"Killing the Messenger: A Story of Radical Faith, Racism's Backlash, and the Assassination of a Journalist" by Bay Area News Group digital investigative reporter Thomas Peele will be released Feb. 7 by the Crown Publishing Group.  

One of the great challenges that violence presents to a community is that until it happens to you, it remains an abstraction. But when it happens to you, it is often too late. There is very little middle ground. And what middle ground does exist is often a fearful, anxious place where no one wants to linger for too long. In other words, the perspective necessary to survive often only comes after the damage has been done.  

Some involved so deeply in street life that experts say they have slipped into a kind of alternate reality in which the rules the rest of society lives by don't apply