The Brief

One of the most important surveys on homelessness in Los Angeles is underway as thousands of Angelenos started visiting streets and sidewalks across the county Tuesday night.

The Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count — the largest of its kind in the country — is typically done at the end of January, as required by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. But this year’s was postponed because of the wildfires.

The data volunteers collect, which will be released by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) in the coming months, plays a critical role in how resources are used to address homelessness.

At a news conference from a Lincoln Heights deployment site, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass cautioned that the number of people experiencing homelessness may rise after the Eaton and Palisades fires, which destroyed thousands of structures.

“This is an important evening because it will allow us to see progress made and how much more needs to be done,” Bass said.

How it works

The count will wrap up Wednesday and Thursday nights with roughly 5,000 volunteers across nearly 150 L.A. County deployment sites, which is like a base camp for each neighborhood.

Most areas are counted after 8 p.m., when many people experiencing homelessness have settled down for the night and are less likely to be tallied twice. But there are some done during the day, including the Antelope Valley and parts of West L.A, because of visibility or safety concerns, according to LAHSA.

On Tuesday, volunteers focused on the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys, as well as the Metro L.A. area, which includes MacArthur Park, downtown, and Skid Row.

Jennifer Hark Dietz, CEO of People Assisting The Homeless (PATH), told LAist the count is a low-barrier way for people to learn more about their unhoused neighbors and the issues they face.

“You can pair them with folks that have more experience,” she said. “You can talk about how homelessness impacts our community and our city.”

Marina Flores, who has been volunteering for more than a decade, agreed. She told LAist that counting in Lincoln Heights has provided a new perspective of her neighborhood.

“I think it's an opportunity to slow down and to pay attention to this issue that is literally, physically, in our backyards,” she said.

Block by block

Flores was teamed up with Helde Pereira, a first-time volunteer and PhD student who is considering researching loneliness in the unhoused population, to cover a small section of Lincoln Heights.

While Flores drove, Pereira used a paper map to navigate and a phone application called “ArcGIS QuickCapture” to keep track of the number of people experiencing homelessness, tents, and makeshift shelters.

The teams are supposed to cover every corner of their assigned area — including alleyways, convenience stores, dumpsters, freeway underpasses, and public parking lots. Those that aren’t easily accessible, such as river banks, have been assigned to special teams of professional outreach workers.

“I think here, look,” Pereira said as they drove slowly down a busy street, pulling over occasionally with the car’s lights flashing.

“That’s an encampment,” Flores replied.

“I knew it would, I always pass by here,” Pereira said. “ I would call it a shelter, not a tent, because  there were more than one tent.”

LAHSA relies “heavily” on those who know their neighborhood best and can check if any people were missed, which both Flores and Pereira navigated easily. They compared notes about which areas they’ve seen people experiencing homelessness and shared their surprise that a nearby park was empty.

It’s considered a visual count, which means volunteers will only tally what they see in front of them, whether that’s a person standing in front of a tent or just the tent itself. Flores and Pereira counted only two makeshift shelters after about 45 minutes of driving block by block.

It’s not uncommon for volunteer teams to come back from counting almost empty handed. Some areas will have few people visibly experiencing homelessness, while others have dozens of RVs, tents, and shelters.

“ Sometimes [volunteers] feel discouraged, like, ‘we didn't find anybody’,” Flores said. “And I'm like, that's wonderful. I'm so glad there's a part of our city that doesn't have people experiencing homelessness there."

What’s next

On Wednesday, volunteers will tackle the San Gabriel Valley and East L.A., including Altadena, which was recently devastated by the Eaton Fire.

On Thursday, they’ll turn their attention to the Antelope Valley, West L.A., and South L.A., as well as the South Bay and Harbor.

Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who represents MacArthur Park, Chinatown, and Lincoln Heights in district 1, said the data helps officials like her better advocate for resources for the people who need it most.

“ But don't stop at the count,” Hernandez said at the news conference. “ The homelessness crises, and the housing crises, are both systems of a system that fails to protect people. We must demand better. We must do better, and we will do better.”

The final results will be released in late spring or early summer, which Hark Dietz noted can be a challenge with the count. She said the point-in-time data doesn’t necessarily reflect the trends and needs of the unhoused population throughout the rest of the year.

“ We saw with the fires, right, things can happen overnight,” she said. “All of a sudden the community of unhoused may need to move to another location.  So I feel like we do have better data to show us those trends,  to show us, you know, areas that we're seeing an increase.”

