The screams began where the singing should have been. In seconds, a child’s birthday in Stockton turned from frosting and balloons to bodies on the lawn and parents using their own flesh as shields. Four people dead. Ten wounded. A neighborhood’s illusion of safety blown apart. As investigators sift through shell casings and shattered plastic toys, the question everyone is terrified to ask is the one that matters most: if even a backyard birthday isn’t safe, what place in America truly is? In the days after the Stockton shooting, the birthday yard became a shrine to all that was lost....
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