Telling stories of gun violence deaths almost cost this reporter his life (Tonya Mosley; Fresh Air podcast)

When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Trymaine Lee was 38, he suffered a sudden heart attack that nearly killed him. The incident made him reconsider the years he had spent reporting on the lives cut short by gun violence — and the stress it had put on his body.

"For the first time really, I had to look deep and engage with what was truly bearing down on my heart," he says. "And for me that had been more than a decade of telling stories of Black death and survival."

As a reporter in Trenton, Philadelphia and New Orleans, Lee covered the deaths of young men who looked like him. The victims were "wearing my same sneakers, same haircut," he says. "And you have to wrestle with seeing yourself in some ways, repeatedly gunned down, your body repeatedly falling. Tears for your death over and over and again."

Lee's new memoir, A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America, is part history, and part personal turning point. He traces the bloody history Black Americans have with firearms, recalls gun violence in his own youth and follows his ancestors' path back to Ghana.

The book reads like a plea for people to see the humanity of those lost to gun violence — and for this country to care enough to act.

"We have an opportunity and we still have this opportunity to be the great nation that we've professed," Lee says. "I'm not a policy maker. I don't profess to be an expert in gun policy. But what I do believe is that until we break our lust for these guns, nothing will change."
Interview: 

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/15/nx-s1-5539315/trymaine-lee-a-thousand-ways-to-die