In 2024, a Baton Rouge teenager named Markel Lee was filmed for a violence-prevention program. Louisiana defunded the program. Two years later, a 17-year-old named Martha Odom is dead. The state would like us to file those two stories in separate folders. We will not.
Watch him at sixteen.
A boy from Baton Rouge sits in front of a news camera in 2024. He is enrolled in the Baton Rouge Community Street Team — a violence-prevention program operating in zip codes 70802 and 70805, where prevention has to fight harder than the violence to keep its footing. The reporter asks him about his music. He tells her music became his therapy after his mother was shot, his aunt was incarcerated, and — in his own teenage translation — “a lot of people died.”
That sentence is Hip Hop’s foundational doctrine. Not a metaphor. The doctrine itself. The genre was built by boys who lost too many people too young and discovered, in the booth, the only laboratory the state would let them keep. Markel Lee, at sixteen, named on camera what Tricia Rose, Imani Perry, and Joan Morgan have spent careers naming in print.
Now watch him at seventeen.
In April 2026, Markel Lee surrendered to Baton Rouge police, charged with first-degree murder, five counts of attempted first-degree murder, and illegal use of a weapon in the April 23 shooting at the Mall of Louisiana food court. He is being held without bond on the murder charge.
The young woman killed in that shooting was Martha Elizabeth Odom — also seventeen, an Ascension Episcopal senior from Lafayette, captain of her soccer team, editor of her school newspaper, three weeks from graduation, on senior skip day with her friends. She did not graduate. She does not get to.
Both of those children matter.
One is dead. One is accused of a death. And the state of Louisiana would like us to file them in separate folders — the way it has always filed Black boys and white girls. Separately. Not equally.
We will not.
The boy the city saw twice
Ralph Ellison wrote about a man whose Blackness was not a body but a condition. I am invisible, the narrator says, because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. Markel Lee was not invisible in 2024. He was strategically visible — visible enough to fill a five-minute segment about prevention working, visible enough to put a face on a city’s good intentions, visible enough to make a press conference feel productive.
Then the budget meeting happened.
Between the 2024 segment and the 2026 mugshot, the program that had Markel Lee was defunded. The Baton Rouge Community Street Team — designed to deploy credible messengers as high-risk interventionists in the very zip codes Lee called home — was shuttered following budget reductions under Mayor-President Sid Edwards’ administration. Jobs. Housing assistance. Counseling. Conflict mediation. All of it. Zeroed out.
That is not a coincidence. That is a sequence.
A teenager whose mother had been shot. Whose aunt was incarcerated. Whose people had been buried. Who told a journalist on camera that his music was the only thing holding him together. That child was, by the state’s own choice, removed from the architecture built to hold him.
The line item was zeroed out. The boy was returned to the street.
Then the state acted shocked.
The slur Louisiana put back in its mouth
In the days after the shooting, Governor Jeff Landry blamed “failures” at home and judges who follow “hug-a-thug” policies. A Louisiana opinion writer reached for an older word: super-predator.
That word has a paper trail older than the boy it is being used against.
It was coined in November 1995 by political scientist John DiIulio in The Weekly Standard. It was retracted by DiIulio himself by 2001, when he signed an amicus brief in Miller v. Alabama calling the theory a “myth.” It was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in Roper v. Simmons, Graham v. Florida, and Miller v. Alabama — three rulings affirming that juveniles are categorically different from adults under the Constitution.
Louisiana did not get the memo. Or got it, and threw it out.
Under Senate Bill 3, signed by Gov. Landry in March 2024 and effective that April, all 17-year-olds in Louisiana are now processed as adults from arrest to sentencing. We are the only state in the country to have passed Raise the Age legislation and then fully reversed it. Markel Lee is being prosecuted under that statute. The slur the Supreme Court buried has been dug up to justify it.
This is exactly what Victor Hugo saw in 1862 — a society that criminalizes the children it abandons and then performs scandal at the result. Les Misérables is a fifteen-hundred-page indictment of a France whose budget had room for the prison and not the orphanage. Louisiana, in 2026, is running the same play with the same outcome. The same governor who has nothing for the prevention budget has 18,000 acres for the punishment. Angola — the former plantation that became Louisiana’s largest prison — has always had room. The Baton Rouge Community Street Team did not.
No child is born a thug.
Some children are made into something the state then has the language to dispose of.
We rise and fall as a community — not separately but equally
Here is where the country’s editorial pages will not follow us. So we will say it where they can hear it anyway.
The same dollar that could have interrupted Markel Lee could have protected Martha Odom.
Prevention is not charity for “those people.” Prevention is the structural condition under which malls are safe, food courts are safe, soccer captains on senior skip day come home. When a boy in 70802 does not get the support the state promised him, a girl from Lafayette does not get to graduate. The boy in the prevention video and the girl in the food court are not two separate stories. They are the same budget line read from two ends.
We rise and fall as a community — not separately but equally.
The research is on the side of the credible messengers, not the governor. A 2023 PNAS study by David Hureau and colleagues found that the people community violence intervention programs work with are simultaneously labeled “violent” and structurally vulnerable — meaning prevention only works when the program treats both conditions at once. A 2024 PLOS ONE study by Ben-Menachem and Torrats-Espinosa documents that publicized police violence sharply reduces Black residents’ trust in law enforcement and their willingness to cooperate with investigations. The data is not in dispute.
The political will is.
The answers are already on the table
We do not need a commission. We do not need a study group. We do not need another listening session.
We need to refund the Baton Rouge Community Street Team. We need to repeal the statute that funnels 17-year-olds into adult court. We need to invest in the trauma services Markel Lee told a journalist, on camera, in 2024, that he was substituting music for.
This is not to condone what Markel Lee is accused of doing. It is to refuse the lie that what he is accused of doing came from nowhere. The somewhere has an address. The address has a budget. The budget has a vote. The vote belongs to people whose names are on file at City Hall and at the State Capitol.
Martha Odom should be alive. Markel Lee should have been held — by something other than a cell. Both of those things are true at the same time. Louisiana built the conditions for neither to be true and would now like us to call that fate.
It is not fate. It is a choice.
And the choice is on the table every budget cycle, every legislative session, every time a credible messenger walks into a meeting room and asks for the line item back.
When are we going to fund the answers already sitting in our face? Before the next senior skip day. Before the next mugshot. Before the next mother in Lafayette buries the daughter we promised would come home — and the next mother in Baton Rouge mourns the son we never built a door for in the first place.
Andrea Hagan is a criminology instructor at Loyola University New Orleans and the founder of Pattern Hunters, LLC, a public scholarship platform that focuses on criminology, community engagement, and accountability. Further information is available at patternhunters.com.
