Editorial: The too-long list of 2022 homicides

There was no waiting for Allegheny County’s first homicide of 2022.

It came promptly Jan. 1 when Amariey Lei was found shot to death in the 1300 block of Wood Street in Wilkinsburg. She was just 19 and coached hip-hop and baton for the Lady Diamonds dance team, of which she had once been a member.

The last homicide came at the very end. Kenneth E. Dorsey, 39, was shot just after midnight Dec. 31. He died at 4:34 a.m., before the sun rose on the final day of 2022.

Over the course of the year, 123 people’s deaths in Allegheny County were ruled homicides, according to the county. That tops the 118 from 2021. It isn’t just the third consecutive year of escalation. It also is a new peak in man’s inhumanity.

Over the course of 2022, it means, about every three days, someone died at someone else’s hands.

Look at the numbers overall, and you see no one was safe. The youngest victim, Michael Barber Jr., lived just five months. The oldest was Robert Dietrich. He was 78.

More than a dozen children were killed, from that baby to 17-year-olds. People older than 60 were killed. There were dozens of victims between 18 and 29; dozens more were in their 30s or 40s.

The worst month was June, when 14 lives ended. The fewest were lost in July with seven.

This isn’t new information. Every one of these deaths was noted as it happened or as the body count was updated each month.

The deadly house party shooting Easter weekend that claimed Jaiden Brown and Matthew Steffy-Ross, both 17. The drive-by that took De’Avry Thomas, 1. Lajaponis Roberts, the 14-year-old girl found shot in a car in Duquesne. The triple homicide in October that led to a second shooting at the funeral days later. Kaari Thompson, 4, shot outside a grocery store with her mother, Temani Lewis, who died days later.

The growing violence — fatal and nonfatal — was the drumbeat of 2022. It cannot be allowed to continue.

Every name on that list is a condemnation of actions taken or not taken and policies that don’t work or haven’t been tried.

It is long past time Allegheny County, its municipalities and the entire region take a hard and honest look at the failures in all areas — criminal, social, economic — that have brought us to a place where violent death is background noise.

We might not like the answers we get or the directions they point, but every potential cause and solution has to be scrutinized. If not, the 2023 list is likely to be 123 names or longer.