Eric Butler, an anti-violence counselor with a gift for winning the trust of emotionally closed-off teenagers, who worked with students, school districts and prosecutors’ offices to divert young people from being sucked into the criminal justice system, died on Aug. 4 at his home in New Orleans. He was 49.

The cause is unknown, according to his sister Najla Butler, who said the death was being investigated by the Orleans Parish coroner’s office. She said that Mr. Butler had suffered for much of his life from seizures, which he had attributed to stress.

Mr. Butler’s work, beginning with street gangs in Oakland, Calif., and extending to a last-chance high school in that city for students who had been expelled from other schools, first gained attention through articles in 2013 in The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor and a 2017 documentary film, “Circles.”

The exposure brought him a reputation in the field of restorative justice in education, which is an alternative to “zero tolerance” policies, such as suspension and expulsion, which in many school districts are meted out far more often to Black students than white students. Suspension can be an early step on a school-to-prison pipeline.

Rather than punish students, restorative justice seeks to have bad actors accept responsibility for their wrongdoing, to develop empathy, and to commit meaningful reparations that will make the victim feel healed.

Mr. Butler led “talking circles” in which young people who had harmed one another were encouraged to own up to what they had done.

Raised by a single mother in a housing project, often sporting piercings in his ears, a backward baseball cap and Beats headphones, he had a knack for getting hostile young people to open up.

“He could take a room of kids doing their very best to hide from everyone — you could feel this seething negativity — but Eric didn’t believe it for a moment; he saw it all as an act,” Cassidy Friedman, the director of “Circles,” said in an interview.

Mr. Butler often began sessions by apologizing to young people for the wrongs adults had done to them.

“He’d say, ‘We don’t have a kid problem, we have an adult problem,’” Mr. Friedman said. That admission often broke through to teenagers.

When leading sessions for adults, such as prosecutors, Mr. Butler would ask them to recall a time when they had been harmed, and a time when they had harmed someone else.

“Eric made a huge impact wherever he went,” Fania Davis, the founder of the group that trained Mr. Butler, Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, said in a text message. “He facilitated circles involving gang violence where families of the young people involved initially didn’t want to be in the same room together, but where they ended up embracing one another.”

At Ralph J. Bunche High School in West Oakland, where Mr. Butler was a full-time restorative justice counselor, suspensions dropped by 51 percent in the 2011-12 academic year.

As The Monitor reported, three teenage girls were on the verge of a fight when Mr. Butler drew them into a circle of chairs to face one another as he facilitated the encounter. One girl admitted that she had stolen shoes from one of the others so that she could sell them to pay for a drug test for her mother. The perpetrator began to cry. The two other girls hugged her. The victim of the theft said there was no need to replace the shoes, and the perpetrator promised that she would not steal again.

Through Talking Peace, a consulting company he founded in 2015 with Hannah Bronsnick, Mr. Butler went on to introduce the principles of restorative justice in other school districts around the country, including in Napa, Calif.; Selma, Ala.; and St. Louis.

In Selma, he trained junior high school teachers in restorative practices, pushing against the grain for some in a state where corporal punishment in schools is legal. Sometimes, a student’s pastor would be called in to do the paddling.

“So the kid is learning: The way I deal with conflict is to hit somebody,” Mr. Butler vented in an article in Mother Jones magazine that chronicled his time in Selma.

Restorative justice in schools, which grew out of a movement to apply it to the criminal justice system, gained a burst of attention when the Department of Education in 2014 found that Black students were suspended at three times the rate of white students. However, research has not shown restorative justice to be an effective alternative to traditional discipline practices.

Still, Mr. Butler broadened his consulting beyond school systems, leading training sessions for prosecutors in Dallas, Legal Aid lawyers in New York City and a tech company in San Francisco, where he helped employees examine their culture.

“He’d always tell the story in his trainings about how kids are immediately able to tell if you’re being inauthentic,” Ms. Bronsnick, the Talking Peace co-founder, said in an interview. “His authentic self was loving every kid he came across, and they could feel that.”

Eric Lee Butler was born on Aug. 7, 1974, in New Orleans and raised in the Ninth Ward in the Desire Projects. He was the oldest of three children of Dorothy Cameron, a hair stylist, and Ernest Butler, who abandoned the family.

Eric attended George Washington Carver High School and John McDonough High School. He played high school football, and it hurt him, he once said, that his father never attended his games.

Mr. Butler had three children by two women but never married. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he moved to Oakland for a number of years, before returning to his birth city.

Besides his sister Najla, he is survived by his parents; his children, Diamon Turner, Tre Thomas and Taylor Thomas; his sister Malikah Butler; his half sisters LaToya Marine Healy, Amanda Young and Zakira Butler; his half brothers Malik Young and Marlin Walker; his grandmother Mattie Butler; and two grandchildren.

In 2010, an adoptive sister, Lanell Butler, was murdered by her abusive boyfriend, who shot her in the face. Despite Mr. Butler’s training in restorative justice, he told Mother Jones: “I never felt the urge for revenge like I did in that moment. It felt so personal.”

He flew from Oakland to New Orleans and plotted revenge with some childhood buddies.

But then his phone rang; it was the mother of the man who shot Lanell. She said she wanted to see his family. The woman drove five hours from Florida, and when Mr. Butler opened the door, she pushed him aside to rush to his mother.

“And she gets on her knees. And she says: ‘I’m the mother of the person that killed your daughter. And I belong to you,’” Mr. Butler recalled.

“My mom stands up. And she stands this woman up. And they just start hugging. And they’re crying and sobbing. And through the sobbing, you can hear my mom say, ‘You was forgiven before you came here.’”

Mr. Butler’s desire for revenge, he said, drained out of him.