Homewood kids caught in war zone
In a neighborhood bearing the deep pockmarks of deadly violence, this is where the innocents await the seemingly inevitable scarring.
This is Holy Rosary School, a three-story stone structure as weathered as the Homewood community it serves. Most mornings, Kelly Street springs to life with the electric crackle of 210 students wandering in for a typical day of lessons and learning.
Not today. Classes are canceled at Holy Rosary for the funeral of Taylor Coles, 8, a third-grader at the school whose young life was suddenly snuffed out Friday in a barrage of bullets.
Taylor, her father, Parrish Freeman, 35, and Thomas Mitchell III, 31, were shot to death at Mr. Tommy's Sandwich Shop and Car Wash on North Homewood Avenue. Taylor's mother, Terri Coles, 30, was wounded.
Police believe the three bandana-clad men who burst into the eatery were targeting Mitchell. Freeman and Taylor, whose last moments were spent selling candy in the restaurant for an extracurricular school activity, happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
One could argue there's not really a right time to be in Homewood, a community besieged by bloodshed and gang activity during much of the 1990s. An often deadly community that is home to four of the five city homicides committed thus far in 2002.
And home to this Catholic elementary and middle school just around the corner from Mr. Tommy's. Home to a school about six blocks from where Shonne Matthews, 24, was gunned down on Bennett Street on Jan. 18. A school much too close to these unsolved murders.
Holy Rosary Principal Gwendolyn Young called Taylor's death a "senseless, tragic act." But Young contends Homewood is still safer now than it was when she arrived at the school eight years ago, when gang culture had infiltrated the community to the extent that the Homewood Crips had an affiliated female gang calling itself the Sterrett Street Bitches.
"It's gotten better over the years," she said. "There are truly some wonderful people here - hard working, caring, loving people. And when something as horrible as this happens, it just devastates them."
The mood in the school, where grief counselors and gym teachers mingle, is predictably somber. But perhaps not as somber as one might expect, Young said.
"Kids see things differently than adults," she said. "Many of her classmates have the perspective that God needed an angel and we needed a guardian angel. They believe Taylor's in heaven now, and she's our guardian angel."
Such is the faith of children. Adults manifest it differently, though no less impressively. Young has faith that her school is not located in the center of an urban war zone.
"No one - not me, not my staff - is afraid to walk out of this building, to go to the store or the bakery down the street," she said.
Such faith must be sorely tested in light of the consistent confirmation of just how commonplace the violence is in Homewood.
For the latest evidence, just drive by Mr. Tommy's. Glance at the bouquets of flowers, a makeshift memorial, sitting near a front window boarded up with plywood after a gunshot pierced it Friday.
Or join the Holy Rosary students this morning at Taylor's funeral at the Mount Ararat Baptist Church as they say farewell to one of their own. A farewell certain to scar their innocence.
