The stories shared at a memorial service for homicide victims Wednesday were all too familiar to the crowd that gathered downtown despite the drizzly, gray Rochester skies.
“Days like this…,” Wanda Ridgeway started to say before trailing off in her thoughts.
“It’s hard,” someone from the crowd responded. “It’s hard.”
Sept. 25 is the National Day of Remembrance for Murder Victims each year ― or, as some put it that night, a chance for members of this wretched “club of hurt” to gather in their shared grief.
Rochester remembers those lost to gun violence
Sage burned in the early evening air around the Liberty Pole, an attempt at cleansing and healing. Families — mostly mothers, aunts, sisters and female cousins — reclaimed the names of loved ones lost to gun violence. The stories shared were all too familiar.
Danita Forney spoke of her son Da’Marri Shaw .
She hit a gut-wrenching milestone last year: Her son has now been gone longer than he was alive. Da’Marri was killed 16 years ago when he was just 15 years old. Forney has a large photo of him on her bedroom wall. She looks at it every day and thinks of an alternate reality where he would come home safe — or at least a world in which she got to say goodbye.