Where in Connecticut are violent deaths happening? New project explains trends

CT Insider – Wednesday, April 23, 2025
By Cris Villalonga-Vivoni

When Kerri Raissan couldn’t find information on local homicide and suicide trends, she and other researchers from the University of Connecticut built their own dashboard and maps with state data to track just that.

Launched in mid-March, the dashboard has data on all information on homicides and suicides, also known as violent deaths, from 2020 to 2024, showing where, when and how residents died.

Researchers ultimately found that these violent deaths affect every Connecticut county and residents from all walks of life. Around 2,521 violent deaths occurred between 2020 to 2024, fluctuating over the years. Hartford and New Haven saw the highest number of homicide and suicide victims, with 195 and 164, respectively. Much of the violent deaths were focused in the city’s core cities. Much smaller municipalities of Franklin and Somers saw as low as two violent deaths, according to the data.

Sandy and Shawn Archer pose at their residence in Haddam, Conn., Wednesday, April 9, 2025. Sandy Archer has been waiting for a live organ donor for several years while also on the deceased donor transplant waitlist. She was diagnosed with a fatty liver as a teen and in August 2022 she was also diagnosed with primary biliary cholangitis.

The goal of compiling data in this way is to inform policy and solutions to help the community, said Raissan, director of UConn Advancing Research, Methods, and Scholarship (ARMS) in Gun Injury Prevention Center and one of the leads on the project.

“You have to first understand the problem before you can make a policy,” she said. “This is hopefully just one more tool that Connecticut policymakers and providers can use to help understand how violent deaths have evolved in a post-COVID world, in Connecticut, and how we can continue to respond effectively to reduce them.”

Researchers with the university’s ARMS Center funded and built the interactive Violent Mortality Dashboard with data from the state Office of Vital Records. According to the report, they also used information from death certificates and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner to identify specific demographics – like race, age, and marital status – and filter out deaths caused by car accidents and natural causes.

Users can manipulate the dashboard by year, gun relevance and manner of death to see the different trends in the Connecticut communities over the four years. In 2024, Raissan pointed out, there were significantly more suicides than homicides across the state compared to other years.

Data also showed that the number of people who were injured and died in Hartford was 195 over the four years, but the number of residents killed was 161.

“This tells me that people sometimes come to Hartford and they die while they are in Hartford, but they don’t necessarily live in Hartford. That is a different kind of impact for a community,” she said. “It’s a different kind of trauma for that community, and we wanted policymakers to understand the difference between someone being injured in their constituency versus one of their constituents dying.”

The dashboard also shows notable differences between victims of homicide and suicide, however, Raissain said this isn’t a surprise to advocates following the issues closely. Instead, it further confirms what was already known, matching national trends.

Around 80% of the people who died by suicide between 2020 and 2024 were white, but rates among Black and Hispanic residents steadily increased too. The average age of death is 51, with a majority of the victims dying at home, according to the data.

Black and Hispanic residents make up a majority of homicide victims in Connecticut, around 49% and 29%, respectively, in comparison to the 18.27% of white victims. Homicide victims are also significantly younger than those who die by suicide, with an average age of 34 years old and a majority dying in the hospital. Data also shows that 20 homicide victims were under two years old at the time of their death.

When parsing through the state data, Raissan said researchers isolated violent deaths but left out gun-related accidents since they are rare and often involve children.

“These are people that have lost their lives to some kind of violent death and all of those people have loved ones. We wanted to create a dashboard that could get the information to the public and policymakers so they could use this information to make our state safer while also making sure that we didn’t unintentionally cause harm to someone whose family has already suffered unimaginable harm.”

The dashboard will be updated regularly as information from the state is released to ensure it includes the most recent data points available. Raissan said they are also looking to analyze the state metrics and trends. According to UConn Today, researchers sent the dashboard to the Public Health, Judiciary, and Health and Human Services committees.

To Sen. Saud Anwar, D-South Windsor, and co-chair of the Public Health committee, the dashboard not only visualizes the data and impact of gun violence, but humanizes the toll of violent deaths on communities to develop targeted prevention and intervention investments,

Funding these prevention initiatives, especially in regards to gun violence, is vital more than ever as changes on the federal level may trickle down into the local efforts.

“Each point on the map represents a life that is cut short, and behind each number is a family grieving and a community changed,” Anwar said. “(The dashboard is) clearly something that helps see the patterns and with visibility comes responsibility.”

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