A 17-year-old boy is dead and two 16-year-olds are hospitalized after a midnight shooting in St. Louis' College Hill neighborhood — the third killing in a city that can't stop its kids from getting shot.
St. Louis police responded to the 2100 block of Linton on the city's North Side just after midnight Sunday, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The 17-year-old's name was not released. The two injured 16-year-olds were dropped off at an area hospital with gunshot wounds.
The killing capped a bloody Fourth of July weekend: a 60-year-old man was shot and killed Friday in Baden, and a 44-year-old man was shot and killed late Thursday in Wells-Goodfellow.
But the real number is 29. That's how many juveniles have been shot in St. Louis so far this year — roughly the same pace as last year, when the city's progressive prosecution experiment had already produced a body count that should have ended careers. Late last month, a 15-year-old was shot and killed in Forest Park Southeast. An 11-year-old boy shot and killed a 7-month-old infant in Baden. An 11-year-old. A 7-month-old. Let that settle.
The Post-Dispatch noted that homicides overall are down slightly — 63 as of July 2, compared with 70 at the same point last year. The paper framed that as progress. Tell that to the 29 kids with bullet wounds.
St. Louis became a national cautionary tale under former Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, the progressive prosecutor backed by George Soros cash who presided over a collapse in case processing while violent crime spiraled. Gardner resigned in 2023 amid mounting pressure, but the damage was structural: a generation of offenders learned that consequences were optional, and the streets absorbed the lesson. Her successor, Gabe Gore, inherited an office that had already signaled to every repeat offender in the city that the system was a revolving door.
The New York Post, for its part, had nothing on this story — its feed was dominated by a fatal California crash, a tragedy of a different kind that underscores where the media's attention lands. A teenager run down at an intersection is news; a teenager gunned down on a North Side street is a statistic that barely makes the A1 jump.
Twenty-nine juveniles shot. A 7-month-old dead at the hands of a child. A city that brags about a seven-homicide dip while its kids keep bleeding out on sidewalks. The officials who built this system still have their jobs, their pensions, and their press conferences. The 17-year-old on Linton Avenue has a closed casket.
The question isn't whether St. Louis has a crime problem. The question is how many more kids have to die before the people who ran this experiment are held to account for what they built.
