The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Nearly 150 take part in march, calling for end to gun violence
Event also focused on need for more jobs for urban youth
NEW HAVEN — Nearly 150 people — including the mother of murder victim Tyriek Keyes — marched through the streets of the city’s Newhallville section Saturday morning, calling for an end to urban gun violence and more jobs for urban youth.
The march was organized by New Elm City Dream/Young Communist League, Ice the Beef and New Haven Rising in the wake of a youth survey done over the summer in Newhallville, said one of the organizers, Jahmal Henderson.
Marchers included the organizers, Newhallville residents, city alders and state legislators and members of area unions at Yale University and Southern Connecticut State University.
The march lost its police escort — and some of the reporters and photographers covering it — midway through when shots rang out and the shooting of a woman and two police officers was reported on Elm Street.
“My son was a special son and I carried him for nine months — and I can never get that back,” Tyriek’s mother, Demetria Telford, told the crowd during a memorial for her son half-way through the march at Newhall and Bassett streets.
“But as his mother, I am going to keep marching to stop the violence — even when I get justice for my son,” Telford said. “All this violence needs to stop! It needs to stop!”
Tyriek was shot on July 16 and died on July 20.
“What they did to my son, it hurts me,” she said. “But his legacy still stands through me ... His legacy lives on through me —and Jesus Christ.”
Earlier, Telford said that “I feel great about the support” expressed by people at the march. “I just want justice for my son.”
Henderson said the march and rally were a follow-up to “a com-
pilation of thoughts from the youth of Newhallville” as a result of the sevenweek survey, which itself was a follow-up to a broader, citywide survey done in 2001.
Among the survey’s questions were “What would you like to see changed in your community?” and “Would you like to be part of any futher actions in the community?” said Henderson, a union steward at SCSU for Local 217 Unite Here.
The Rev. Charles Brewer of the Trinity Temple on Dixwell Avenue knows a thing or two about gun violence and the scourges such as drug abuse that plague the Newhallville community.
Many years ago, when he was just 24 years old, he was “one of the biggest crack dealers” in New Haven — until he got shot once in the neck, three times in the chest and once in his arm.
While he subsequently turned his life around and now is pastor of three churches and president of the Joshua Generation Clergy Association, Brewer told the crowd “I never forgot where I came from.”
Alder Delphine Clyburn, D-20, told the crowd before the march that in addition to the enemies within, “we have an enemy that comes, the scripture says, to destroy us.”
In order for the community to protect itself, “We have to come together ourselves and know that we’ve got a problem with violence in the world,” Cyburn said.
“We cannot be the one to keep violence going against ourselves,” she said. “We need to stop.”
She made reference to Tyriek, saying, “his life, even before he got into high school, was taken ... We need to stop and take care of one another.”
Clyburn told Telford, “So, Mrs. Demetria, you need to know that your ward and your alder are with you.”
“I know,” Telford said.