Ground Broken On Homicide Victims Memorial

Nearly 100 people showed their support Sunday at a groundbreaking fpr the New Haven Botanical Garden of Healing Dedicated to Victims of Gun Violence, a citywide effort to raise awareness of the plaguing epidemic of gun violence in New Haven.

The memorial project at 105 Valley St. was spearheaded by four women who each lost a child of their own to gun violence.

“These are generations that will never exist. We don’t know if they were going to be lawyers, presidents, doctors,” said one mother.

Beaver Hills Alder Richard Furlow has supported for the garden project since its initial proposal.

“If one person can see this monument and this park and decide not to shoot because of it then this will be worth it,” Furlow said.
 

The mothers partnere don the project with the Urban Resources Initiative (URI), planning firm Svigals + Partners, New Haven Mayor, Toni Harp, former Gov. Dannel Malloy, and New Haven State Sen. Martin Looney.

Colleen Murphy-Dunning, director of the Hixon Center for Urban Ecology and URI, was present on behalf of the firm, which took on the project pro bono.

The organizers and supporters gathered on the land designated to the memorial garden on Saturday to offer visuals of the expected layout and a list that Harp said contained over 600 homicide victims’ names dating back to the 1970s.

The mothers agreed that the garden will be a place for their children’s memory to live on and for each child to have a ​“second chance,” as one mother said
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Tears were shed by those who had loved ones on the extensive list of victims, and even those who didn’t. There were very few people who did not know of a friend or neighbor that were victims of gun violence.

A donor who worked closely with the mothers on the project, Jackie Fouse, shared with the audience that she was instantly inspired to dedicate herself to the project alongside the mothers.

Fouse is a soon to be alumna with a master’s in environmental management from Yale University.

“We’re going to change our cities, our states and our county one community at a time with projects like this,” Fouse said.

The garden is meant to be a call to action by first memorializing the gun violence victims. Families and community members are then encouraged to recognize the immense impact of gun violence beyond New Haven and Connecticut andwork toward eliminating the problem.

“We want to talk to the youth and let them know that you don’t have to pick up a gun because if you pick up that gun you both lost,” said project organizer Marlene Miller-Pratt, mother of Gary Kyshon Miller who was shot and killed in 1998.

Miller-Pratt is a science teacher at Hill Regional Career High School. She said she returned to New Haven to lead the project with the other mothers after living in North Carolina for more than 20 years.

“This is a vision that New Haven needed,” Miller-Pratt said.

These families refuse for their children’s deaths to be in vain, they told Miller-Pratt.

“I hope that when we do dedicate this healing place that we also rededicate ourselves to have sensible gun laws,” Harp said.

Many of the mothers met at the police department’s Survivors of Homicide support group.

“I found somebody who understood, not somebody who would say it’s going to be okay or get over it, because you never get over it,” Miller-Pratt said.

The garden’s design includes a pathway with the dates and ages of the victims of homicides from firearms with their name if the family chooses to include it.

The project is being funded by the city, the state, and private donors. 

Rebecca Bombero, director of the city’s Department of Parks, Recreation, and Trees, worked closely with the organizers on the parks design and the necessary permit process.

The idea for the garden project stemmed from Miller-Pratt’s visits to the Marsh Botanical Garden on Yale University’s campus, when she preferred not to be in a cemetery atmosphere but still wanted to grieve over the loss of her son.

The Healing Memorial Garden is said to be the first permanent memorial in the country for homicide victims, though many other states in the country have hosted temporary memorials for gun violence victims from T‑shirts displays, exhibits, and ceremonies according to a CityLab report on the garden proposal. 

Gun violence has ​“ravaged our city,” Harp said.

Rev. Keith King of Hamden’s Christian Tabernacle Baptist Church led a prayer on the memorial grounds with the families and audience.

“We are saying that death and destruction does not have the last say,” King said

“Our missions don’t stop here. We’re moving forward,” Miller-Pratt said.

The organizers and supporters will begin their gardening work for the memorial on June 1 and continue each weekend after that on Saturday mornings.