Home >  Local News >  Neighborhoods

Sunday, July 14, 2002

By Bill Schackner, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

At the Homewood corner where bullets took the life of an 8-year-old girl and two others last winter, they came yesterday with stories that could have been just as tragic except for their ending.

	Kevin Jackson, 7, listens as others sing gospel at a crusade against violence in Homewood yesterday. Behind him, from left, are Stephanie Porter, Stacey Calhoun (Kevin's mother), and, with her arms in the air, Leesa Collins. Click photo for story. (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette)

There was the prostitute and drug addict who found God in a crack house.

And there was the pimp turned preacher, who smiled at friends and energetically shook hands with strangers.

Not far from both of them, a woman in a flowery dress, waiting for her turn at the microphone, politely recounted her life as a gang member and an armed robber and how she managed to turn her life around by getting out of prison, going to college and becoming a lawyer.

Each of the speakers at a streetside crusade against violence had a poignant message for the roughly 300 people in the parking lot of a restaurant, at Frankstown and North Homewood avenues, where 8-year-old Taylor Coles, her father and another adult were gunned down in January.

"You're not trapped," Dorothea Hall, the former gang member who is now a criminal lawyer in Norristown, Montgomery County, told yesterday's crowd.

Participants in the event, "Taking Him to the Streets," used a mix of music and ministry to preach an end to violence and a message of self-help. The goal was to turn a scene of "violence and mayhem into a beacon of hope," said organizer Adrienne Young, executive director of Tree of Hope, an organization that helps families of murder victims.

"What it's about is reclaiming everything that God has already given us," said the Rev. Hubert D. Hutcherson, pastor of Shiloh Community Missionary Baptist Church in Homewood.

Speaking on stage, he turned his message to the men in the crowd and suggested that community development begins at home.

"Some of you got children you need to go back and take care of," he said as some women at the rally nodded in agreement. "There are too many young men running around the street without fathers."

The gunmen who fired indiscriminately upon entering Mr. Tommy's Sandwich Shop and Car Wash that January night shocked a community that has struggled to rid itself of crime. Killed in the Jan. 25 shooting were Parrish L. Freeman, 35, his daughter Taylor, and Thomas Mitchell, 31, who police say was the intended target of the shooting.

Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. has said that he believes the slaying was a contract killing. He said he will seek the death penalty against suspect William "Munch" Thompson, one of three believed involved in the slayings. The others are being sought.

Yesterday, Taylor's mother, Terri Coles, made her first trip back to the restaurant where a bullet hole in the wall still marks the spot where her daughter was mortally wounded in front of her. She wore a shirt adorned with pictures of Taylor and her father and the words "I miss you."

Tears streamed down her face as she recalled what it used to be like in the neighborhood, how teen-agers weren't afraid to stay out late and how children who didn't carry guns could settle their spats with a night of sleep.

"These kids aren't allowed to be kids," she said. "They have to be adults at such a young age."

She was moved by the event but disappointed that young men in the neighborhood are still killing each other "over nothing."

"I thought the violence would stop. I thought these kids would wake up after what happened to my daughter," she said. "I'm angry a lot, a whole lot of the time because of all of these senseless shootings."

There were assorted politicians who showed up and mingled with the crowd yesterday. And there were the everyday people who came to talk about redemption.

The Rev. Cornell Brunson, 55, said he worked as a pimp, abused drugs and alcohol and spent 25 years in and out jail before he turned his life around.

Evangelist Audrey Williams, 42, a Lawrenceville native now living in Ohio, recalled her fall into drugs and the day decades ago that she resolved to turn her life around. She was in a Washington, D.C. crack house at the time.

"It was the pit of hell," she said.

Williams later studied business and went to Bible school. She said it was important to speak out in the name of ending the despair.

"I could be selfish and say I'm not going to tell nothing about myself, that it's nobody's business, or I could do what I should and that's pour it out.

"A lot of people are hurting. A healing needs to take place," she said.