'Peace Day' event has new significance

Many touched by street violence

A mother of three children, ages 12, 7, and 2, Colletta Mills ignored a long list of Saturday morning things she had to do.

Celebrating "Peace Day" in a Dorchester school parking lot on Columbia Road yesterday came first. With a rising tide of youth violence in the city and the prospect of more as the weather warms, Mills said the call for peace has taken on new significance.

"Right now, I'm fearful of summertime. More lives will be lost," the Dorchester native said. "I should be looking forward to the summer months with my children."

Mills and more than 100 parents and children from neighborhoods besieged by random gun violence gathered for the event, which took place at the Lilla G. Frederick Community Field.

Students sang, danced, and performed for the crowd, and speakers noted that nearly every youth in attendance had been touched in some way by gun violence.

"They become numb," said Emmanuel Tikili, a sponsor and a program director for the Boston TenPoint Coalition. "It's really negative. Their bodies, their minds become used to it."

Katie Drake-Cook, 14, said she heard about a recent shooting death in an instant message from a friend.

A butterfly face painted on her cheek, she said the randomness of the gunfire makes her uneasy.

"Bullets have no name," she said. "You don't know who's next."

Some of the shootings are gang-related or linked to the drug trade. Others result from festering rivalries between schools or neighborhoods.

Helenia Almond, a 15-year-old from Dorchester, said much of the violence she sees is between girls at her school, the Grover Cleveland Middle School in Fields Corner. There have been screaming fights and fist fights in school.

"Usually it's somebody said something about us," she said.

"We get competitive," her friend, Patricia Pimentel, 14, said.

Almond and about a dozen other girls from the school performed cheers and a "stepping" routine, clapping and slapping their hands and thighs in unison at yesterday's event. School social worker Cherelle Webster-Payne helped them form the sorority as a way to ease the tensions. She said it's helped, although other problems persist.

"Imagine walking to school through neighborhoods where you know you're not welcome. It's a fight every day," she said.

City Councilor Charles T. Yancey encouraged the students to stay strong. He said he grew up in the very same neighborhood, but later attended Tufts and Harvard universities.

"You have to stay away from negative characters in our community," he said. "Be leaders, not followers."