Some 50 Brooklyn high school and middle students toured a morgue as part of a program to teach them about the consequences of gun violence.
They visited the Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center, which receives a new gunshot victim every 36 hours.
“The gun violence rate is so high in East New York and we needed to make a change,” Nicole Favours, an employee at Brookdale, told ABC News. “What [the students have] been asked to do now is make a change.”
The organizers of the tour hopes that it will make a deep impression on the students, and it appears to have worked.
“Seeing that body, it just made me realize that life is precious,” Shane Magloire, 17, told ABC. “And just thinking, like, ‘What if one of my friends or myself was dead?’”
The students were regaled with stories from emergency room doctors and saw video footage of gunshot victims.
Favours says that they plan to bring in new students to the morgue every three months.
