BOSTON — On days when the sun was shining and the air was warm with a gentle, cooling breeze, Ateiya Sowers-Hassell liked to keep the salon door open. Labor Day was one of those days. Sowers-Hassell was tending to two clients at Salvaged Roots, the natural hair salon and spa in the Four Corners section of Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood where she works as a stylist. She was in a groove, soothing music playing in the background, when gunshots boomed through the air.

She saw people running from Exclusive Barbershop next door. She heard a voice telling a 911 operator that someone had been shot in the head. Her hands shook as she ventured outside. Then she saw 20-year-old Elijah Clunie slumped in a barber’s chair, haircut unfinished.

In the chaos, a 7-year-old boy stood in shock, eyes bulging at Clunie’s body. Sowers-Hassell asked the boy to come with her and sheltered him at the salon until his father arrived. “He kept going, ‘I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe,’” she said, and he later told her he never wanted to get his hair cut again.

Barbershops and salons are regarded in the Black community as safe, sacred spaces, where men and women gather to laugh, debate, and see their unofficial therapists: the barbers and stylists. When those refuges are violated by gun violence, an unspoken bond is broken.

Clunie’s killing cost Dorchester more than his own young life. Shootings send ripples of trauma through communities that can carry across generations. A 2020 study found that exposure to gun killings was linked to higher levels of depression, suicidal ideation, and other mental health difficulties. Children and young adults were the most susceptible, and Black youth were disproportionately affected.

When economists calculate the societal costs of gun violence, “what they find is that much bigger than hospital treatment or criminal justice response or anything, is the fear and trauma and how it affects individuals and businesses,” said Daniel Webster, a professor and distinguished scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.

Four Corners — home largely to African American, Caribbean, and Puerto Rican families — is not a destination neighborhood. A historic Methodist church is one of the few attractions. There aren’t any major supermarkets, fine dining restaurants, or hospitals. Of the businesses that do exist, many cover their doors and windows in plexiglass and metal bars.

“We talk about these food deserts of good, healthy food; the truth of the matter is, it’s a desert for everything,” Webster said. “Businesses generally don’t want to be there.”

The owner of Salvaged Roots, Shanita Clarke, said she intended her salon to stand out as an oasis in the community.

Clarke was planning to take her then-13-year-old son to the salon to get his hair done when she got a phone call about the shooting. She rushed to work to check on her stylists. Clarke, her staff, and clients spent the next three hours waiting while officers collected evidence. In the weeks that followed, calls came in to push back appointments. Clarke said she could sense her clients’ anxiety and understood it. Even though she wasn’t in the shop when Clunie was shot, she experienced the incident vicariously through the sound of gunshots captured on the salon’s security footage and accounts from her employees.

A case statement from the commonwealth of Massachusetts alleges the suspect in Clunie’s killing, Diamond Jose Brito, entered Exclusive Barbershop wearing all black clothing and a ski mask. Brito walked to the back of the shop, where Clunie was seated, and asked his barber how long the wait was for a haircut. About 45 minutes later, the statement alleges, Brito returned, walked to Clunie’s chair, shot him in the back of the head with a small silver revolver, then shot another victim multiple times.

Brito, of Canton, Massachusetts, was arrested in Mattapan in October and is being held without bail. He pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him, including murder.

“Mr. Brito maintains his innocence and we are looking forward to presenting his defense at trial,” Brito’s attorney, David Leon, said in a statement to KFF Health News.

Boston City Councilor Brian Worrell’s office is around the corner from Salvaged Roots and Exclusive Barbershop. The neighborhood requires investment and initiatives by elected officials and policymakers, he said. Residents have to feel that homeownership and stable careers are possible.

“That can’t be some far-off thinking,” said Worrell, who represents District 4, which includes that part of Dorchester. “They have to be able to see it, and it has to show up in their lives, in a real, tangible way.”

Clunie had been a student at TechBoston Academy and a basketball player who was named player of the game after a big win his senior year, in 2022. But in a draft senior presentation uploaded to the presentation site Prezi in June of that year, a user presumed to be Clunie wrote: “When I first moved to the Dorchester area I thought I was going to die,” noting “the killings on the news” every day.

Moments after the shooting, an unknown person walked into the barbershop and recorded a graphic video of Clunie’s body, which was then uploaded to social media platforms. It spread on Facebook and X, leading users to find Clunie’s personal accounts, on which some commenters made light of his death. He would have turned 21 the Saturday following his killing.

Worrell called the video especially inappropriate and callous. But apathy in the face of violence, he said, isn’t hard to imagine in a community suffering food and housing insecurity, struggling schools, and a persistent lack of opportunity.

Clarke said she’s torn on how to move forward. Loud noises and being alone trigger anxiety, and she now sometimes locks the salon doors once clients are in for their appointments. She’s felt anger and isolation, she said.

Recovering from the trauma of witnessing gun violence is often more difficult for onlookers when they still live and work where the shootings happened.

“We want to address the mental health trauma from gun violence, but let’s not kid ourselves,” Webster said. “If we don’t actually address gun violence, we’re swimming against a really strong tide.”

Since she opened her salon almost six years ago, Clarke has been active in community efforts to make the neighborhood safer, attending civic association and neighborhood meetings and speaking with police and local politicians.

Clarke believes efforts to clean up nearby Melnea Cass Boulevard moved more drug users into Dorchester. Salvaged Roots is next to a commuter rail station, which Clarke said attracts transients who set up camps and leave behind trash and sometimes drug paraphernalia. Only a week before Clunie’s killing, there was a fatal shooting across the street from the salon.

In 2024, there were about 20 shootings in the police district that includes Four Corners, five of them fatal. Most of the victims were Black men, according to a KFF Health News analysis of Boston Police Department data.

Though gun violence overall is at a record low in Boston since 2023 and the city has invested more in investigative resources — including police detectives, management, and oversight — a disproportionate amount occurs in Boston’s historically Black communities.

Since Clarke opened Salvaged Roots, she feels Four Corners has gotten both better and worse. “If other businesses leave, then where do people that live in the community — where are the nice places that they get to go to?” she asked.

Residents of neighborhoods with frequent gun violence and crime can mistakenly be perceived as being desensitized, but “we can never accept the violence as normal,” Boston City Council President Ruthzee Louijeune said. She’s volunteered and worked in Four Corners and said tackling the violence takes a multipronged approach, including getting guns off the street and providing access to affordable housing, secure jobs, and good health care.

In communities of color, she said, intergenerational trauma from racism and poverty must also be addressed.

In Dorchester, Louijeune said, a high number of residents resort to visiting emergency rooms for mental health issues. The neighborhood needs more access to health care, she said, especially for young people. Across Boston, Black residents were nearly twice as likely to go to the ER for mental health care than white residents, according to the Boston Public Health Commission’s 2024 Mental Health Report.

Months later, attention and curiosity over the shooting had died down, but the trauma remained. Sowers-Hassell continues to work at Salvaged Roots, and though the city sent a trauma team to meet with the stylists after the shooting, she still has flashbacks. She said the influx of resources was helpful and that Four Corners has been a little quieter. But she’s skeptical the reprieve will last.

“Everybody talks a good game,” she said, “but when it’s time to get something done, what’s going to happen?”

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