She got the call at work: Come home. She knew something had happened to one of her kids.

        She drove to the Madisonville house where her son and daughter lived. Her husband stood out front. It's Nolan, he said, and he's dead.

        In that second, Lucy Logan became one of a growing group in Cincinnati: the relatives of a homicide victim.

        Nolan was victim No. 9.

        Now there are 33.

        Thirty-three families that have lost loved ones to violence this year in Cincinnati. Thirty-three families shoved into a world Ms. Logan never thought much about all the times she saw somebody else's killing in the news. Not until her 19-year-old son, Nolan Moi, was shot in the back of the head sometime early on Monday morning, March 11.

        She's thinking of trying to get all the families together. Not for a support group. But to talk about how they might work together to help detectives solve the crimes. And how they might speak as one voice against the escalating violence in this city.

        “I just think the public needs to hear about this as much as possible,” she says. “This is people. I don't know if it's posters of all the victims posted all over town or what, but I want people to have it in front of them every day.

        “We may not like it, but this is happening in Cincinnati.”
       • • •
       Ms. Logan's husband, Darrell Miller, was home in bed when one of Mr. Moi's roommates called about 9:30 a.m. to say he fell and was bleeding. Mr. Miller pulled on some pants and drove to the house. He saw his stepson lying on the stairs in what he realized later was really a lot of blood for just a fall down the stairs.

        He couldn't see any wounds; Mr. Moi's long curly hair covered his face.

        “I said, "Is he conscious?' The paramedics just said, "He's gone.'”

        Maybe my wife won't come, he thought. Like if she didn't show up, it wouldn't be true, her son wouldn't really be dead. But she did come.

        Hours later, they still thought Mr. Moi died from hitting his head. Then detectives said they found some shell casings and asked if Ms. Logan and Mr. Miller owned any guns.

        Then, the revelation from investigators that the 19-year-old had been shot in the back of the head.

        For two hours, investigators sat in Ms. Logan's living room asking questions about her son's life and who might want to kill him. She understands why they had to ask — it just felt awful sitting there trying to come up with something your son might've done to bring on homicide.

        He smoked pot — “like any other 19-year-old kid,” she admits. He sold some too, she says, but not in the past year or so.

        He watched a lot of TV, delivered pizzas for Mio's, worked with his father, an electrician, and played games on his new computer. The night before he died, he asked his mom to come over and check out his new Sims game. She went for a walk instead.

        One of his new games was still running on the computer when they found his body.

        Mr. Moi's roommates, John Miller and Carolina Curran, were asleep feet away from where he died, which police say could have been anytime between about 1:30 and 6 a.m. They heard nothing. Police found that hard to believe, and grilled the couple for 12 hours before being let go. Mr. Miller and Mr. Moi had been friends since seventh grade.

        Mr. Moi's sister, Anna, and her husband also were asleep in another apartment in the house. They didn't hear anything, either.

        The killing, as with most of the rest of the 33, remains unsolved.
        • • •
        As Ms. Logan began to deal with her son's death, she started to notice how many more homicides were following.

        Five days after Mr. Moi was shot, another Cincinnati homicide. Four days later, two more. Four more days, and two more killings.

        Now, almost three months after Mr. Moi died, his mother still wants to know what happened in the last minutes of his life.

        But she sees a bigger picture, that being the mother of one of Cincinnati's 33 homicide victims this year puts her in a position from which she might be able to change something.

        She's not sure what. It just feels to her like she and the other relatives should try to figure that out. Maybe some kind of vigil on Fountain Square — the center of the city, to focus people's attention on the fact that killings are happening an average of every five days.

        “Maybe just to make a point of asking the city: What are your plans for dealing with these homicides?” she says. “If this becomes a regular thing, what are we going to do about it?

        “Just being thrown into this group has been a real learning experience for me. These families have a kinship, and it's murder.”

        Ms. Logan invites family members of other victims, or those who want to help raise awareness about the homicides, to call her at (513) 271-5824.

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