Murder on Edwards Street

A week ago yesterday, there was a shooting death about 100 yards down the street from my apartment. I was on my way to South Carolina and only learned of it from and e-mail from the ubiquitous Chief Ronnell Higgins of the Yale Police. There are a lot of murders annually for a city the size of New Haven - this was the 29th - and they hardly pierce the consciousness of those not directly involved in the victim's life or neighborhood.

The thing that makes this murder on Edwards Street so remarkable is that these things don't happen in East Rock, my section of town. It's a neighborhood of wide, tree-lined streets with beautiful old mansions, many of them subdivided into apartments for students of the university. This violent incident apparently spilled over from somewhere else, a gang fight or groups of rivals, whose cars met on this street in this neighborhood, erupting in a fistfight in the street until someone pulled a gun. When the young men realized that one of them had been shot, they jumped in their cars and sped away, leaving a 23-year-old man to die in the street.

That's the part that has been haunting me. He was left face-down in the street. I've searched the papers and Internet for his name but have not been able to find it. I haven't been able to find any additional information that has been released publicly. So I mourn for a nameless young man who, along with some friends, got into a fight with another group of men and ended up shot, lying in the street with no family or friends around to hold onto him or pray over him as the life drained out of him into the asphalt of Edwards Street.

And it happens in neighborhoods throughout this country with alarming regularity, and I stand convicted of reading about it in the paper or hearing it on the news and remarking about how sad or tragic it is, and then I move on. Yet the killing continues, and, except for family and friends, no one seems to notice or care enough to try to change it. Me included. Until it hits my own street, and my heart now aches for a nameless young man whose life was cut short who undoubtedly left behind a grieving mother and father and siblings and friends who wonder what he was doing on Edwards Street in broad daylight on a beautiful fall afternoon.

I think maybe I'll give Ronnell Higgins a call on Monday and ask him the name of this young man. I know that God knows who he was, but I need a name to attach to this tragedy so that I can continue to pray for him by name as well as for all the other nameless ones who die in the war on our streets. Miserere nobis.

(His name was Kashon Douglas. Thanks to my friend, Lisa, for letting me know. Requiescat in pace, Kashon.)