Lives after losses on view in photo exhibit
HEALING WALL: An exhibit of photographs by Lisa Kessler, above, which opened Friday at Lesley University, honors Survivors of Homicide Victims Month.
By Margery Eagan |
When Joseph Clarke got his driver's license, he told his mother he smiled for the camera, "so if I ever get pulled over, the police will see that I'm not a thug."
It is that license picture – a young man looking thrilled to be alive – that his mother, Gem Rose, a nurse, has carried with her daily since Joseph became Boston's first murder victim of 2008, shot in the head on Jan. 6. He was 23. An hour before his death, he had called his mother to wish her a happy birthday.
Exactly four years to the day after her brother Robert, 27, was murdered, Analicia Perry, 20, was gunned down on the same Roxbury street as she knelt before her brother's makeshift shrine. Their niece Kendra, 7, growing up in a family drenched in grief, likes to draw pictures and write poems. Here's one: "The little girl is going to the store to get some food. We hope she is safe on the street. My wish for the world is for families loving each other and loving other families. And that people would get along"
Renee Rose had a dream that her son Victor, 25, killed in a Roxbury drive-by shooting three years ago, came to her and said, "The moon will tell." She says it's a message that his killer will be found, and there will be justice. "I am still waiting," she says. "In the dream, the wolf howls at the moon. My son's nickname was Wolf."
The above stories were told and retold Friday at Cambridge's Lesley University in a new exhibit commemorating Survivors of Homicide Victims Awareness Month. How jarring that such an observance even exists. But it does, and the exhibit features both Boston photographer Lisa Kessler's moving pictures of local families who've survived murders – the Clarkes, Perrys and Roses among them – as well as artwork they've produced at the Peace Institute. That's the Dorchester organization founded by Tina Chery that does yeoman's work helping families cope with murder's aftermath.
So on Friday, friends of the Institute and families of the murdered came together in Cambridge. Among them, the Timilty School classmates of 13-year-old Steven Odom, who was killed last year as he walked home from playing basketball with neighborhood friends.
"It was in a sense breathtaking," said his mother, Kim. To be together with mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters who understand what she understands, "it was healing and very beautiful."
The Lesley exhibit runs through Dec. 6.
The Peace Institute, at 1452 Dorchester Ave., lost half its funding in state budget cuts and will hold a fund-raiser Dec. 2 at the Blarney Stone in Dorchester.
Margery Eagan
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