Denver's Six Homicides in Ten Days Echo 1993 Summer of Violence

The gravel crunches under tires on the way to the Montbello Recreation Center. It’s the same lot where I watched my own kids chase each other thirty years ago. Now, the chain-link fences look tighter. The shadows feel longer.

Denver is bleeding again.

Early April brought six homicides in ten days. That isn’t a trend. That’s a spike. And if the pattern holds, 2026 will eclipse last year’s violence. We are looking at a summer that could easily echo the “Summer of Violence” that haunted my youth in 1993.

Make no mistake. The numbers don’t lie. In 1992, Denver saw 93 murders. The city coined the term “Summer of Violence” for the gang-related bloodshed that followed. It wasn’t just the headlines. It was the sound. Shots rang out in Black neighborhoods almost as loud as the gangsta rap blasting from car speakers at Park Hill house parties.

I was a kid then. My mother shopped for gang-neutral colors. She dressed me in beige and gray because red and blue meant you were a target. It wasn’t paranoia. It was survival.

Today, the context is different, but the result is the same. Mikail Nasir Khalid Payne was shot to death last month at the Montbello Recreation Center. He was my nephew, cousin, or friend. Several people close to me were. One of them is activist Shareef Aleem, a family friend for over two decades.

Payne died where I’ve thrown Unity Rallies. He died where my nonprofit hosts community events. I walked those grounds. I played in those spaces. Now, his Go Fund Me campaign is collecting dollars while the chants of “Stop The Violence” rise again.

The short version? We are back in the cycle.

The statistics from the nineties missed the survivors. During my freshman year at George Washington High School, friends pulled up sleeves and pants to show bullet wounds. Exit wounds were as common then as tattoos are today. Everyone knew one of the fallen. Everyone was proximal to a shooter.

That danger shifted culture. It hardened demeanor. It altered life-paths in ways that are hard to articulate to someone who didn’t live within that zeitgeist.

Now, we see the same mechanisms at work. Anti-gang marches and “Heal The ’Hood” rallies sprang up in the nineties as communities fought desperately for grass-roots solutions. They were matched by intense policing and the omnibus crime bill of 1994, which increased mandatory minimums for drug and gun possession.

We have the rallies again. We have the federal funding for community-led violence intervention programs. But the funding is just paper until it hits the street.

If these patterns persist, and retaliatory violence follows these shootings, this summer will not be a memory. It will be a mirror.

Read that again. Six homicides in ten days.

The question isn’t whether we can stop the violence. The question is whether we can afford the cost of trying. Federal funding is arriving. But will it reach the corners where Nasir died? Or will it get stuck in the bureaucracy, just like it did in the nineties?

The danger of being gunned down altered my generation’s life-paths. It’s altering yours now. The shots are ringing out. The music is still blasting. And no one is checking their colors anymore.