Have thoughts?

We also wanted to take a temperature check on where those feelings stand.

Among the questions we asked: Do you feel like homelessness across L.A. has improved or gotten worse since Mayor Bass took office?

You can take that survey here.

Go deeper…

• Has homelessness changed under Mayor Bass? Here’s what you told us
• LA’s Homeless Count needs more volunteers
• LA-area homeless count rescheduled to February
• Wildfires delay annual Los Angeles homeless count

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

A Westlake resident died early Saturday while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody at the Adelanto immigration detention facility, according to a GoFundMe page created for his family.

Alberto Gutierrez Reyes was detained by ICE on Jan. 9 in Echo Park, according to the fundraiser. He became seriously ill while in custody and repeatedly requested medical attention, the organizer said.

“Despite his repeated requests for medical attention, he was denied the care he desperately needed. Tragically, Alberto passed away at 1 am today, leaving his wife and young son facing an unimaginable loss,” fundraiser organizer Karina Cruz said.

Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez said in a statement on Instagram this is the “9th known death in ICE custody this year.”

Hernandez criticized federal immigration authorities and the Trump administration in her statement and said the immigration detention system “cannot be reformed” and “must be abolished.”

Updated: 3:35 p.m. March 3

“The Trump administration does not value human life. They are using our federal tax dollars to bankroll detention and a deadly deportation machine instead of funding healthcare, food, housing, education, and the systems that actually keep people alive,” she said.

The fundraiser describes Gutierrez Reyes as the family’s sole provider and says his death has left his wife and son facing both emotional and financial hardship. Donations will help cover funeral expenses and support the family.

Patricia Martinez, Gutierrez Reyes’ wife, told Univision that a representative for the Mexican Consulate called her Friday morning to say her husband was dead. Authorities did not say how her husband died or where his body was being held.

“We haven’t seen his body, we haven’t seen anything,” Martinez told the news station at a memorial over the weekend.

It was not immediately clear what medical treatment Gutierrez Reyes requested or what preexisting health conditions he had while in custody. A spokesperson for ICE could not be reached for comment.

A representative for The GEO Group, the private prison operators who oversee the Adelanto facility, directed all questions to ICE.

In January, a group of Adelanto detainees sued the federal government on behalf of anyone denied basic medical care in the facility. A man suffering a seizure went without oxygen as guards watched him convulse on the floor, and another was not given antibiotics for a severe staph infection that led his finger to burst, according to the proposed class action lawsuit.

The complaint says the for-profit detention center operated by GEO Group has a long history of unsafe and abusive conditions. The facility’s population spiked from just a handful of detainees to nearly 2,000 in a matter of months after federal immigration raids resumed last year.

Last summer, as reports mounted of federal immigration agents taking Costa Mesa residents off the streets, leading others to hole up in their homes, the City Council decided to do something. They voted 5-0 (two other council members were absent) to donate $100,000 in city funds to help families affected by the ICE raids with food and basic needs. They also asked city officials to look into allocating money for legal defense.

Many at the meeting, in the audience and behind the dais, felt good about the outcome: the advocates thought they finally had a solid source of funding for the relief effort, which was already underway through small donations and their own out-of-pocket costs, and council members felt they were providing tangible support for the city’s large immigrant population.

More than 1 in 5 Costa Mesa residents is foreign-born, according to Census data, and more than one-third of residents are Latino, who've born the brunt of President Donald Trump's mass deportation campaign.

The goodwill didn’t last long. The language used to earmark the funds was intentionally vague, meant to keep the small, politically divided city out of the crosshairs of the Trump administration and local MAGA activists. Before the smoke cleared, the relief measure would lead to a rift in the city’s tight-knit volunteer network, demands for accountability, and, among the would-be beneficiaries, a feeling of increasing abandonment by local government.

Here’s what happened.

It started with volunteers delivering food

When ICE raids intensified in Southern California, the streets of Costa Mesa’s largely Latino westside started emptying out. Tamale vendors stayed home. Kids on summer break stopped riding bikes around their neighborhoods.

“This has been the saddest summer of my life,” Councilmember Manuel Chavez said at a City Council meeting in August.

Chavez represents District 4, which is predominantly Latino.

“It is noticeably a lot quieter in my community and time and time again at community events I go to it’s very clear there’s a visible lack of our Latino brothers and sisters,” he added.

