The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
A year later, no answers By Ed Stannard
Mother grieves for Tyrick Keyes, slain at 14 last year
NEW HAVEN — For Demethra Telford, the loss of her son, Tyrick Keyes, might as well have happened last week.
But it was a year ago, on Monday, July 16, 2017, when an unknown assailant walked up to 14-year-old Tyrick near Bassett Street Park and shot him three times, including twice in the groin. Telford had to make the horrible decision to take her son off life support four days later.
“This is a rough month that I can ever go through,” Telford said last week as the anniversary of her son’s killing loomed. “It’s been rough many months since
the passing of him and it’s even harder that this is the time he left me. He was my baby.”
An energetic, upbeat “mama’s boy” who loved to play basketball, watch professional wrestling and dance, Tyrick was involved with Ice the Beef Youth, an organization whose mission is to channel the city’s youth away from violence and toward settling differences peacefully.
Despite a $50,000 reward and a continuing investigation by city police, who have interviewed witnesses to the 9:30 p.m. shooting, no one has identified the gunman, who police believe shot Tyrick in a case of mistaken identity.
Tyrick was the fifth homicide in 2017, which ended with seven. So far this year, there have been eight, six of them by gunfire, according to Assistant Police Chief Herbert Johnson III, head of the detective bureau.
But while there were 31 nonfatal shootings in the first-half of each year, gunfire has amped up since May, with 24 victims, three of them fatal. Police attribute the increase to rival groups settling scores after their leaders were released from prison.
But Tyrick Keyes’ unsolved slaying stands as a particular frustration, not just for Telford, but for police and other city residents, especially in Newhallville, where much of the violence takes place.
When describing Tyrick, a smile breaks through Telford’s tears. “He was such a wonderful kid. He loved school, he loved sports, he was a mama’s boy,” she said. “He’d give you the shirt off his back.” She said Tyrick was softspoken and not “a violent kid.”
“Everybody loved him. He never gave me any problems. He was just my little boy, my little Ty-Ty,” Telford said. She said that when Tyrick was sick, he would refuse to stay home. “No, Mommy, I got to go to school,” he’d say. “‘I got to be rich and famous and give you a house.’ That was his goals. Wanted to go to college. He wanted to be somebody,” Telford said.
Tyrick loved to perform, “popping and breaking” in more than 100 shows with Ice the Beef Youth, according to the organization’s president, Chaz Carmon. He had “a very, very nice spirit, always smiling all the time,” Carmon said.
He said Tyrick performed in shows with hip-hop artist Mikey Jay, a two-time Grammy nominee. On Saturday, a show to be held at Goffe Street Park will be dedicated to Tyrick, Carmon said. And next year, the New Haven Youth Basketball League will be named for the slain teenager, he said.
‘He knew he was leaving’
Telford grew up in New Haven and had moved several times within the city, most recently from the Hill to Read Street. “Just before it happened, I wanted to move because there was a shooting,” she said. She applied for Section 8 housing but the housing official told her she didn’t meet the guidelines.
“I told him they were shooting and he just laughed and said, ‘Wear a bulletproof vest,’ and three days later (Tyrick) got killed. He left the house and he wasn’t even gone 10 or 15 minutes and a girl ran around the corner and told me my baby was shot,” Telford said.
Tyrick was on life support for four days. “When I had to let him go, I talked to him first,” Telford said. “He understood me because he nodded his shoulder and head. I told him I loved him. … He looked over at me, a tear came down his eye. He knew he was leaving, I know that.”
After a final kiss, “I watched my baby take three breaths and he was gone,” she said.
Now, Telford focuses on seeking justice, keeping in touch with lead Detective Paul D’Andrea, and starting an organization called Never Forgotten, Never Alone. “When it happens, you have everybody around you and then afterwards you’re alone,” she said. “You don’t have anybody around you to talk to you anymore.”
Aside from her family, Telford said her main support is her alder, Delphine Clyburn, D-20. “She’s the only one that keeps in touch with me,” Telford said.
“She’s enduring and she’s got a steady beat in making sure that the person is found,” said Clyburn, whose brother, Aaron Freelove, was shot dead in 1997 at 33 in what Clyburn believes was a set-up. “We talk a lot with each other. … I think we talk a good once a week,” she said.
