Christopher Peak Photo
Pall-bearers load Tyrick Keyes’s coffin into a hearse.
A 14-year-old boy’s body lay in an open casket Tuesday morning, head resting on a pillow. Teenage boys covered their mouths with their fists as they approached the casket and silently wiped tears from their eyes; the girls went up in groups, interlocking their arms and sobbing into each other’s shoulders.
By the time they left the church, they heard calls to learn from the death of the boy, Tyrick Keyes. From his mother, they heard a determination “not to give up on justice.”
Keyes’ funeral filled Bethel AME Church on Goffe Street with mourners — and with some hope.
The mourners heard Newhallville’s outgoing top cop,Shafiq Abdussabur, describe a conversation he had with Tyriek’s mother, Demethra Telford, hours after Keyes died from gunshot wounds. Telford asked Abdussabur how God could take her baby.
An observant Muslim, Abdussabur told the grieving mother that he couldn’t comprehend why things happened. Weakened as she was by the loss, he pointed out that those around her, in her family and her neighborhood, could be strengthened — if they took the death as an impetus for change.
Speaking at Tuesday’s funeral beside a closed, gray-metal coffin in civilian clothes, Abdussabur reiterated that message. As he mourned the death of Tryiek, a “super-awesome, All-American teenager,” he called for the community to use this instructional moment to heal and improve.
“Death is a reminder for the living, and this is our reminder for what we need to do,” said Abdussabur, who pointed out that he stood in a similar church 11 years ago when his cousin Jajuana Cole was murdered. “Before there was The Cancer Foundation, there was somebody who died from cancer. Somebody got upset and said, ‘You know what? I’m going to start a foundation.’ Before there was Mothers Against Drunk Driving, somebody — a child, a mother, a brother, a family member — got killed, and they made it an issue.”
But when it comes to ending violence, “we started about 11 years ago [in New Haven], and then we fell asleep. We started worrying about who the president is. We started worrying about the ozone layer. We started worrying about wars in other countries. And we forgot about the wars in our own community,” Abdussabur continued. “We don’t have to build a village; we have to repair this village.”
Shafiq Abdussabur with state legislators Robyn Porter and Gary Winfield.
Just what those repairs might be started to take shape through a series of remarks at the funeral. Abdussabur instructed kids to put a brake on the rush to grow up. Tywanda Coggins, Keyes’s aunt, called for a return to “old-school” parenting (that might include an occasional “whooping,” Rev. Phillip R. Agee added). Mayor Toni Harp condemned the “casual use and glut of guns” that could escalate teenage arguments into a fatal encounter, and Police Chief Anthony Campbell asked for a reconsideration of community policing, not just as a walking beat, but as a citywide effort to stop crime. Chazz Carmon, head of the anti-violence group Ice the Beef, asked for more funding for youth programs.
The services began at 10 a.m. with an hour-long wake. Mourners approached the open casket, where Keyes’s head rested on a pillow, just below the pulpit. He was in the same outfit he’d worn to prom a few months earlier, only his mom had switched in a long-sleeve shirt to cover his arms, draped a silver necklace around his neck and put on the pair of Jordans she’d promised him.
Before the service began, as Tyriek lay in the open casket, most people said a few feet back, behind the first pew. Others, like State Rep. Robyn Porter, touched Keyes’s motionless arm. One member of Ice the Beef crumpled when he saw Keyes’s face, bending over and hyperventilating. Ushers later escorted him out.
After the funeral began, parishioners walked the aisles, handing out tissues and water to teary-eyed observers; at one point, though, as eight kids did an a cappella number and Lisa McDowell wrapped up a song, they paused to dab their own eyes.
Mother Demethra Telford outside the church.
Raw emotion filled the sanctuary, but it wasn’t always weepy. At the start of the service, Telford took the microphone to sing herself. “By the time it gets to heaven, it might not sound right, but it’s for him,” she prefaced it. Carman, whose dancing at Ice the Beef always cracked Keyes up, did a few moves behind the coffin, miming placing an invisible top-hat on his head. “I know you’re laughing now,” Carman left it.
Telford, Keyes’s mom, had one message for reporters after the service. “I’m not going to give up on justice,” she said.
An investigation into the shooting, which occurred on Sunday, July 16, at 9:30 p.m. on Bassett Street near Newhall, is still ongoing. Cops say that Keyes was targeted after being in an earlier spat in another part of New Haven. Keyes died at the hospital on Thursday morning at 12:09 a.m.
Outside the church on Tuesday afternoon, Campbell said detectives are “working tirelessly” to apprehend a suspect. “We’re confident that will happen in the near future. Our criminal justice system says that before you make an arrest, we have to dot our i’s and cross our t’s. That’s what we’re doing. We want to make sure that when we bring justice, we have the right person and individuals involved.”