JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – If you feel like you hear about a homicide every day in Jacksonville, you're not far off. On average, the city hasn’t gone more than 2½ days without a homicide since the year began.
In the first six months of 2019, 75 adults and seven children were killed in Jacksonville. That's 82 homicides in this city in six months.
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Over the previous decade, the highest number of homicides in the first half of a year was 68 in 2017, according to News4Jax records.
In June -- a month which saw the start of the Cure Violence program in Jacksonville -- the city had 17 killings in 30 days.
More than 30% of those homicides were in Northwest Jacksonville and the Eastside, two of the city hotspots identified by the Cure Violence team. Those areas are where the program kicked off this month with “violence interrupters” heading into the streets to connect with the community and try to get people to put down the guns.
The Cure Violence team has asked the community for patience as it works to change the culture of violence, starting in these problem areas.
10-year homicide comparison
TRACKING 2019 HOMICIDES: January | February | March/April
Following the trend that brought Cure Violence workers to its streets, ZIP code 32209 has been the site of nearly 20% (16) of this year’s 82 homicides. The next closest were ZIP codes 32208 and 32210 with 10 each.
About 21% (17) of this year’s homicides have involved a victim under the age of 21. Of those, seven have been 17 years old or younger, including an 11-month-old baby police say was beaten to death by his caretaker.
The other victims under 18 years old were all teenagers who were shot, and three of those were killed in shootings that also wounded or killed other victims.
Authorities have not yet released a cause of death in all 82 homicides, but at least 64 of this year’s killings involved gun violence.
Most of the homicide victims have been men or boys. Fourteen of the victims have been women, including an 18-year-old and a 66-year-old each killed in separate murder-suicides involving family members. About half of the women killed this year were murdered by someone they knew, according to investigators.
News4Jax has worked to find pictures of each of the victims, whenever possible, to put faces with the numbers. We have generated a map, showing the locations of each of the homicides, along with the name of the victim, when known, the circumstances of the homicide, and a photo of the victim, if one was available. Prior mugshots were used only when no other photo was available.
If you know the name of a homicide victim who is not named on our map or have a photo of a victim, please email webteam@wjxt.com and we will update our database.
Editor’s Note: Since the introduction of Marsy’s Law and the narrow interpretation of it adopted by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, News4Jax has relied on sources to provide some homicide-related information that would typically come from law enforcement, including the location of some crimes. The data we put forth in this article, including ages of victims and where crimes were reported, was compiled from those sources, law enforcement and our reporting in the field.