A sign is seen, Wednesday, April 19, 2023, in front of the house where 84-year-old Andrew Lester shot 16-year-old Ralph Yarl a week earlier in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

In suburban Detroit, it was a lost 14-year-old looking for directions. In Kansas City, it was a 16-year-old who went to the wrong house to pick up his younger brothers. There was the 12-year-old rummaging around in a yard in small-town Alabama, the 20-year-old woman who found herself in the wrong driveway in upstate New York and the cheerleaders who got into the wrong car in Texas. All of them, and dozens more across America, were met by gunfire. In the United States, strangers are often seen as threats and fear has been politicized. And now simple acts like ringing the wrong doorbell can seem like a fateful question of trust.