At the time, a group of volunteers had been busy organizing a mutual aid effort to deliver food boxes and other necessities to residents who either feared leaving their homes, or had lost a breadwinner to deportation. Adam Ereth, executive director of the Someone Cares Soup Kitchen, let the volunteers use the nonprofit’s facilities to pack the food boxes, and passed on some of the soup kitchen’s leftover food donations.

Ereth also offered up the nonprofit as a conduit through which individuals could donate money directly to the food box effort. Ereth kept track of the privately donated funds, which totaled around $14,000, he said, and used it to reimburse volunteers for purchasing tortillas, beans, meat and fresh produce for the boxes.

Like much of the local response to the surge in ICE raids, the mutual aid effort was scrappy. Which is why the organizers began to lobby City Council members — some of whom were part of the mutual aid group — for a more reliable source of funding.

“After a while I was like, you know, I can't spend $240 on chorizo twice a month. I need to get reimbursed,” said Haley Horton, one of the organizers.

At the Aug. 5 City Council meeting, Mayor John Stephens proposed that the city help fund the relief effort, along with legal defense for families facing deportation. Residents recounted the devastating impact the raids were having on the community.

“I was listening to the public speak about it,” Stephens later told LAist. “And I was thinking, you know, we could do more.”

Around the same time, local governments in L.A. County and other parts of Orange County, including Santa Ana and Anaheim, were setting up funds to help immigrant families with groceries, rent and legal defense against deportation. (The governor recently announced the state’s own $35 million investment in humanitarian aid and legal defense for immigrant residents; Irvine is also now funding immigration legal aid.)

Ultimately, Costa Mesa's City Council allocated funds to two local nonprofits to help affected families with food, rental assistance and other needs: $50,000 would go into a relief fund run by a local church; the other $50,000 would go to the Someone Cares Soup Kitchen “to provide daily meals and groceries to impacted residents,” according to a staff report at a subsequent council meeting.

There was no contract, and no requirement to account for how the money was spent, a city spokesperson confirmed.

Horton and the other volunteers working on the food box program were elated. Among them was Brooke Grey, who heads the local chapter of the group Food Not Bombs.

“ When the city approved that money, despite all the awfulness that's happening, it was a very joyous moment,” Grey said. “It's knowing that … we're in this together to help,” she said.

But the good vibes were short-lived.

A Costa Mesa volunteer preps food boxes for delivery for ICE-affected families.

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Jill Replogle

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‘I didn’t want ICE going to the soup kitchen’

The Someone Cares Soup Kitchen started 40 years ago in Costa Mesa when its founder, Merle Hatleberg, literally made a pot of soup for hungry children. Today, the nonprofit provides a free hot lunch to around 300 people daily, including seniors, veterans, unhoused residents and anybody else who shows up — all served out of a former Chinese restaurant in central Costa Mesa.

The organization took in around $975,000 in donations and fundraising efforts in fiscal year 2024, according to its most recently available tax filing.

Debbee Pezman, Halteberg’s daughter, now chairs the soup kitchen’s board of directors. She said she was hesitant about accepting the city’s $50,000 donation when approached. She knew the mutual aid effort was already operating out of the kitchen. But it was under the radar, and she didn’t want the organization to be “in the spotlight,’” she recalled recently.

“I didn’t want ICE going to the soup kitchen,” Pezman said. Plus, she added, her board was wary of singling out a particular group for help.

“We support people in need, not only the immigrants in need,” Pezman said.

Still, in neighborhoods around the soup kitchen, ICE enforcement was having increasingly devastating consequences for the city’s immigrant residents. In October, a Costa Mesa resident named Gabriel Garcia Aviles died in a hospital in Victorville after being picked up in a raid and detained at the Adelanto detention center. As families sought to decrease the chance of being separated, some parents quit their jobs and stopped going outside, including to buy groceries and visit the doctor.

“It’s absolutely horrific,” Councilmember Andrea Marr said of the arrests and deportations. “We’re talking about families who have been involved in their communities, moms cooking for school events. These are not other people, this is very much the fabric of the community."

Increasing the economic squeeze, as of January, the state no longer allows adults without legal immigration status to enroll in Medi-Cal.

“All of the doors are closing,” said Juana Trejo, a long-time leader in Costa Mesa’s Latino community. “It’s like we’re imprisoned.”

As concern kept rising, the soup kitchen accepted the city funds — on the condition that the money not be earmarked for a specific purpose.

That’s when the rift began.

