The names strike you first.

The long, long list of children’s names — 366 children killed by their parents and caregivers from 1985 to 1999 — all listed, one by one, on eight-foot almost floor-to-ceiling panels that cover the walls of a meeting room at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department Headquarters.

Eric

Mariana

Baby J

Adam

Kayla,

Toby,

Jazmin ...

Your eye moves naturally across the panels that roll up like scrolls so they can go from place to place.

Your eye moves, line by line, and picks up the ages — 2 years, 6, newborn, 18 months, 8 — and then, inevitably, painfully, it moves on to the cause of death.

So many names, so many deaths, so many causes. Starving, poisoning, stabbing, strangling, asphyxiation, blunt trauma, head trauma, blunt force, drowning, beating, shaken baby syndrome, shaken baby syndrome, shaken baby syndrome, decapitation ....

De-what?

Surely, not.

But there it is. Black letters on a white scroll.

For every child, at every age, a cause of death.

We look for names we know.

And find them.

DeMallon, 2 years, head trauma

Christopher, 18 months, shaken baby syndrome

Buddy, 6 years, blunt trauma

Here in Rowan we knew Buddy as Budde, Budde Clark, the name stepmother Robin Gosnell — who is serving a life sentence for his murder — gave him after she wrested custody from his mother.

We also knew him as Jordan Bradshaw, the name his mother, Pam Bradshaw, gave him at birth.

She’s here, at this news conference in Charlotte on a Thursday morning, to help the N.C. Child Advocacy Institute introduce its thick, new book, “Not Invisible, Not in Vain.” She was at the first one in Raleigh, too, and she’ll go to others in the Triad, New Bern and maybe Wilmington.

Because she can answer questions for reporters.

She can tell them why Robin Gosnell was able to get custody of her child. She can talk now about her pain when Jordy lost weight and stopped growing and his personality changed. And about how he stopped laughing and jumping into her arms to be hugged the very few times she was allowed to see him. How he had turned into a frightened little boy before he died.

She puts a face — with eyes that fill with unbidden tears — on all those names of murdered children. And she wants to do it for her Jordy, who will not have died in vain if things happen that let other children live.

Those three Rowan County children didn’t die in vain, says Dr. Marcia Herman-Giddens, the principal author and editor of the book, a mammoth but easily digested manual of procedures that people who have to deal with child abuse need to know.

They didn’t die in vain, she says after the news conference, because things happened as a result of their deaths.

“Changes have been made in the way we do things that have benefitted all of us, especially children.”

A law was changed to make safety the primary concern when a child is being placed in a new home, and caseworkers were added to DSS staffs.

That’s rare.

Generally, she says, child homicide by a stranger gets big headlines, public outcry, stiff criminal penalties. When a child is murdered by a parent or within a family, the reaction is usually silence.

The press conference was aimed at breaking that silence.

“We all want to turn away, but we cannot,” says Dr. Jonathan Sher, president of the N.C. Child Advocacy Institute. “We must work to assure that these murders are not swept under society’s carpets.”

“Not Invisible, Not in Vain” is a healthy start, Herman-Giddens says. It will help professionals who deal with the horror of child abuse murders — from emergency medical service workers to police, clergy, prosecutors, and the media — know what they must do.

It provides the protocols, offers “best practice” guidelines and helps each group and agency understand not only their own roles but the role of others as well. The purpose is to help establish consistency — among agencies, in punishing perpetrators and in offering support to all those affected by the murder of a child.

“If we ever hope to break the chain of events that perpetuates the legacy of child abuse, neglect and murder,” she says, “we must openly face — and deal with — these unspeakable crimes.”

Others speak briefly from their many different perspectives and their shared passion to do whatever they have to do to keep those who should be nurturing children from killing them — Sher, Charlotte’s police chief Major John O’Hare, assistant district attorney Steve Ward and Larry King of Charlotte’s Council for Children.

What, King wonders aloud, were all those children whose names are on those panels, thinking about as they took their last breath?

Like a Greek chorus making sure everyone understood the point, four unnamed people quietly went to the podium as each speaker finished to let those who had seen tho names and ages and causes of death also hear the stories of the children.

Bianca, 19 months old, had been immersed in a tub of scalding water by her mother’s boyfriend ....

Desmond’s mother’s boyfriend was babysitting for Desmond, age 3. The boyfriend was administering some blows to the child, presumably for discipline, when he hit Desmond forcefully on the head with a hairbrush ....

Four-month-old Jackie had a history of being hospitalized for burns to her left hand, foot and buttocks. A week before the fatal incident ....

Setaria, 10 months old, was sleeping in the same bed as her father. The father said he saw Setaria falling off the bed ....