Decline does little to ease families’ pain

Lakewood Manor is a Baptist-affiliated retirement and assisted-living community in western Henrico County. It hums with energy and attentive care.

But in a quiet courtyard there, Gloria T. Edwards and some of her siblings gathered one day last month to remember their sister Lora Barnes.

Holding hands, offering a moment of silence and reflecting on a brick memorial inscribed with Barnes' name, the family finds little sanctuary from their lingering pain in statistics showing a decreased homicide rate.

Barnes, 44, a longtime nurse who worked two jobs providing selfless care, died a horrible death; firefighters found her burned body inside her tiny eastern Henrico home. She'd been strangled, robbed and left for dead.

Her killer, a man she'd befriended and took into her home and life, is serving a 51-year sentence. But Barnes' loss in March 2008 still numbs her family.

"We want to make it our mission as a family to do what we can to see that this doesn't happen to someone else. We want to raise awareness about domestic violence," Edwards said.

Fewer people may be dying violent deaths in homicides, but the effect on families, friends and witnesses is lasting, costly and emotional.

"It can take years before victims are hit with the real impact of loss," said Michon Moon, director of Richmond's Victim-Witness Assistance Program. "And you can see what violence is doing to the young people."

Buttressed by state grants, victim-witness programs in Richmond and in Chesterfield and Henrico counties are spending more than $1.5 million this fiscal year to tend to families and witnesses affected by crime.

Henrico's office helped 4,200 people last year. Chesterfield reached 2,115 people, providing nearly 21,000 specific direct services.

A key focus is the effect on children. More than 80 percent of the young people getting help for mental-health problems through Richmond's nonprofit ChildSavers Guidance Clinic experienced or witnessed trauma first-hand.

Of the more than 400 children seen a year, about 85 percent have diagnoses of disorders that can be traced directly to violence. As many as 20 percent have witnessed a murder or murder scene, according to director of development Lynn McCashin.

"What we are learning is that it is important to get trained people to these children as soon as possible. So we are going out with the ambulances, with the police," she said.

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It looks like business as usual at the Hong Kong Restaurant, a nondescript shopping center take-out spot in the 2900 block of East Williamsburg Road.

Appearances can be deceiving.

"The dream is broken. We have nothing," Su Ling Zheng told a hushed courtroom audience in Henrico in April through an interpreter. Her husband, Zi Ping Lin, who'd left behind his family in China to forge a new life in America for them, was gunned down in a botched robbery attempt at the restaurant in July 2007.

Three teenagers were sentenced to long prison terms.

But Zheng and her two daughters, in effect, have been sentenced to long lives of work to keep the restaurant going.

One daughter is missing out on college; another can't shake the loss of her father and cannot get needed therapies for a bad leg because of lost health insurance.

Concerned county residents have started a fund for the family at Wachovia branches, but little has been contributed.

. . .

Few deaths this past year generated outpourings of grief more pronounced than that of Powhatan High School football star Tahliek Taliaferro.

He was shot to death after a run-in with other teenagers at a Flat Rock ice cream stand.

More than 1,500 people streamed past Taliaferro's casket June 30 at the high school.

Taliaferro's death offered a reminder of the toll taken on young black men in society today.

In June, 20-year old Patrick Goins died in Henrico from knife wounds after fighting with youths over his niece.

In August, 16-year-old Henrico resident Ricky M. Burton, fresh from his late-night shift at a fast-food restaurant, was gunned down in a robbery.

Days later, 19-year-old Virginia Army National Guard soldier Deon E. Johnson Jr. was shot to death. Family members told authorities his distraught uncle pulled the trigger.

And last month, just a block from where Johnson died, Quintin L. Chambers, 16, died in a hail a gunfire in eastern Henrico, a possible victim of ongoing neighborhood rivalries.

Chambers' mother quietly sobbed at the family's rental home after the shooting, describing her son as a young man who was turning his life around.

The funeral, a week before Christmas, drew more than 500 people, including dozens of teenagers dressed in white T-shirts bearing Chambers' picture and the chilling words "Only the good die young."

One young man placed a flower on Chambers' coffin at Oakwood Cemetery, passing his right hand across the wooden box, his two middle fingers curled to his palm.

It was no gang symbol. It was the universal expression for "love" in sign language.

At the funeral, though, a sad-eyed friend of Chambers' was asked if people could put aside anger and a desire for revenge.

He shook his head sideways, the universal sign for "No."

. . .

The families of victims of violence in the Richmond area have been meeting annually for 18 years at Richmond City Hall.

The memorial service began when Richmonder Linda Jordan was trying to reach out to other survivors; she lost her college-age son to a murder in 1990.

The annual meetings of Jordan's Coalition Against Urban Violence, which have attracted hundreds of people, have not fully served the demand for help.

A new group dedicated specifically to the families of homicide victims began a year ago.

Gilbert Wilkerson, a Richmond courts judicial assistant who lost a brother to homicide in 1996, spoke last month about the consequences of death by violence.

"Even today, I feel like a stranger here because somehow it does not seem real," Wilkerson told a somber crowd of fellow mourners who met at the memorial service started by Jordan.

He urged families to bounce back through forgiveness, good works and fighting evil.

"Take back your life one day at a time," he said. Contact Bill McKelway at (804) 649-6601 or .