For a short time, a photograph of Tony “TJ” Brisker hung alone above a white wood door at Light of the Village, a church in Alabama Village, a destitute neighborhood in the Mobile suburb of Prichard in southern Alabama.
Other young men in the neighborhood had died violently before him; more than a few had combustible tempers, sold drugs, and toted guns, but they had mothers and fathers and siblings and in some instances children, and their families and friends missed them.
The founders of the church, John and Dolores Eads, felt each passing. They had known almost all of them as children and although they did not condone many of their choices, they also believed that drug dealing did not define the entire person. They spoke at their funerals and mourned their absence. Because of how they lived, their deaths, although tragic, did not shock them…