samuel Brightmon, 16, was walking his friend home around 11 o'clock at night when he was shot dead. Nobody knows why. Samuel, an obliging fragile homebody, didn't know anyone in the neighbourhood. They had only just moved there. Audry Smith, his mother, rushed to the scene and cradled him for his last moments. She said she knew he had died because the ambulance she was following turned its siren off.
A few months after the shooting, every Saturday night, Audry was still putting on the same clothes she wore the night he died – a pair of pink jogging pants and a T-shirt that says 'All stressed out and no one to choke'. 'It's not even intentional sometimes,' she said. 'I just find myself with it on. Every Saturday, around the same time, I'm angsty. I don't go to sleep. I never go to sleep until the Sunday morning, only to wake up in tears.'
One of the most shocking things I learned while writing the book was how common it was – particularly for black parents – to be blamed if their child was shot. Following the brief news story about Samuel's death, one reader wrote: 'I have two adult kiddos and there's no way they would've been out walking streets after dark, AND I always knew where they were. I do not blame the victims but all parents could do better.'
In fact Samuel had been enjoying a family night that night with Audry, playing UNO, drinking cocoa and watching 'We're The Millers'. He was walking his friend back the five minutes to his grandmother's house. Audry knew exactly where he was. She just couldn't save him.
Of the 10 kids who were shot dead that day, seven were black, two were Latino, and one was white. Firearms are the leading cause of death of black children under the age of 19 in America. This, it turned out, was the primary focus of black parenting in poor areas. Keeping your kid alive.
As one father, whose son was shot dead just a couple of hours later, told me: ‘'You wouldn’t really be doing your job as a parent here if you didn't think it could happen.'
Another Day in the Death of America by Gary Younge is out now (Guardian Faber, £16.99).