A Tragedy's Second Anniversary Without Press Coverage

Exactly two years and a few days ago there was a shooting in a house 2 doors down from us.

I remember it being fairly early in the evening, schoolkids were still up and the air was cool.  We neighbors came out to see what was going on.  Was it a shot we heard?  A voice yelling?  The police arriving as they do, driving the wrong way on our one-way block?  At first we knew little, but when you see EMT's strolling instead of trotting, you know for whoever it is, it is too late.  Many, many years ago that section of the house was a candy store, when this was part of a close-knit Italian and Jewish neighborhood.  That evening it became a crime scene, a tear in the fabric of a city becoming known more for its young male homicide rate than its universities.

The dead one was a 13 year old boy.   He was shot in the head.  By a friend.  In a house that seemed to be connected like adjoining hotel rooms.  There is not much more that I know as fact:  his killer was 18 years old at the time and ran away, leaving behind the other witness, a young man who lived there.  The killer turned himself in and as could be expected, lied to the police (and probably himself).  The newspapers and TV stations lost interest after all the salaciousness was squeezed out of the story -- the boys' ages, the quiet street, the speculation about where and how a gun wound up in the room, the entreaties for money to bury a child.  After a few days there was only a tiny TV reporter in a cheap pantsuit standing alongside the antennaed van, shivering in the late October sun waiting for someone who wanted to be the center of attention at all costs to come outside so she could make her bones.

I'd written here previously about what happened last October.  Since then the family that was living in the house moved out -- traumatized, a little heartbroken, ashamed.  The original charge of murder was revised to manslaughter, and 2 years to the day that it happened the boy's mother and family and still very young friends gathered outside the house to remember him.  Where else can they go?  It is the one place on the planet that they are certain he was at, because this is where he died.  So, a small group gathered to light candles and tie balloons around a street sign, and not say much at all.  As each person left she thanked them for coming.  Then more kids would arrive to pay their respects, walking that cool night across Legion and Frontage from The Hill.  No cops, no press, no curious neighbors.  Just a woman enduring the longest night of her life, her remaining children and family including a couple of toddlers too young to remember, and a handful of teenagers crying.

Each night someone has been lighting the memorial candles.  And then that will end and the balloons will wither in the cold air.  And then that boy's mother will count the days until she must come back.  I plan to be there with her again.

A Tragedy's Anniversary Without Press Coverage

On the 4th Tuesday of every month I attend the general meeting our our neighborhood's community association.  It's something we've done since arriving in New Haven and finding out about the group.  My ties to West River have grown and deepened, and the neighborhood's initiatives toward community building have done the same.  That particular night, my friend, Ellen, Lilli and I were walking home the block and a half from Barnard School and we were overtaken by a swarm of teenagers.  They quickly parted around us on foot and on bikes and we could see that they were heading towards my house.

Four houses down we met A, who had been at the meeting, too.  He is by temperament both cautious and suspicious.  Perhaps for good reason; and perhaps he is this way as only people who have given others reason in the past to be cautious and suspicious can be.  He was getting ready to call the police.  I told him wait, I saw my neighbor, Eric, in the crowd, talking to kids, keeping an eye on things.  We went down the street and a hunch I'd had since the first teenagers overtook us was confirmed.  It was a year ago that Marquell Banks was murdered in the house 2 doors down from ours. These kids, some who knew him, some who did not, collected to grieve, and to discharge an inchoate, unspecific anger towards the house's tenants.  I'm sure if Eric hadn't been there some kid would have tried to get inside the house.  (The tenants coming home saw the crowd forming and left to sleep elsewhere.)

It is that palpable anger that made A want to call the police immediately.  Even a wise cop can only ameliorates it briefly.  And wise cops are rare.  But, it's a year later now and these kids are still angry, still looking for the answer to the problem of one of their own killing another of their own.  Marquell's family is traumatized.  The tenants, who have young children of their own, are traumatized and stigmatized.  (This is not conjecture on my part.  This comes from conversation and witness.)  The teenagers who came to mourn are traumatized.

We, the adults of this street in particular, and this community in general, need to reclaim the obligation that we've assigned to the police.  We've demanded, in the name of public safety, that they also fix what's broken in the social fabric and by doing so wash our hands of responsibility to each other.  As a community we've made great strides in that direction when the issues address a material lack, we fall short when it involves matters that are made more difficult by a lack of trust and no belief in agape love.  When those events happen we resort to calling the cops and deluding ourselves that the problem's been solved.  It hasn't, and I expect to see some of those same kids back again next year.