New Haven Independent

Tracey Suggs and Sonda Whitfield lost their 13 year-old children in shootings within five weeks of each other in 2006. As the third anniversaries approach, they are finalizing plans for the campaign in their memory, aimed at 500 young New Haveners. They promise events filled with straight talk about what guns and gangs are doing to their families and their neighborhoods.

Suggs and Whitfield are pictured (left to right) wearing T-shirts printed for the campaign, dubbed “Gun Violence Awareness Month.” It begins June 13.

“Something has to be done,” Suggs said. “There’s too many kids being lost. What better way to remember Justus and Jajuana?”

Jajuana Cole, 13, was shot to death on Dickerman Street on June 16, 2006, when four 16-18 year-olds fired into a crowd. She was hanging out in a courtyard at a neighborhood party.

Five weeks later, Justus Suggs, a shy boy who dreamed of owning a repair shop, was shot in the head while riding his bike home from a Hill neighborhood carnival. Justus, too, was 13 and hit by a stray. A 16 year-old apparently engaged in a feud between the Hill and Tre gangs fired into a crowd of kids, including Justus, who had nothing to do with it.

Sonda Whitfield, Jajuana’s mom, learned on TV of Justus Suggs’ shooting. She headed over to Yale-New Haven Hospital.

She didn’t know the Suggs family. She waited in the lobby and sent word up to Suggs’ room that she wished to visit.

Tracey Suggs sent down word: No visitors.

“I started crying,” Whitfield recalled. “I said, ‘All I want to do is give her a hug!’

“She came down to the lobby. We both started crying. Nobody knows what it’s like to lose a child. It never leaves you.”

Whitfield and Suggs bonded as the community rallied around their families. Supporters organized memorial tributes, anti-violence marches, and money for their funerals.

A New Haven cop, Shafiq Abdussabur, recruited the two moms to volunteer in CTribat, a program he runs that works with young people in trouble or at risk or getting in trouble.

“I can’t sit inside the house and cry all the time,” Suggs decided.

As they worked with kids on the streets, the moms watched teen shootings continue. Tracey Suggs’ 17 year-old nephew Maurice Nicholson was gunned down three months ago as he stepped outside Ashe’s Barber Shop.

Suggs and Whitfield decided to do more for this year’s anniversary with Gun Awareness Month, organized with Abdussabur through CTribat and timed to bookend roughly around the dates of Jajuana’s and Justus’ murders. Organizers are declaring the carnage a “public health emergency.”

The campaign starts on Saturday, June 13, with a memorial service on Canal Street for shooting victims. Then CTribat will hold anti-violence workshops with, among others, former gang members, including WYBC’s Juan Castillo. It will enlist churches and masjids in “victim service days.” An “urban think tank” session will explore the question: “Public Health or Public Safety?” The police department will run a gun buy-back. Groups helping out with the month-long campaign include, among others, the police department, mayor’s office, Yale, Planned Parenthood, Yale-New Haven Hospital, the Male Involvement Network.

Click here for details. Register to get involved through this website.

Previous memorial events for Jajuana and Justus, as well as CTribat’s more formal workshops with cops and ex-gang members, have succeeded in drawing some of the young people often not reached by more mainstream institutional efforts, Suggs said.

The goal in this new campaign is to draw in 500 young New Haveners and refer over 100 of them to “partner agencies.” Organizers also hope to identify and help “50 families in need of existing crisis management services.” In addition to “delivering” an anti-violence message, they aim to register 2,000 people for an ongoing campaign.

Whitfield and Suggs said they plan to challenge teens and adults alike: Stop blaming the cops, or parents. Start snitchin’. And take responsibility.

“We need to make our kids accountable,” said Suggs.

“Nobody,” Whitfield argued, “can make you do nothing you don’t want to do.”

They believe their own experiences lend power to their message. They continue to live with the pain of their children’s murders, every day. “I tell people, ‘Don’t be fooled by my smile,’” Suggs said. “It’s a curtain masking how I’m really feeling. That day never left my mind.”