HOUSTON -- Daniel Gibson will never forget the look on his grandmother's face.
He had just flown in from Cleveland and gone straight to the hospital, where his cousin, DeMarcus Gibson, was in a coma after being shot twice in a drive-by shooting. The two grew up together under the watchful eye of their grandmother, Betty Burns. DeMarcus, 23, was four years younger, so Daniel played the role of big brother.
But when he walked into that hospital room, the first person he saw was his grandmother.
"Everybody was there," recalled Gibson, who was excused from games at Orlando, Miami and Chicago at the end of February to be with his family. "I remember looking at my grandmother. She's been down this road so many times before. The look in her eye was more or less a look of disappointment . . . and pain. It hurts her to see us like this."
Although DeMarcus survived and is recovering, Gibson still shares his grandmother's pain every day. There's a piece of him that has never left the tough Herschelwood neighborhood in which he grew up. Gibson came from a two-parent household and was a good student -- sixth in his class of 212 at Jones High School in Houston and a member of the National Honor Society -- as well as a star athlete, but not everyone in his family has made the same good choices.
As the one who made it out and made it to the NBA, Gibson still struggles with why it was him and what he can do to help the others.
"I deal with a lot of things," he said, softly. "I see a psychiatrist to help me better understand that you can't help everybody. Sometimes you put added pressure on yourself.
"I'm know I'm here for a reason. But you're constantly searching for the reason. It seems like every time you help somebody, somebody else falls by the wayside. It's a constant battle, a constant struggle to figure out how to help them and what to do."
His concern goes beyond his family to the larger issue of black-on-black crime and what he sees as the ineffectiveness of schools and churches in trying to prevent it.
That concern is well-founded. According to an article in The Wall Street Journal in 2012, Bureau of Justice Statistics data show that from 1976 to 2005, white victims were killed by white defendants 86 percent of the time and black victims were killed by blacks 94 percent of the time. Although the U.S. murder rate has been dropping for years, an analysis of homicide data by the newspaper found that the number of black male victims increased more than 10 percent -- to 5,942 in 2010 from 5,307 in 2000. Overall, the newspaper found, more than half the nation's homicide victims are African-American, though blacks make up only 13 percent of the population. Of those black murder victims, 85 percent were men, mostly young men, according to the newspaper.
"Black people in general have always struggled to come up in the world," Gibson said, "and now that we have more opportunities, we still decide to kill each other off and fight amongst each other, which is crazy."
Gibson also is upset that this sort of violence doesn't seem to enrage the public like the mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo.
"Not to downplay any of the mass killings that happened that sparked this conversation," he said, "but when I look at the black community, it has been witnessing mass killings for years and years, and there hasn't been any rush to ban guns. That really bothers me.
"I feel like it's not the guns that are the problem. You can try to take away the guns, but there are still people dealing with issues. They'll find another way to cause some of the same terror."
Like Gibson, others touched by violence struggle to find a way to help stop the epidemic.
Arkansas Baptist College honored the memory of a student murdered last year, Derek Olivier, by dedicating a new research center to address the problem of black-on-black violence in America's cities. Olivier, a 19-year-old freshman football player, was shot to death on Sept. 27, 2012, while helping a fellow student change a flat tire.
Meanwhile, pastors in Florida and Detroit are intervening with anti-violence programs and reaching out to those on dangerous streets known for high black-on-black crime rates, according to the Christian Post.
"We wait for situations to happen," Gibson said. "But they're happening every day. Some of them aren't as publicized as others, but they're happening every day. Newtown? The day before I'm sure there was a shooting somewhere."
Gibson, who was 14 when his best friend was shot and killed during a robbery, is not waiting. For years, he has gone back to Jones High School to talk about growing up in the neighborhood and facing the same challenges kids are facing now. He wants to offer them more hope and more encouragement than he got when discussing his dream of being a basketball player with his fourth-grade teacher -- not that playing basketball should be seen as the only way out. "Say I said I wanted to be a doctor," he said.
His last trip came during the All-Star break, just before DeMarcus was shot.
Shelia Williams, the assistant principal who helped coordinate the visits, said Gibson got through to the students.
"They absolutely get his message," she said. "They were so excited he wanted to come back and meet with them. He told them, 'If I can make it, you can make it. You don't have to be a product of your environment. It's not where you are, it's where you're going.'
"They absolutely responded to him. They heard him. You could have heard a pin drop."
Williams said Gibson took a lot of questions and had a very open discussion with the students. He told them to find an adult to talk to about any problems they were experiencing.
But his main message is directed to adults.
"I pray we stop killing each other and start helping each other," he said. "In order to get to the top, you don't have to step on anybody's head. I don't know where that idea came from that you have to bring somebody else down in order for you to make it. There's room for all of us at the top if you put in the work to get there. Let's stop killing each other and let's start helping each other in the communities. Your support, your knowledge, your wisdom, your positivity goes a long way with kids. I'd like to see us as a people do better.
"Not just [for] black kids. I want all kids to feel as though they have an opportunity to be successful no matter where you grow up."
Data Analysis Editor Rich Exner and news researcher Jo Ellen Corrigan contributed to this report.