“I think she has the supports with the people who have heard her story and have situation like her,” Clyburn said. “We just talk about the things that I need to help her accomplish.”
She said people are gathering signatures to name the corner of Bassett and Newhall streets after Tyrick.
More evidence needed
Clyburn and Telford both believe the police haven’t done everything possible to solve the homicide. “It went cold for a long time when it
happened,” Clyburn said. “You’ve got to be on it when it happens.”
“In the Police Department, if they were together in solidarity in there you could be effective on the outside,” Clyburn said. “But if you have so many things going on in the inside you can’t be effective on the outside.”
Last month, two officers resigned after being accused of filing false background check reports on new hires.
“Don’t get me wrong. They’re doing their job, but they’re not doing enough to get after these guys, not only for me but (for) everybody else,” Telford said. “They need to work much harder. Sometimes I wonder if they’re scared themselves. If they’re really doing as much as they can, to me everything would have been solved by now.”
If Tyrick’s killer is found and brought to justice, “I will feel a little relief because I know they got him, but another part of me won’t because I don’t have my son. I won’t ever let them go for parole. I want them to have life because they took a life.”
‘Every right to be upset’
Assistant Police Chief Herb Johnson, who leads the detective bureau, said, “It’s difficult. People are scared to come forward on cases. … The only way we can put this together is through courageous people and we have a lot of that in the city of New Haven, which we’re lucky for. … The community in New Haven are more helpful than people could imagine but there are people who are scared.”
Johnson said the community policing that his department does helps a great deal in building trust with city residents but when police misconduct is suspected elsewhere, such as Ferguson, Missouri, where in 2014 a black man, Michael Brown, was fatally shot 12 times by a white police officer,
it affects the level of trust locally. He said his officers “cringe” when they see incidents of police abusing their authority.
“Some of these videos, you can see officer are like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ … Because now they know that, though it didn’t happen in New Haven, they’re going to be blamed for it,” Johnson said.
“We’re here to help and we have the best interests of the community in this department but there are occasions that fracture that trust,” Johnson said. “We’re not perfect either. … We take a step backward sometimes.”
But the police also take steps to keep in touch with residents. Besides district management team meetings and school resource officers, the department runs a Police Activity League camp, which began last week, and recently showed up in force at a neighborhood basketball game, partly to make sure there was no trouble, but also to hand out water and iced drinks and fraternize with those attending.
“The detective is in constant contact; anytime she calls, he’s there,” Johnson said. But he also said, “Nothing is going to be OK, nothing. … She has every right to push us to do the best that we can. She has every right to be upset, because we’re upset.”
Police need cooperation
For Stacy Spell, New Haven manager of Project Longevity, which works with police and others to reduce group violence, Tyrick’s death “stands out to me. It’s like a gut punch and I’m still reeling from it,” partly because Newhallville is where Spell grew up and worked as a police officer and detective.
“It pains me as a father and a grandfather, as an uncle, as an elder of the community, that a year later no one has bothered to step forward to say, ‘I saw or I think I saw something relating to that homicide,’” he
said.
“It was on a hot summer evening. People were out on their porches, people were walking,” Spell said.
Spell said he and his colleagues “went out in the community afterwards and all we did was walk and talk, talking over fences, talking about our fears. We went out and we felt if we went out in the community … and spread that message of hope,” letting people know that they could give police information anonymously.
“The police can’t do it alone. The police are our servants,” Spell said. “They come into our community … but eventually return home. We live there. We have some responsibility to mandate the village mentality.” He called D’Andrea “a sharp, young detective, very sharp. He’s tenacious.”
He said the community has lost the attitude of watching out for each other. When Spell was young, “we looked out for one another’s children. We’ve lost that. People won’t speak to children. … We can address the youth in our community with love, respect and dignity. … But we’re not doing that.”
He pointed out that a week after Tyrick Keyes was slain, a 13-year-old was shot in Bassett Street Park. Just one person came forward, though “at least 50 sets of eyes were there directly and that’s not talking about what’s behind the curtain,” he said.
“Tyrick’s mom is grieving to this day. She will grieve the loss of her child until her very last breath on this Earth,” Spell said.
Spell said he knew Tyrick “as a younger kid. He used to come to the West River community garden. … Tyrick used to play on my son’s skateboard.” When Telford moved her family to the Hill section, “He says, ‘Mr. Stacy, would you take me fishing?’ … I wish I had taken that kid fishing.”
