When Dr. John Rich was at the Boston City Hospital, he assumed the young black men who frequently showed up in his emergency room were somehow responsible for their violent wounds. But when he started interviewing them, he learned that many of them were victims of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Some had been robbed, others had talked to the wrong girl at a party or been caught in the line of fire while walking home,” reports this NPR interview with Dr. Rich and Roy Martin, Rich’s urban cultural interpreter.

Dr. Rich is working to deal with the trauma these men have experienced in order to help them truly heal.