Even a strong person can be broken. George’s youngest son, Travell, was murdered nearly a dozen years ago. Her health began deteriorating soon afterward. If that wasn’t enough, her husband has been hospitalized for months after suffering a head injury in an assault last September, a reminder of how some Stockton families may be afflicted by violent crime multiple times.

“They say the Lord don’t give you no more than you can take,” Mayfield said. “But he’s given her enough.”

Tracy George’s story shows how the consequences of endemic violence linger with loved ones for many years, long after most of the community has moved on.

Since Travell’s death, hundreds of other homicides have diverted the public’s attention. Detectives have been assigned to newer crimes. Reporters have been assigned to newer stories. But for the mothers of Stockton homicide victims, nothing changes. The nightmare never ends.

It’s the little things. Every time her car sputters, Tracy George is painfully reminded of her son, who was repairing cars before he was a teenager.

She can’t even visit Travell’s grave at Cherokee Memorial Park in Lodi. It’s overwhelming to think of her baby down there beneath the immaculate lawn, with his No. 42 running back’s jersey.

“Sometimes I wish I could pinch myself like it was a dream,” she said, fighting back tears. “All of this stuff. Travell being murdered, and what’s going on with my husband. … It’s crazy. It don’t make no sense.”

Travell and his older brother, Clarence, were good boys, their mother said. She went through their dresser drawers to make sure they weren’t being recruited by gang members. She wouldn’t let them spend the night at friends’ houses — their friends had to come to them.

Her diligence paid off. Travell graduated from Franklin High School and went on to San Joaquin Delta College and then California State University, Chico, where he was trying to decide what to do with his life after football.

Then it all unraveled. Travell was home for summer break when he went to see his cousin on Volney Street in south Stockton. There, less than three weeks before his 21st birthday, he was shot just before 1 a.m. by someone who simply walked up and fired into the group he was standing with.

To this day, Tracy George doesn’t know why. And she doesn’t know who.

“They didn’t even give him a chance to see what he could do with his life before they took him,” she said.

She was hundreds of miles away when it happened, training for a new job near Los Angeles, when someone called and said Travell had been wounded. Sitting there in her hotel room, she frantically called every one of her contacts in her phone, not knowing he had already hemorrhaged to death.

She couldn’t fly home until the next day.

“I didn’t get to see my baby until he was in the casket,” she said.

Tracy George stayed at a friend’s house for three months. It was just too hard to go home and see Travell’s things.

When she did finally come home, her struggles were just beginning.

In 2010, someone stole her deceased son’s truck, one of the last reminders she had of his life.

In 2011, in her mid-40s, she suffered a pair of heart attacks, which she attributes at least in part to stress related to the unsolved killing. She was diagnosed with vascular disease and, later, cancer which is now in remission. She has been unable to work consistently because of her health problems, and almost lost her home as a result.

On top of all of that, her husband of four years was assaulted at a party, falling to the ground and striking his head on concrete. When it became clear how serious his injury was, Tracy George thought, “Is this going to happen again?” Could she lose both her son and her husband to acts of violence?

He was in a coma for weeks; doctors had to temporarily remove part of his skull to alleviate the swelling.

“I didn’t need none of this,” Tracy George said. “None of this.”

There is at least one light in her darkness, and that is Clarence George III.

When Travell died, Clarence felt guilty. He was the older brother. He was supposed to protect Travell. And yet he wasn’t there the night that he died.

At his brother’s funeral, in front of 1,000-plus mourners, Clarence, 20, took the microphone and made a pledge to his brother.

“I’m gonna go to college and become somebody. I promise you,” his mother remembers him saying.

Today, Clarence is a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University. He is studying African-American ethnicity and hopes to someday help address some of the underlying causes of violence in cities like Stockton. The same kind of violence that claimed his brother.

Something good, it turns out, came of that horrific event.

“His death really sparked a fire in me to be an asset to my family,” Clarence said recently, “to take my life and to make something out of it.”