Teen Violence Hits Home For Alder Prez

Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker-Myers gave an impromptu eulogy in City Hall Monday night for her sister’s son, an 18-year-old homicide victim, the first person to be shot and killed in the city this year, the young man her daughter called ​“brother.”

“I have experienced so much death in my life that it doesn’t affect me in a way,” she said. But that dull hurt lasted only a second. Why? Because violent, premature death ​“is starting to affect my children.”

Walker-Myers offered those words of hurt — and, ultimately, anti-violence encouragement — during the latest full Board of Alders meeting in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall.

The West River legislator and aldermanic president gave that eulogy for Dashown Myers, a Wilbur Cross High School football player who was fatally shot on Feb. 23 at 1435 Quinnipiac Ave.

Walker-Myers told her colleagues that she wasn’t planning on speaking about Myers during her turn giving the meeting’s ​“divine guidance,” a rotating opportunity for alders to address the full board with a poem or a speech or words of inspiration before the alders formally start discussing proposed legislation on that night’s agenda.

She said she was planning instead on speaking about former Mayor Toni Harp, the city’s first female, African American mayor, in honor of March being ​“Women’s History Month.”

“But sometimes life happens,” Walker-Myers confessed. ​“I had a really, really rough week last week.’

And so, just as she did in January at the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day service at Varick Memorial A.M.E. Church soon after a state police officer fatally shot 19-year-old Fair Haveners Mubarak Soulemane in West Haven, Walker-Myers pivoted from her prepared remarks to give a speech brimming with personal hurt, political outrage, and anguished determination to saving young at-risk New Haveners from violent, premature death.

“Last week I buried an 18-year-old that’s like a nephew to me,” she said. ​“It’s my daughter’s first cousin. The only person she called brother.”

She paused, and then confessed that, as an adult, ​“I’m starting to get desensitized to losing young, African American men. And that’s sad.”

That self-distancing from the visceral hurt of homicide doesn’t come from feeling too distant from young people dying from gun violence, she said. Quite the opposite. She said she has experienced so much of that loss over her life that the pain, by familiarity, is somehow less acute.

But then she looks at her daughter grieving, at her sister grieving, and remembers all over again how impossibly painful this all is — and how it must stop.

She called on the mayor’s office, on fellow elected officials, on the Board of Education, on residents throughout the city to prioritize providing young people at risk of violence with kindness, and services, that might change the arc of their lives.

“I don’t know how to do it,” she said. ​“I don’t have a silver bullet. And I don’t have a cure. But I know that something has to happen, and it has to start with us. We should not be burying children in this city. We just shouldn’t. No mother should have to do what my sister had to do last week.”

She recalled all the people in her life who have encouraged her, helped her not just survive but thrive at work and in local politics: her mother, her father, her grandmother.

Not everyone is so lucky, she said.

“Some of these children are out there by themselves,” she said. ​‘We have to wrap our arms around these children. Because if don’t, we’re going to continue to lose them time and time and time again. And I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m at my breaking point right now with dealing with these types of things that I feel like can be taken care of proactively before we lose another life.”

Then she circled back to the original planned subject of her speech: Mayor Harp.

“I think she recognized and realized that there’s a population of people we were missing when we put together Youthstat,” she said about the Youth Services-led program that targeted support and resources at young people most likely to drop out of school and hurt someone or be hurt themselves.

That program must be preserved, she said. ​“As long as I’m still president of the Board of Alders, I will continue to try to figure out with people how we’re gonna save the next generation.”

The fight for freedom and for justice is waged and won in every generation, she said. The fight never stops. And don’t just take her word for it, she said. ​“That’s Coretta Scott King.”