A debate over the council’s intent

Volunteers who’d been buying supplies and packing boxes for delivery said they assumed the $50,000 from the city would replenish dwindling private donations. 

Ereth, who’d opened the nonprofit’s doors as a staging center for the mutual aid effort, saw it differently. He turned down those requests.

Tensions grew between Ereth and the mutual aid organizers. At the end of 2025, Ereth closed down the delivery program.Horton, the volunteer who helped start the program, was livid.

“I had to go into a room, I had to cry, I had to scream,” she told LAist. Horton and other mutual aid leaders estimate that the city funds could have fed 200 families for two years.

The fundamental disagreement comes down to this:

Mutual aid volunteers said they believed the $50,000 was made available specifically, to deliver groceries to families directly affected by the immigration crackdown.

Ereth said there was no expectation that the money be used for that narrow purpose. “The city decided to solicit us to give us a gift based on the work we’ve been doing for the past 40-plus years,” he said of the soup kitchen’s long-standing role in Costa Mesa. “It happened to be during the time federal enforcement activity was taking place pretty forcefully.”

Councilmember Arlis Reynolds, who helped launch the food box effort, was dismayed by Ereth’s interpretation of why the city awarded immigrant relief funds to the soup kitchen.

“We were intentionally vague based on what I thought was a pretty clear understanding,” she told LAist.

Marr agreed. “I think (Ereth) took advantage of a loophole,” she said, adding “he should have known” what the money was intended for.

That vague language, however, also allowed Ereth to use the funds as he saw fit.

Reynolds conceded that “technically (Ereth) is correct that he got city funds with zero written restraints.” But, she added, “if I knew that he was going to change the model, I would not have voted to give the funds.”

How best to help?

Ereth defended his use of the city funding for the soup kitchen’s overall operations.

“We’re a longterm organization in the community,” Ereth said, “when times get tough, we’re looking to remain as an institution, rather than just addressing an acute need that pops up.”

Ereth said it was unsustainable to continue delivering food boxes to ICE-affected families because of the large number of people and resources required. He also noted that the soup kitchen had invested its own staff time and resources into the delivery effort, including electricity, gas and most of the donated food that went into the boxes.

Some City Council members agree with Ereth’s position, including Stephens, the mayor. He told LAist the city funding for the soup kitchen had “absolutely” gone to its intended use.

“The Someone Cares Soup Kitchen has been a part of the Costa Mesa community for decades — they serve lots of populations in need, including this group impacted by ICE activity,” Stephens said.

He and soup kitchen leaders say the dispute boils down to miscommunication, and a dispute over how best to help. Pezman, the board chair, said instead of delivering boxes, the soup kitchen is providing groceries for pick-up twice a month, to about 40 families.

“I’m sure there are people who are fearful and not coming out of their house,” Pezman said, “but there are also people who are coming out of their house.”

She said the nonprofit leaders never intended to cause friction. “I do feel like what the soup kitchen did was on board and correct and communicated all the way through to the city,” said Pezman. But, she added, “if the city said, ‘We would like you to return the funds,’ we’d just return the funds.”

Sheryl Long helps stack food boxes in the back of a minivan for delivery to ICE-impacted families.

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Jill Replogle

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Calls for accountability, as mutual aid moves on

Today, many involved in the mutual aid effort in Costa Mesa would like to just move on from the incident. Others are demanding more accountability.

“In my mind, it’s a huge injustice,” said Trejo, the community leader. “We’re going to be a little more careful in the future about who we put our confidence in.”

Another activist, Grey from Food Not Bombs, has repeatedly asked the City Council to investigate how the money was spent.

“There’s no accountability,” she said. “It creates a distrust in the community.”

Meanwhile, Councilmember Reynolds has asked city officials to look into how families who were receiving boxes last year can access food paid for with the ICE relief funds. She told LAist she saw “no incremental benefit as intended” from the city’s donation to the soup kitchen. Rather, she said, Ereth’s decision to end the food delivery program “created a huge amount of confusion, frustration, and service gaps to families we intended to serve.”

When Ereth ended the food delivery program in December, the mutual aid leaders vowed to find another way to keep it going, but it was unclear how, without a reliable fiscal sponsor. They spent the next few months fundraising and looking for new partners.

Then, on Valentine’s Day, more than a dozen volunteers met at a warehouse in Costa Mesa to load beans, rice, chorizo, tomatoes, limes and more into cardboard boxes and IKEA bags. Other volunteers then pulled up into the alley to collect the boxes and distribute them to 150 needy families.

