A mother's peace plan

Clementina Chery catches her breath as she pauses at the realization that her son, Louis D. Brown, has now been dead almost as long as he was alive.

"He would have been 30 years old," she said yesterday. "Can you believe it?"

Her son was shot to death in a Dudley Street shootout in 1993. This Sunday, April 13, marks what would have been his 30th birthday.

Some aspects of street violence have changed since then. Shooters and their victims have gotten younger, Chery noted. The raw pain, though, remains the same.

For Chery, remembering her son became her life's work long ago. She runs the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute in his memory. She spends a lot of time counseling grieving mothers. She is always on guard against any tendency in our city to become desensitized to violence.

In the process, a shooting that might well have become a small reminder of a violent time in Boston has stayed fresh.

This Sunday will be busy as usual. Among other activities, she will take part in a prayer and healing service at First Parish Church in Dorchester. She wants the community, she said, "to heal itself" and she speaks about what she calls seven principles of peace.

"Love, unity, faith, hope, courage, justice, and what I call that f-word, forgiveness," she recited. "It's so potent I can't even say it."

Her own commitment to forgiveness has been recently put to the test. Charles F. Bogues, the only person convicted in her son's murder, is seeking a new trial, arguing that he never saw evidence that might have raised questions about his guilt.

Brown was killed with a bullet from a .45-caliber handgun. Bogues has argued that police told him he was the only shooter firing a weapon that caliber, and that subsequent evidence has shown that not to be the case. Prosecutors dispute that ballistics evidence points to other suspects. A state appeals court has taken the matter under advisement.

Chery takes no position on Bogues's guilt or innocence, but believes that the facts of her son's shooting have not fully been aired. She wonders why no one else was ever charged in the shooting.

"I know he is guilty because he was there that day, but what about the other people?" she asked. "That's been my question. So I don't know the truth. If [a new trial] is the only way I'm going to get the truth, then let's find the truth."

Chery has two other children, an 18-year-old daughter and a 15-year-old son. She speaks about them only reluctantly, and has made a point of shielding them from the public eye.

Her daughter, she says proudly, has a 3.6 grade point average at a college she will not name. Her son attends high school out of state. She chose to get him out of the neighborhood, away from the streets.

"He's in a gated community," she says. "I didn't want to lose him. The streets haven't changed, and my fear was that he might feel he has to pick up a gun. They're so accessible. I couldn't face losing another child."

As the name of her organization implies, Chery thinks of her work as promoting peace, as opposed to fighting violence. She is skeptical of the idea that law enforcement alone can save the families she works with.

She has brought not only dogged stamina to her campaign, but an optimism that is hard to reconcile with her tragic history.

I asked her if she ever wonders what Louis might be doing if he had survived. Of course she does, as any mother would.

"I think Louis was just so quiet and so calm that he would be working in the background, helping to bring others to their full potential," she said. "He believed that if peace was to happen it would be his generation that brought it about, regardless of which side of the street they came from."

In his absence, peace became her career. "There's no quick-fix solutions - it's long-term," she said. "Things are so entrenched in our community."

Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com.

Correction: Because of a reporting error, a column by Adrian Walker on April 8 misstated the location of the 1993 murder of Louis D. Brown. Brown was shot to death on Geneva Avenue in Dorchester.