As students let tears flow for 13 year-old Justus Suggs at a funeral service, preachers brought young men into the spotlight with two messages: Teens, we believe in you; and parents, stand up to the teens — fight the “devil” — in your homes.
Friends and family from the Hill neighborhood packed into the Ebenezer Chapel Tuesday morning to mourn the loss of the young mechanic and fisherman who was shot in the head while riding his bike through the Hill on July 29.
Kids in “RIP Justus” T‑shirts filed past the boy’s open casket as soft women’s voices filled the Dwight Street church with the refrain: “Goin up yonder to be with my Lord.” Mourners filled the pews and lined up against the pale walls inside the chapel. Funeral service programs read: “Justus R. Suggs, Sunrise Oct. 23, 1992 – Sunset Aug. 8, 2006,” the day that Tracey Suggs made the tough decision to take her son off life support.
Justus had remained in a coma for about 10 days while family and friends said their last goodbyes. No arrests have been made in Justus’ murder, but he appears to have been a bystander caught in the fray of the same turf wars that took the life of 13 year-old Jajuana Cole in June.
Tracey Suggs has written her own plea to kids in turf wars on this site. At Tuesday’s service, she sent a heartfelt message to her own son: “You are my blessing, joy and pride in this life and the next. You will get to play fight, laugh and joke with me and Keith again. We will even have our mother and son fights out of love; you are that ‘sexy pimp’ you claim to be now and forever. We will never forget you.”
Between songs of praise and sorrow, preachers focused their words on the youth in the crowd. “I pray some young person, Amen, would look at themselves in the mirror in a different way” after Tuesday’s service, said the Rev. David McClure, Jr. “God gonna touch some of these young men in the crowd today, make them some men of backbone, not no wish-bone men.”
“Look at these young men — just look at them,” he said later, asking all young men in the crowd to stand up. “What I see today, I see greatness, I see success! Young men, God wants you to rise above! I see doctors, I see lawyers, … You’re special, I see greatness in you.” After the sermon, preachers blessed the young men.
A second preacher brought the grieving youth back in focus with a fiery message to parents. The Rev. David Via, wearing a gold-embroidered robe, denounced his own past of drug-dealing and “fighting people because they was on my street.” He told the crowd where they could find the devil: in their own homes. “The devil thinks we shouldn’t live past 13 years old. The devil doesn’t want us to be nothing. … It’s time to make war against the devil, even in our own homes.”
With continued war metaphors, Via called on parents to stand up to their children, because “somebody’s brother, or somebody’s son, killed this young man.” “We gotta stop being afraid of our own children,” he said, urging the crowd to “draw your swords against the devil.”
A third preacher, the Rev. Anthony Brown, criticized the mayor and city for allowing violence in the Hill “when two blocks away at Yale, they don’t have that problem.” Mayor John DeStefano could not attend the funeral because of meetings outside the city, but has beefed up patrols and helped the Suggs secure funds for the funeral, said mayoral spokeswoman Catherine Sullivan DeCarlo.