The powerful story of what one teenager's digital life reveals about grief, gun violence, and the limits of social media 

When seventeen-year-old Gakirah Barnes was gunned down in the streets of Chicago’s South Side, the media labeled her as the “gun-toting gang girl of Chicago.” But the digital trace she left behind told a far more complicated story.

Drawing on more than a decade of research, Desmond Upton Patton confronts Gakirah’s online world while wrestling with his own personal and professional biases about violence and Black youth. Through a deep dive into Gakirah’s X account, Patton works to understand her life while developing new, ethical, and groundbreaking methods to interpret social media data that emphasizes care and accountability, challenging the ways artificial intelligence and digital research can misread marginalized communities when stripped of human understanding. The Streets Don’t End at the Corner argues that any serious effort to address gun violence today must understand social media as a new neighborhood, one where conflict, loss, identity, and survival unfold in real time.