The goal is to increase the number of recipients to 200, which the organizers estimate will cost $4,000 per monthly delivery. Fundraising is ongoing.

“There's no way this can end,” Horton said. “There's too many people who care.”

Two masked men dragged a landscape worker into a vehicle and drove off.

Another masked pair in green fatigues detained a man walking out of a grocery store. 

Four masked people in a black SUV circled a block. 

These were all calls LAPD received in January from people alarmed by what they were witnessing and unsure about who they could trust as immigration agents carried out operations across the city.

They were also among the first details that the department has released of how its officers have responded to calls for help from neighborhoods targeted by the federal government’s immigration crackdown.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass issued a directive last month requiring the department to produce monthly reports, aiming to increase transparency about policing amid immigration sweeps. The report follows weeks of mixed messaging from the department, as LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell refused to enforce new laws requiring federal agents to remove masks and identify themselves.

Bass’ order prompted McDonnell to change course last week — a reversal he continued in Tuesday’s meeting. He sent a note to the department establishing a new policy requiring officers and supervisors to identify federal agents, document encounters with them and refer cases for possible criminal charges if misconduct is suspected.

Deputy Chief German Hurtado told the Police Commission Tuesday the department received eight calls in January from the public about immigration operations and none in February. The LA Local has reached out to ask why this is the case and will update if more information is available. 

Three of the January calls were in the department’s Northeast Division and two in Rampart Division. Harbor, Southeast and Olympic divisions had one call each.

Officers submitted two crime reports of actions by federal agents, but Hurtado provided no further details. 

In several cases, the people who called the police and the alleged federal agents weren’t actually there when officers arrived. And in most cases, the department took no further action after confirming the individuals worked for federal immigration agencies.

In one instance, Hurtado said police received information that two taco vendors had been kidnapped. “No report was taken,” Hurtado said, because video of the confrontation appeared to show the masked men were federal agents. The two were detained, he said, not kidnapped.

A man in the department’s Southeast Division reported being assaulted by immigration agents. Hurtado said officers found he had been knocked over while agents were chasing someone else: “They cleared the scene once they realized that it was a federal enforcement action,” Hurtado added.

The department had not received any reports of federal agents refusing to identify themselves to police officers, he told the commissioners. And he emphasized that the department’s longstanding policy is not to assist or impede immigration enforcement.

“The officers are not going to interrupt the actions of another law enforcement agency,” Hurtado said. “They’re there to keep the peace.”

Commission President Teresa Sanchez-Gordon pressed Hurtado to provide more details on how the department is clarifying its role for the city’s residents who are also immigrants. 

“They’re still fearful that they can’t call LAPD for help,” Sanchez-Gordon said.

Hurtado responded that the department’s new immigrant affairs liaison, along with at least two officers at each station, were redoubling efforts to communicate that the LAPD does not contribute to immigration enforcement.

“When police do not help with immigration arrests, it’s not about protecting criminals,” Hurtado said. “It’s about protecting communities. It’s about making sure that everyone feels safe enough to seek help for a crime and participate in everyday civic life. Public safety works best when fear is replaced with trust and in Los Angeles that trust has saved lives.”

McDonnell, who was present for the presentation, also issued a new policy on Tuesday clarifying how city policing intersects with federal immigration enforcement. Here are some of the requirements:

• When officers are dispatched to calls about apparent immigration sweeps, they are expected to turn on body cameras before exiting their patrol cars.
• They’ll record interactions with the apparent agents, verifying their identities and the agencies they work for. 
• If it’s a confirmed federal immigration enforcement action, the officer is expected to maintain public safety and help deescalate any tense confrontations.
• Officers will write reports about these encounters and label all body camera footage for review.

The chief’s policy update brings the department into compliance with Mayor Karen Bass’ executive order from February requiring the changes. 

Apart from the new policy, Sanchez-Gordon said more must be done to ensure the community understands what LAPD officers are and aren’t responsible for during what have often been tense confrontations. She said she wants to work with McDonnell to host meetings with immigrant advocacy groups to better understand community concerns.

“I think we all have our work cut out for us,” she said. “It’s a new era for the city of LA.”

The post Here’s what happened when people called LAPD to report potential ICE activity appeared first on LA Local.

The short documentary All The Empty Rooms follows CBS news correspondent Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp on their years-long journey memorializing the empty rooms of victims of school shootings.

