‘Eye-opening’ data shows more Connecticut children are dying in urban centers

CT Insider – Friday, April 25, 2025
By Lisa Backus

Shevron Wilson was fatally shot in broad daylight earlier this month about 100 feet from his Hartford home.

At 17, Wilson, remembered as a loving teenager who liked basketball and music by his family during a vigil April 17, was one of several youths under the age of 18 who died from gun violence or other unnatural means in a city that has a percentage of child deaths nearly three times its percentage of the state’s population, according to figures issued Wednesday by the Connecticut Office of the Child Advocate.

It’s a disparity that is playing out in some of the state’s larger cities while more suburban towns and cities with higher incomes are seeing fewer deaths, the data showed.

“It was eye-opening,” Assistant Child Advocate Brendan Burke said of his own findings. “There was a clear distinction between the top four and the next 16 and then everybody else. The overwhelming majority of Connecticut’s cities and towns don’t see a lot of child fatalities, but the ones that do, see a lot of them.”

Hartford makes up 3.31 percent of the state’s population, but saw 9.57 percent of the state’s unnatural or unexpected child deaths from Jan. 1, 2021, to March 31, 2025, Burke told members of the state’s Child Fatality Review Panel Wednesday.

New Haven, Waterbury and Bridgeport also are experiencing unusually high percentages of child deaths compared to their percentage of the state’s population, his figures indicate.

The four cities including Hartford make up 14.3 percent of the state’s population and 32.18 percent of the child deaths, Burke said. The figures are based on 376 deaths of children under age 18 during the timeframe examined.

During the same time period, cities in the state’s “gold coast” such as Stamford, Norwalk and Fairfield saw lower percentages of unnatural child deaths than their population size, according to the data. Stamford, which has 3.77 percent of the state’s population, had 2.66 percent of the state’s unnatural child deaths, Burke said.

It won’t be easy to extrapolate how to prevent the child deaths based on the data, Burke said. But it does show that among the potentially hundreds of reasons why so many kids are dying in the state’s largest cities, access to resources such as food and affordable housing likely are playing a role, he said.

“The more we understand a very complex problem, the closer we get to ensuring that children have healthy upbringings,” Burke said.

Families that are struggling with food insecurity or must wait for their EBT card to be recharged before they can put food on the table or have to go back to work two weeks after giving birth to a child are more likely to be under stress leading to bad outcomes, he said.

The 16 municipalities that followed Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport and Waterbury in the percentage of child deaths compared to their population were New Britain, Danbury, Stamford, Norwich, Meriden, Bristol, Norwalk, Groton, Windsor, West Hartford, Manchester, Middletown, Somers and Southington. The 16 make up 26.4 percent of the state’s population and 32.45 percent of child deaths for the period from 2021 to the end of the first quarter of 2025.

Somers has a small population but had four child deaths in a fire last year, driving up that town’s percentage of the number of unexpected or unnatural child deaths, Burke said.

The cause of the unnatural or unexpected deaths that were examined were homicides, accidents or undetermined, with unsafe sleep incidents in infants playing a major role in the undetermined deaths, Burke said.

Of the state’s five largest cities, Hartford had the highest percentage of its child deaths to homicide at 18.57 percent, followed by New Haven with 14.29 percent, Bridgeport with 8.57 percent and Waterbury with 7.14 percent, Burke determined.

Burke said based on 2023 census data, Bridgeport is Connecticut’s largest city, making up 4.10 percent of the state’s population, followed by Stamford at 3.77 percent, New Haven at 3.74 percent and Waterbury at 3.18 percent. New Haven had a high rate of undetermined child deaths at 13.85 percent of the deaths and of the four cities, Waterbury had the lowest percentage of child homicides at 7.14 percent, the data showed.

Bridgeport, Waterbury, New Haven and Hartford also had high percentages in the number of reports to the state Department of Children and Families and the number of substantiated DCF investigations in 2024 compared to their population, the data showed.

“It’s pretty clear that this is happening in our urban centers where the percentage of population is lower than the percentage of child deaths,” Burke said.

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