‘WE’RE THE ONES HURTING’
Suffolk residents create support group for families impacted by gun violence
SUFFOLK — In late October, Julia Wright walked into a training room inside the Suffolk Police Department. She was joining a group that doesn’t want to have new members.
But the Suffolk Advocacy Group has grown since it started in March. It’s a support group for those who have lost loved ones to violence.
Eight people were here this Thursday night and Joan Turner, the group’s co-founder, had initially invited Wright because she’s a social worker; she wanted Wright to work with the group to coordinate a Thanksgiving drive for a family in need.
But Wright stood behind a podium that night and recounted how her uncle was fatally shot 24 years ago.
Two men had been charged with his death in 1997, went to prison and were later released. She unexpectedly saw one of them at a birthday dinner last year.
“I felt like I was almost having a panic attack,” Wright said. Most in the group nodded. They know what it was like to see a relative’s killer in court.
One member, Lucy Manley, asked Wright how she was able to stand being in the same room with her uncle’s killer. Manley’s son had been shot and killed around Thanksgiving six years ago.
Wright said all she could do was pray.
Turner sat in the second row. She shook her head in agreement as Wright spoke about unsettled feelings and grief. But she couldn’t relate as others had when Wright spoke about some semblance of closure in facing their loved one’s killer. She still doesn’t know what happened when her son disappeared six years ago.
But she needed this group, like the others, to lean on, to help carry on living without the people they want the most.
Grief that may never fade
On Nov. 11, 2015, Turner was sitting at the kitchen table with her husband and daughter when the phone rang. It was the mother of her son’s girlfriend. The girlfriend then got on the phone. Turner’s son, Quantez Russell, had been shot and was lying on
25th Street in Newport News.
Turner grabbed her keys and raced from Suffolk.
She knew crime scenes. Turner had worked as a fingerprint examiner and crime scene technician in Newport News before she moved to do the same work with the Suffolk Police Department in 1996. The evidence she gathered could help exonerate or put someone in jail.
She would sometimes lecture Quantez and her younger daughter, Jenay Wolfrey, when she came home from work on not selling drugs or anything that would put them in a dire situation, or worse, a body bag. Turner took her children to church, put them in scout troops to ground them in tradition and community. Quantez was a good kid, she said, he loved the outdoors and could build almost anything with his hands including topiaries. But as he reached his teen years, she saw him make poor decisions.
She found out later that he had been approached to join a gang in the eighth and ninth grades. He joined his sophomore year at Lakeland High.
Turner noticed that he wasn’t wearing his favorite color blue. He was wearing red. The first time he’d been arrested Turner was working and heard his name being transmitted over the radio. Officers brought him to the station for trying to sell shaved Ivory soap as crack cocaine — a class six felony.
When he was 17, he put a gun to his mother’s head after she accused him of being high at home.
She was in disbelief, and she could never turn her back on her son, but she also had her limits. She couldn’t enable her son by allowing his behavior in her home. He was in and out of Western Tidewater Regional Jail, Turner accepted his phone calls, but she didn’t visit him. She loved her son, but she said she didn’t want to see him incarcerated. Turner said she’d raised him not to make the decisions that placed him there.
In early November 2012, he confided in his mother.
“I just need to let you know that I love you,” he said, “You’ve always been there for me.”
He told her that he’d robbed and shot at people in Portsmouth, but he did not give her names or locations. She called the police, though they told her, and she knew, there wasn’t anything the department could do without more information. So, she prayed for her son. Prayed for the families he hurt.
That Wednesday night in 2015, Turner arrived at 25th Street. There was no trace of Quantez. She called the police who searched the area and contacted hospitals. Nothing. He didn’t answer his phone. Nothing.
He had vanished.
In the days following his disappearance, Turner heard rumors that he had been set up the night he went missing. But detectives could not get a solid lead.
That Saturday morning, Nov. 14, Turner woke up screaming. Her screaming woke her husband who asked what was wrong.
She had a feeling, she told him, that her baby was gone.
Months passed and a woman called Turner on July 5 on Quantez’s 31st birthday. It was a blocked number. The woman began to cry when she asked if she called the right number for his mother. She said that she’d heard how Quantez died months before — he was shot twice in the head, his hands and feet chained, and his body thrown in the James River.
Turner notified police, and boat crews searched the water with sonar equipment for days. She knew finding anything would be close to impossible, though.
Six years after his disappearance, she still aches for baby, she says. It’s a feeling that may never fade. It is worsened, she said, because she can’t go to a gravesite to mourn.
Instead, Turner peppered her living room with orange: arrangement with of orange flowers on the coffee table; orange pillows line a beige sofa; a woven rug with orange threading, the hue is the color that unifies people who’ve lost someone to violence. An “In Loving Memory” pillow with a collage of Quantez’s photos is also on her couch.
She has a large photo of Quantez in the house that she carries to speaking engagements. In the photo, he’s lying on a brown couch wearing a red shirt with a red bandana around his neck. His eyes look heavy as if he were tired.
She wondered recently as she discussed the photo: “Did God take him away just to give my baby some rest?”
Giving back
Each member at the October meeting knew Turner before they joined the Suffolk group. She worked murder cases connected to four of them.
In 2006, Turner was working a crime scene on south 10th Street where an 18-year-old boy had been shot and killed. His father Anthony Parker arrived at the site, in a trance, not remembering how he drove there.
The suspects, who were 15 and 17 at the time, turned themselves in a few days after the shooting. But the death of his son, Deshawn, led Parker to start tracking the number of killings that followed.
Parker aired his frustrations on Facebook last year, asking people to work to find solutions to the shootings in his community. Turner saw the post and she and Parker formed the advocacy group to meet every month to navigate the grief process. Other meetings have included sessions with therapists and the cold case detectives to discuss how the unit works.
Moving forward, the group wants to help in other ways, such as fundraising and feeding a small family on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
The group isn’t just for them, Parker has said. It is to give back.
The meetings have helped members like Manley who’s attended every gathering since March.
They’ve cried together. They’ve vented. When they’ve fallen apart, members have a space where they won’t “feel crazy” for how they choose to cope.
But it’s not just about support. It’s about giving members the tools they need to help repair themselves.
“We’re the ones that are hurting,” Turner said at the meeting, “We’re the ones that are still breathing.”