New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Losing a son to gun violence is hard. Losing two is ‘indescribable’
Brothers Mark and Guy Moore grew up like twins and one was never without the other, according to their parents, who won’t see the young men grow old together.
The brothers were victims of gun violence, killed about a year apart. They are among the 850 homicide victims on a list of 2,056 gun deaths
that took place between January 2010 and mid-2020, according to medical examiner data obtained by Hearst Connecticut Media.
“When this first happened to Guy, I would have never in a million years imagined this could happen to my son, then 15 months later it happened to Mark,” their mother, Helena Moore, said.
“They were everything,” their father, Mark Moore, said of his boys.
Guy Moore, 26, was focused on working and taking care of his son, Guy Jr., when he died in March 2018 after being shot in Waterbury, his father said.
Mark A. Moore, 29, was one test away from his CDL and had twin girls, a son and a 7-week-old baby girl when he died in 2019 in New Haven.
Growing up the boys excelled in sports — Guy in basketball and Mark in baseball — supported by their parents and family members. Helena and Mark Moore said their entire family is close. They did everything with their sons and now they spend a lot of time watching their grandchildren.
“Watching Guy Jr. is like seeing Guy all over again, from the way he looks and moves, everything, and Mark’s children are the same thing,” Mark Moore said. “We’re seeing our children all over again through their children.”
“It’s actually a healing process for us having them around,” Helena Moore said.
She participates in the Survivors of Victims of Homicide support group run by the New Haven Police Department and has helped build the Memorial Garden for Victims of Gun Violence in New Haven which honors those killed in the past 40 years.
“The garden is really healing,” she said. “It’s helpful for me because it’s something I can remember my sons with. Instead of going to the cemetery I go there. You want the children growing up now to say, ‘I don’t want my name to be here.’”
She said the community needs to get to the source of how young people are getting guns and “why they feel it’s so easy to shoot someone.
“Before I lost my sons, I empathized with parents, but once it happened to us, it’s indescribable the feeling, very emotional,” she said.
Mark Moore said they need to get illegal guns and drugs out of the city and stop putting all the resources into arresting young people for having them.
“I don’t approve of using, but get the people that are manufacturing these things out of the neighborhood,” he said. “Get the top dogs. You’re spending all this money on task forces to come into the neighborhood but instead use it to figure out who’s bringing these things in.”
He said young people also don’t have the outlets he had growing up in sports and other activities to meet people from different neighborhoods and build respect for each other.
“Teenage years are loaded with energy and if there’s nothing for you to do but nonsense, that’s what you’re gonna do,” he said. “They’re sitting on skills that we had an opportunity to use.”
Moore said the city used to fund more programs when he was growing up in New Haven and that gave him healthy ways to handle rivalries with other youth and make lifelong friends.
“You teach your kids a certain way but sometimes they have to conform to what’s around them,” he said.
Helena Moore said she worried about her sons because of that environment even as they were working toward their goals.
“They were headstrong boys,” Mark Moore said. “They weren’t disrespectful kids, but coming up in the city it’s kind of tough keeping your children away from situations that always seem to show up. They just appear somehow, even before the tragedies. They always had to overcome situations.”
The Moores are missing many answers regarding their sons’ deaths. While the man who shot Guy Moore was arrested and charged with murder and is awaiting a February pre-trial, police have not arrested anyone for Mark Allen Moore’s shooting.
“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t cry,” their father said. “This is going to affect us for the rest of our lives.”