City urged to unite over year's 3d homicide victim
Amid sobs that broke occasionally into uncontrolled wails, ministers and family members of a slain 21-year- old man urged the city's African-American community yesterday to embrace and support its young men.
The funeral of Warren Daniel Hairston drew about 400 mourners to Jubilee Christian Church in Mattapan.
He was found in Dorchester Jan. 27 dead from a gunshot to his head.
Hairston's family said he was friendly with gang-involved youth but was trying to pull away from the rough life of the streets.
"This is not a City Hall problem; this is not a Boston police problem," Leonard M. Lee, an uncle who helped raise Hairston, declared to rising applause. "It is our problem. . . . I am not calling Mayor Menino. I am not calling the police commissioner. I am calling you."
The city's most recent homicide victim, Hairston was the third person slain this year, compared with four at this time last year. The other victims in 2007 include two young teenagers, ages 13 and 14. No one has been arrested in any of the slayings.
Those who eulogized Hairston warned that there would be more bloodshed if the community did not do a better job of educating and influencing young people.
Lee urged adults in the community not to turn away from the groups of young black men they see on the streets of the city and not to listen to people who say they are potential gang members.
"When you walk down the street -- Harvard Street, Blue Hill Avenue, Sonoma -- please Jesus don't cross the street," he said. "Make a connection. . . . They might be potential fathers; they might be sons. How would you feel if someone walked by you and looked at you like you were an animal?"
Family members acknowledged that Hairston was confused, frustrated, and sometimes bored with his life.
"He was young, he was tempted by the street and he was left with few options, like a lot of young people," Lee said, but "he loved his friends, he loved God. . . . He was trying. He wanted to be someone."
The Rev. Troy Goode of Jubilee Christian, one of six clergy who participated in the funeral, asked everyone 22 years old and younger in the crowd to stand at the beginning of his eulogy.
He asked older participants to approach and hug the youth, and scores did so.
"It is not the squeezing of the trigger that we need to worry about," Goode declared, "It is the atmosphere in our city, the atmosphere in our community that we need to get control of. . . . We have fallen down on our job, and our young people can't connect with us any more."
The crowd represented a broad cross-section of the city: elderly couples in suits and Sunday dresses, and many young people.
Some wore buttons reading "Jahmol Norfleet, find your peace" with the photo of a gang-involved youth who was friendly with Hairston.
Norfleet, 20, helped lead a cease-fire in a major gang feud in the city before he was shot to death last November.
Mourners, none of whom wished to be named, said the turnout was an illustration of growing public disgust at resurgent youth violence in the city and of the deep involvement of some members of Hairston's family in community and self-help organizations.
