She was drawn to gun violence research. Then she discovered the truth about her father’s death.

y her first semester of graduate school, in 2018, Jordan was conscientious about suicide awareness. She was pursuing a doctorate in criminology at Rutgers University and had come to understand the interconnections between mental health, firearms access, and self-harm. As she shuffled through her classes on research methods and policy analysis, she began to see how a person’s environment affected their risk of suicide, as it did of homicide.