Tonight's Vigil

A 2007 photo of a community solidarity peace march down the street from where the triple stabbing occurred. The apartment buildings pictured are typical of the housing in that section of Carver-Langston. Other parts of the neighborhood are predominated by four unit buildings, and rowhouses. you also have Langston Terrace, from which the neighborhood takes part of its name. Many of the apartments in Carver Terrace were originally intended as temporary housing, that would be demolished after a time.
I didn't get the announcement up in time (I was having an email issue), but I attended tonight's vigil for Erika Peters, Eric Peters, and Dakota Peters with a friend. I'm not so much one for neighborhood marches, or anti-violence vigils (though I've attended more than my fair share of both), but I have to say that I think vigils of this particular type can be very beneficial for the family, area residents, and anyone else who attends. This one went well and was very poignant. The oldest son, who did not live with his mother, was present, as was the father (I think) of the two dead boys. He spoke well of Erika Peters, saying they were friends, but that things had just been too hard for them. There was a large family contingent, and many of them spoke during the vigil. One neighbor, with whom Erika Peters had been close, talked about an un-returned phone call and feelings of guilt and responsibility. Though clearly, as police who were present pointed out, that un-returned phone call in no way caused what happened. A young relative of the two boys touched on the the way that the tragic intertwines with the banality of everyday life. He, like many attendees (myself included. It was hard not to do so.) wept. He spoke of how much he missed them, and now, having their tiny socks and underwear in his drawers, he felt unsure what to do with these personal items.
I used to be a devotee of the British crime writer P.D. James. She once wrote something (much more eloquently crafted than my paraphrase) about how if the dead could know the appointed hour at which they would leave this world they could clean up the small messes and embarrassments that we all leave around, assuming no one else will ever see them ("On a chair beside the bed was a large jar of vaseline, the lid open, a single fly gummed to the rim. The back of the chair, and the floor were strewn with clothes and the top of a chest of drawers, which served as a dressing table under an oval mirror was crowded with bottles, dirty glasses, jars of make-up, and packets of tissues"). Few of us have the luxury (if it is a luxury) of knowing when we are about to go. All of us have such messes. To lesser, or greater degrees (depending upon circumstances) they are exposed to those who we would prefer not to see them. I recall that in the novel Plays Well With Others, Alan Gurganus writes of a gay man on his deathbed bidding a close friend to please dispose of the closet full of sex toys before his Mid-Western parents arrive in NYC. My apologies, I suppose this has become a bit of a meditation on death, and its aftermath, as much as the post that I intended to write. The connection is the regret. The afterthought.

The real point here is how avoidable all of this might have been. I'm not talking about Joseph Mays restraining himself (although if he had persued counseling, he might never have murdered his girlfriend and her two sons in cold blood), but rather about the duty we all have to call the police when something isn't right. People get scared. They don't want to get involved. A woman and her two young sons are now dead. A third boy has lost his mother and two brothers. A two year-old has lost two brothers, a mother, an effectively lost a father at the hands of that father. One can only hope that her caregivers are very strong people.
All the family members and friends I saw gathered there tonight lost people for whom they cared deeply. I'm told that many of the cops who initially responded were rookies with young kids. At the vigil Groomes said many are still unable to return to work due to the psychological impact of viewing that crime scene. That's a lot of damage all around. And I'm not even going into how this might impact other kids in the neighborhood (not well, I suspect). At the conclusion of the march pictured above I was shown the place where elementary school students had found the corpse of a murdered man the week before (that murder was not what prompted the march) about thirty feet from the school. I'm sick of (and sickened by) all of this. At the moments when I wasn't crying, I often wanted to vomit. It isn't fun to watch/hear a kid who is probably 14 talk about losing his mother as two brothers like this. It's sick, really, really sick.

Bottom line, call the cops when you hear, or see, something. Even if you hate your neighbors, CALL. You might prevent something like this. Also (and this was a conversation I had the other night), if a neighborhood kid is kind of bratty, treat the kid well (but appropriately)...it's probably just his parents. He probably needs a role model. Don't be a dick. STEP UP. CALL THE COPS. I NEVER want to see this kind of thing again, but I know that I will. Let's minimize the numbers.

On a related note, one of the kids from the Guardians photo attended the vigil.