Gun Violence Call: Move Beyond T‑Shirts

One young man knew seven people who have been shot. He said he is tired of memorial buttons and T‑shirts. Now a college freshman in New Haven, he was moved to volunteer to help write a middle-school curriculum on avoiding taking up guns.

Then a woman told the story of how, when she was 12, in 1991, she witnessed her 14-year-old brother being shot and killed on a New Haven street. The murder remains unsolved. She has for years run a mentorship program for kids vulnerable to street violence.

Those stories of new and old commitment to addressing gun violence emerged Monday night during an emotional panel at Albertus Magnus College.

The gathering, entitled ​“Gun Violence in the Community: Impacts and Responses,” drew nearly 50 people to the new Behan Community Room at the Hubert Campus Center that borders on New Haven’s Newhallville and Hamden’s Newhall neighborhoods, one of the local areas most impacted by gun violence.

The panel’s specific focus on guns and youth homicide was the first of its kind, said Sister Anne Kilbride, assistant to the president of the college for Dominican mission, and one of the event’s organizers.

The evening featured not just expressions of concern, but examples of concrete action.

The featured panelists included former New Haven Police Chief Otoniel Reyes, now chief of public safety at Quinnipiac University, and John Velleca, a former interim top cop in New Haven who now teaches criminal justice at Albertus. They are both Albertus alums. The event also featured organizers of New Haven’s homicide memorial garden, women who have lost sons to gun violence.

The gathering was emblematic of the kinds of programs through which the college is planning to engage more actively with social justice, environmental and other pressing issues in New Haven and Hamden in the years to come, according to school officials.

“The basis of Catholic social teaching on social justice is: see, judge, act,” said the panel’s moderator, Professor Robert Bourgeois. ​“Tonight we will engage in the first step: to see and listen, with humility and gratitude, to those affected by gun violence, the voices of the community.”

Reyes and Velleca presented the grim numbers about increasing gun violence. Velleca called for passing laws to get guns off the street. Reyes called for efforts to reduce poverty, social disparities, and crumbling family structures.

The rest of the evening was devoted to speakers and then audience members sharing their traumatic and, in some cases, recent experiences.

Tawana Galberth rose from the audience and said: ​“I was 12 years old when I witnessed my brother, age 14, killed.”

Her brother was Markeist Alexander. The date was Jan. 21, 1991, a year when the number of homicides in New Haven topped 30. They included the death of Christian Prince, a white Yale student, whose story, Galberth recalled, completely overshadowed the life-altering tragedy in her family.

These years later Galberth has emerged not bitter, even though the crime remains ​“cold” and unsolved, she said. She called the police a positive force in the community: ​“They are there to protect us, but it has to begin in the home.” Galberth went on to found a mentorship program where she currently works at the New Elm City Dream.

Yes, guns kill people, she concluded, eliciting a standing ovation for her still pained candor, ​“but it’s people who teach people to point a gun.”

“This is very close to home, my home,” said panelist Kim Washington, founder of Mothers Demand Action and a teacher for troubled kids through the Hamden Board of Education. ​“Gun violence is in our cities, towns, suburbs, worldwide.”

She described a Sunday evening years ago when she was living with her 81-year-old father, and 13 or 14 shots rang out, she said. ​“I pulled him to the floor and said, ​‘Don’t move.’”

In her work with kids, she said, ​“I hear children and mothers crying at funerals. You see young people wearing pins and T‑shirts to remember their loved ones.

“If you think you are not affected by gun violence, look in the mirror.”

Marlene Miller Pratt did. She’s a lifelong city science educator and the founder of the recently established New Haven Botanical Garden of Healing, dedicated to loved ones, mostly the young, killed by gun violence.

After losing her oldest child to ​“senseless gun violence,” Pratt said, she saw how dangerously desensitized the community was becoming, due to the normalizing of gun homicide.

“We can’t just remember them in T‑shirts and buttons and carry that for a few days and then forget them because there’s another homicide,” she said describing the percolating of her vision that bore fruit in the garden.

“I didn’t want a tree. I wanted an acre of [memorial] land for every child. And not at a cemetery where you will remember the day you buried your child. That’s why a garden. A place where you can reflect and see the child, see them in the water, or look up and see the birds and ask, maybe that’s the spirit of your child.”

She invited the audience members — several of the Albertus students in the audience had not heard of the garden — to visit the memorial walkway there with the names of the dead on the bricks, to walk in the shoes of the bereaved mothers and to experience the ​“generational void” that each young person’s death represents.

In emotional remarks that drew one of several standing ovations from the audience, she emphasized that the garden is also universal, a place for anyone to come if they need healing.

Pratt called especially on the students in the audience to become mentors for the city’s vulnerable young people, and to help them steer away from violence by helping with an anti-gun, conflict-resolution curriculum she is developing for vulnerable middle-schoolers.

As the emotional gathering drew to an end, Albertus freshman Jared McKenzie approached Pratt. He offered to volunteer to help her develop that curriculum. He told her he was close to seven people in Hartford, where he grew up, who all were killed in gun violence. He, too, is tired of the evanescent memorials, the t‑shirts and buttons.

“I am motivated” by what he heard Monday night, he said. ​“This climate will be positive.”

As they exchanged contact information, Pratt said, ​“We got to talk.”