Inside the San Francisco Bay Area’s pandemic murder surge: ‘No one knows this pain but us’

Guardian analysis reveals region-wide increase in violent deaths, but Black and Latino residents make up majority of victims

On the night of 3 September 2020, Sonya Mitchell got a call as she was leaving work. Her 23-year-old son, Daimon Dada" Ferguson, had been shot in a drive-by outside his older sister's home.

In the months before, Mitchell, 56, had been watching reports of shootings in her hometown of Vallejo, in the San Francisco Bay Area, with increasing concern. There was the shooting at a birthday party on 9 June that killed two women and injured a 10-year-old. Three separate shootings had rocked the city on 20 August, including a double homicide that left a 25-year-old man and his 24-year-old girlfriend dead in a car with their infant son.