The film features four families from Santa Clarita, California; Uvalde, Texas and Nashville, Tennessee.

Director Joshua Seftel said he received a call from Hartman three years ago asking if the photography project could be turned into a documentary film. Hartman showed Seftel a photo of an opened toothpaste tube from the bathroom of a school shooting victim.

“You could see the story,” Seftel said. “You could imagine the kid rushing to school in the morning, not taking the time to put the cap back on the toothpaste tube, thinking 'I'll put that on when I get home.' And then the child never came home from school and I immediately just thought this approach — talking about school shootings through these photographs of the empty bedrooms — was just really novel and powerful.”

All the Empty Rooms is now nominated for Best Documentary Short Film at the 2026 Academy Awards and is available to watch on Netflix.

LAist All Things Considered host Julia Paskin talked with Seftel and Mia Tretta — a school shooting survivor and friend of one of the victims featured in the film.

A sensitive filmmaking process

During the filmmaking process, Seftel said he wanted to be as respectful of the families as possible by entering the rooms with small crews and using minimal equipment. He said many of the rooms were “frozen in time” and left untouched by parents since the day their children died.

Julia Paskin:  Did you learn anything about how to go about documenting stories in a way that is respectful to your subjects?

Joshua Seftel: I would say that a lot of the coverage on school shootings and mass shootings in general, especially early on, focused on the shooter and talked about them a lot. And the victims often were in the background and often faded away from the news coverage.

So you end up with the victims being forgotten, and these families that we visited in All The Empty Rooms all feel that way. They feel like however long it had been since their child had been killed in a school shooting, they felt like the world had moved on and left them behind.

And for them to be able to get to tell the story of their child is everything… In the process of making this film, we've wanted to shine a light on the people who are gone, the kids who are gone. And in the process of telling the story, we made a film that never mentions the word "gun."

That was by choice because we wanted to make a film that was about the children who were gone, and we wanted to make a film that never gave the viewer a reason to turn it off.

And sadly, in the world we live in, even just saying the word "gun" is polarizing and could possibly get people to turn off. And we want to make sure people watch to the end and know the stories of these children because we think the stories of these children in these empty rooms have the potential to make people feel something again.

On the importance of silence in the film

Julia Paskin:  You insisted on Steve Hartman being a character. Folks that are familiar with him on CBS know he does a lot of "feel good" stories. And this is a departure because this story, as he points out, deserves that treatment. Why was that important to include in the storytelling?

Joshua Seftel: For those people who watch Steve Hartman on CBS and see him on CBS Sunday morning almost every week, he's there to sort of say the perfect thing.

And in this film, when we followed Steve into these bedrooms and into these homes, oftentimes there's not much to say. It's about the silence of these places. It's about the absence of the child.

These rooms are empty. And what we found is that Steve didn't have the perfect thing to say because in some cases there's really nothing to say. What's happening in our country with gun violence and with school shootings where there are now more than 100 a year is completely unacceptable. And we all know that deep down.

And by showing these bedrooms and showing the empty spaces and the children who are gone, there's not much more you need to say than to just see these rooms. And that's what we wanted to capture in the film.

‘Losing my best friend’

Tretta was best friends with Dominic Blackwell, one of the victims in the 2019 Saugus High School shooting in Santa Clarita, where she was also shot. Tretta also experienced another school shooting last December.

“ I lost my best friend and I went across the country to go to college. And six years later I found myself in lockdown for over 10 hours at the Brown University shooting,” she said.

Tretta met Blackwell on the first day of 8th grade after having transferred to a new school.

Tretta: I walked into my math class … and he was sitting in the back of the class with his feet on the desk and a bright SpongeBob shirt and introduced himself as Dominic Michael Jordan Blackwell. And from that day on, we became best friends.

Pretty much from that first day of eighth grade, we were inseparable… until one random day in November. A boy we didn't know pulled a .45 caliber ghost gun out of his backpack. And because of gun violence, Dominic is gone. And it was in that same shooting that I was shot in the stomach.

And I feel like even though the pain of getting shot is terrible physically and mentally and something that I'm still having to deal with on an almost daily basis, nothing compares to the pain that I felt losing Dominic and losing my best friend and having to cope with that at the same time as everything else.

So I think the movie does a really beautiful job of not only showing the fact that gun violence stole such a beautiful person from everyone's lives, but also portraying him as the type of person he was.

This interview has been edited for clarity.