Telford’s organization, “Never Forgotten, Never Alone,” is part of Ice the
Beef Youth, Carmon said, calling for witnesses to come forward. “You can’t let this negative activity and behavior continue in our neighborhood and not do anything about it,” he said. “If we don’t do anything about our streets and our neighborhoods, who’s going to do it?”
A garden of remembrance
Marlene Pratt is one of the hundreds of survivors of gun violence in New Haven — there have been 306 homicides in the city since 2000, with a high of 34 in 2011 — and she is leading an effort, Survivors of Homicide, to support those who have lost loved ones to gun violence and to remember the victims with a memorial garden on Valley Street.
Pratt, a physical science and biology teacher at Hill Regional Career High School, grew up in New Haven, but moved to rural Gilead, N.C., with her family “because it was safe. I saw the drugs coming in.” But when her son, Gary Kyshon “Kiki” Miller, moved back to New Haven to take a job fixing bicycles, Pratt returned.
“My son was killed in the West Hills community,” Pratt said. “He was leaving a young lady’s house and he was shot in the back. He felt like it was safe for him because he grew up in the area,” she said. Kiki Miller, died on May 20, 1998. He was 21.
“I decided I need to do something.” She would see “all this yellow tape and I saw all the people walking by and I said, ‘What’s this?’ They said, ‘Another kid got shot.’
“I looked at the mindset of individuals in New Haven and I said, ‘This can’t be the mindset. … I just feel like the community needs to be educated; the kids need to know that every time a life is taken a generation ceases to exist. There will be no children. There will be no grandchildren.”
Survivors of Homicide meets regularly with the police victim services coordinator,
Officer Jillian Knox. The architectural firm Svigals and Partners has offered its services for the garden, as has the city Department of Parks, Recreation and Trees.
“In that area right now we see the wide space of grassland that can be cultivated. We see the West Rock behind us that shields us,” Pratt said. The West River runs nearby and “we know there’s life in that water.”
Bricks with the names of victims of violence will line a walkway. “When they walk down that memorial lane they will say, ‘Look at all the lives that have been taken,’ ” Pratt said. “I just feel like the garden is going to make a difference.”
She said that, despite the lack of recent arrests “for the most part we feel like the police are doing all that they can to bring these people to justice. … People have to know that their identification is going to be protected. They have to know that, if they say something to the police, they’re going to act upon it.” Her son’s killer, his cousin, was sentenced to 30 years for manslaughter.
“What they need to know is that the person who is the underdog, the person who is being killed, their parents are now the victims and they need help.”
Pratt said her group plans to speak to middle school students about avoiding gun violence. “I’ve found my peers. We’re going to bring about awareness and then we’re going to make a difference,” she said.
Recovering from trauma
Steven Marans, a professor of psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Center, is director of the National Center for Children Exposed to Violence and has consulted nationally on trauma caused by violence. He has co-developed a brief intervention to help children who have been exposed to violence cope with the aftereffects. He also helps the survivors.
“It’s a completely understandable wish that one element could be put to rest by justice, where the event held no justice at all. … It’s no wonder that a parent would feel frustrated and bereft,” Marans said.
However, people need to know that, while they will always grieve, they can recover from the trauma and lead normal lives, he said.
After a traumatic event, “people often find it difficult to think clearly and find themselves hypervigilant and hyper-alert,” Marans said. A sudden sound may result in increased heart rate and respiration. “Part of what we do in this intervention … is to help adults pay closer attention and become more aware of their own potential reactions to traumatic events and to pay attention to their child’s reaction … so they can take control and be the boss of what they can be the boss of.”
For the child a key is early intervention, Marans said. “It’s about finding order … and being able to find support and being able to be understood and to be heard by the most important persons in one’s life, one’s parents,” he said.
“Where there are those circumstances that wind up creating traumatic experiences … it is important for people to recognize that there are interventions that can assist people in recovering.”
Telford keeps grounded by keeping up her search for justice.
“When they took him, they took a part of me and I have to live with that for the rest of my life,” Telford said. “Once justice (is) done for my son, I’m going to be out there fighting (for) justice for everybody else.
“My thing is that if anybody out there knows what happened to my son, I’m begging, I’m pleading to please come forward,” she said.
Anyone with information can call police anonymously at 203-946-6304.