Guns still major problem at Burke
It must have been harrowing for every parent who got the robocall from Boston Public Schools yesterday telling them that a 17-year-old student had brought a loaded handgun to Dorchester’s Jeremiah E. Burke High School.
The frightening find in the boy’s backpack came just eight months after beloved junior Raekwon Juaquay Brown was shot dead in broad daylight less than a block from the school. Two other teens — and a 67-yearold woman who says Brown saved her life — were also shot but survived.
Yesterday, Brown’s godmother, Van Nessa Jemmott, or “Aunty V,” was appalled to learn a student had brought a loaded gun to her slain godson’s school.
“Nothing has changed,” Jemmott told me. “We miss him every day. He laid down his life to save an older woman and kids today are still not safe in this school. You can not go to high school and get an education and know that anywhere in that vicinity you can walk with your head high and be safe. What has to happen? Life has been lost. This is appalling.”
Jemmott said she moved out of the city last July, a month after Brown was gunned down. Three men have been charged with his cold-blooded murder and are due in court next month. A trial date has not been set.
Brown was the youngest of nine siblings, the “teddy bear” of his family.
“Everybody has their good days and their bad days,” Jemmott said. “There’s not a day that goes by that you don’t think about something he would have said or a laugh or something he would have done or that infectious smile of his. There’s not a day that goes by that we don’t think about him.”
“This was a promising young man that had far to go and lots to do and he is not allowed to pursue his dreams in life because his life was cut short,” she said. She added that she moved out of the city to protect her young daughter from a similar fate.
“I want to try to give her the quietness and the peace of being able to walk outside of our front door and not have to worry about gunfire and ducking and dodging.”
According to school officials and police, at about 8 a.m. yesterday, a 7.65 mm Deutsche Werk handgun was found inside a student’s backpack after he walked through a metal detector at the Burke’s front entrance.
The gun was loaded with a single round of ammunition. School police arrested the student and he’s charged with unlawful possession of a firearm, ammunition and a large-capacity feeding device. He’s being held on $100,000 bail.
Jemmott said youngsters who don’t want to learn shouldn’t be in school.
“Too many children are dying for simple reasons, like they said something on Facebook,” she said. A BPS spokesman said school police are always on patrol inside the Burke and metal detectors have been in place for many years.
Now, all Brown’s family has are photos and memories. Jemmott said he was wonderful.
“I know that he’s with us in spirit but sometimes you want to pinch his cheeks or hear his laugh and look at that gorgeous smile. We’ll never see him go to college or have a family. He’ll never do these things. It shouldn’t be that way.”