Vigil Remembers Year’s 1st Murder Victim

Over 100 New Haveners gripping red and black balloons packed Poplar Street to mourn the New Year’s Day murder of a soft-spoken 23-year-old — and to decry a deadly pattern of gun violence that also saw the victim’s younger brother killed in tragically similar circumstances just three years earlier.

That candle-lit scene took place Monday evening at the corner of Poplar Street and Grand Avenue in Fair Haven, where Dontae Myers, the city’s first homicide victim of 2023, was shot in a likely targeted act of brutality late Sunday afternoon.

“I never thought that I’d be bringing in the New Year like this, losing the only son I had left,” Myers’ mother, Laquvia Jones, said to more than 100 family members, friends, and Fair Haveners gathered for the vigil. ​“But here we stand.”

Jones had stood in a nearly identical position on Quinnipiac Avenue at the start of 2020. Her other child, Dashown Myers, was shot at just 18 years old on Feb. 23 of that year. Dashown’s death was also that year’s first homicide. Both shootings took place on a Sunday in broad daylight at around 3 p.m. Her children were born three years apart, Jones said, and died three years apart. 

“This one is harder,” Jones declared — because her older son Dontae left behind three young children who she said ​“will never know the real him, who will live off of memories.” She clutched Dontae Myers’ 8‑year-old son, Jayceon, to her stomach as she spoke those words to the crowd growing around her. Jayceon sobbed as his grandmother held him close. 

“I said it at my first son’s vigil — when you pull the trigger, you don’t pull it on a target. You pull it on a community. You pull it on anyone who loves that person,” Jones stated.

Zariah Green, 25, was one person who loved Dontae Myers. She was expecting to celebrate their daughter Laani’s first birthday all together in less than a month. And it was on her own birthday on Jan. 1 when she got the news that Myers wouldn’t be making it to their celebration that night, nor to any birthdays down the line.

“He left my house at two o’clock,” Green recalled through tears while speaking with the Independent about the Jan. 1 fatal shooting. ​“He was supposed to come back at five or so — we had plans to go out for my birthday. But he never made it back.”

“If I was able to trade places with him I would because it hurts so much,” Green cried. She described Myers as a soft-spoken person who ​“always kept to himself.” They got to know each other over shared lunch breaks while working at Walmart. ​“He was always the person you call no matter what,” Green said.

“Now my daughter has to go without her father,” she wept. ​“He promised me he wasn’t gonna leave us like this. But it happened anyway. He always told me he felt like he was next, but I didn’t believe him. Then I saw him in the hospital bed yesterday and I knew it was for real.” 

Cierra Viera, 23, the mother of Myers’ two other children, said she and Myers grew up in Fair Haven side by side, having their first child at just 15 years old. More recently, they delivered another baby named Jaebriel, who is now just over a year old. ​“I’m gonna miss him terribly,” Cierra said of Dontae. ​“I wish we could’ve grown old together.” 

“Dontae was a light that will always shine,” LaJamia Banks, Jones’ sister and Myers’ aunt, said. ​“Just his smile — he was very low and mellow, he was not loud, just smooth.” Banks said she always referred to Myers as her ​“first born” — the first child she loved like her own.

“He was one of the good ones,” said Larrisha Gary, a cousin of Laquvia Jones. ​“We’ve been hit left and right from 2020 until now,” she added, noting that in addition to losing her two nephews, her children’s father and another cousin, Natosha Gaines, had died to gun violence during those same two years.

“We’re pretty much numb to it right now. It’s just sad — we’re reliving this whole situation, and you’re numb, you’re numb, you’re numb to everything.”

Addressing the larger crowd, Jones said: ​“Today is about Dontae, but it’s not about Dontae.” It was about families and neighborhoods slashed by bullets and violent deaths, she said, and about ensuring that more young people are able to value their own lives as well as those of others.

From her perspective, it was also about personal accountability. She, along with Police Chief Karl Jacobson and Mayor Justin Elicker, used the moment on Monday to warn the youth congregated by the somber candle display against following Dontae’s path. 

“This didn’t have to happen,” Jones said. ​“He chose to be in New Haven, he chose this street life,” she asserted, explaining that she found her family a home in Middletown following the death of Dashown to flee the kind of violence he experienced. ​“Sin pays two payments: You’re either going to hell or you’re going to jail. The few dollars you get off of it, it don’t amount to this pain,” she exclaimed. 

“I’m not sugar coating anything,” she stated. ​“There’s no going back once bullets leave the chamber, y’all,” she urged. ​“Your candle gonna go out,” she promised, blowing out the wick she held in her own hand to honor Myers. ​“Your candle gonna go out and what did you do with the life that you lived? Were you a terrorist of the community?”

“I don’t blame the City of New Haven for my son’s death” she said. ​“I blame the shooter. I want someone to be bold enough to come stand in front of this eight year old,” she demanded, ​“and say why [his father] had to leave.”

Mayor Justin Elicker pointed to the high number of deaths concentrated in ​“the 10-block radius alone” spanning around Poplar Street. Kevan Bonilla, John Tubac, Tyshaun Hargrove, and the 2022’s final homicide victim, Ernie Negroni-Feliciano, he enumerated. ​“It’s the same thing” every time, he said — ​“we go to the scene of the homicide, to the hospital, a grieving family… it’s ridiculous.” 

Police Chief Karl Jacobson also looked around at the teenagers and 20-somethings standing around Poplar Street. ​“I know a lot of you from the streets from arresting you,” he said. ​“I’m not gonna say much because I’m having a hard time,” he began, wiping away the water brimming from his eyes. ​“But every time we do this it takes and takes from this community, especially the family members. And you know what, the cops too. I just saw him last month wearing a red tuxedo,” he remembered of Dontae, ​“and he made me laugh,” he grinned. ​“This family has gone through way too much, man. Please just value your life and value everybody else’s life.” 

“We’ll do anything,” he claimed. Job trainings, he offered as an example. ​“But you have to value your own life. Your life is worth something. Everybody’s life is worth something!”

After those words, Jones instructed everyone to release their balloons into the sky on the count of three. 

“One —” she began. Jayceon stepped in: ​“Two, three —” he completed. Jayceon peered out from the hood of his winter jacket as the balloons disappeared into the black night. When he realized the balloons were out of sight, more tears traveled down his little face and he retracted back into his winter coat. 

Kia Williams, 40, stood at the back of the vigil as individuals delivered speeches and exchanged trembling hugs alongside both memories and painful warnings. 

A childhood friend of Jones, Williams said, ​“I’m feeling her pain. Though you can never say you know what she’s going through, if you’ve loved a child it’s very hurtful and it’s very sad.” Her own daughter played with another young girl nearby as Williams spoke.

She said unlike her own childhood in New Haven, she worries about letting her own children play in their backyard or walking to school alone. ​“Right now nobody feels safe,” she said. ​“This world changed, period. We used to play, we used to go out and skate. We can’t do none of that stuff no more and it’s sad. It’s sickening.”

“You can’t even walk to the store without holding a weapon, whether that’s just pepper spray or a taser,” she said. 

“It’s just a lot of shit. I don’t feel like anyone should lose their life unless God calls.”