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'Sick of it': After killings of mother and infant, Hartford advocates call for an end to violence

From left, Henrietta Beckman, Laverne Terry and Janice Hill, wipe tears while gathered near the Hartford scene where police say a gunman killed young mother Jessiah Mercado and her infant son Messiah Diaz after a car pulled up alongside the victims' vehicle Tuesday afternoon and opened fire.
Mark Mirko
/
Connecticut Public
From left, Henrietta Beckman, Laverne Terry and Janice Hill, wipe tears while gathered near the Hartford scene where police say a gunman killed young mother Jessiah Mercado and her infant son Messiah Diaz after a car pulled up alongside the victims' vehicle Tuesday afternoon and opened fire.

Following Tuesday’s drive-by shooting in Hartford that claimed the lives of a young mother and her infant son, violence prevention advocates – who are all too familiar with gun violence – say it’s time for a change.

Janice Hill and other members of Mothers United Against Violence gathered near the scene of the shooting that killed 20-year-old Jessiah Mercado and 4-month-old Messiah Diaz.

Hill lost her son, Alford Grayson, in a 2015 shooting. This week’s news brought back painful memories.

“It’s hard when you gotta grieve the death of a child. It’s hard. It’s not easy,” Hill said. “I don’t care how long or how many years it happened – the hurt comes back, because you’re reliving. When you hear somebody else’s child got murdered, and a baby got murdered, that brings that hurt back again.”

Henrietta Beckman leads Mothers United Against Violence. She, too, lost a son to gun violence. Randy died in 2002.

“These two young people did not deserve this,” Beckman said. “That baby had his whole life to live. His mom had her whole life to live.”

“I mean, a 20-year-old and a 4-month-old? Come on, y’all,” Beckman said.

The Rev. Henry Brown, a shooting survivor himself, called on Hartford residents to come together to stop gun violence.

“The siege is upon this community,” Brown said. “We’ve got to do better for one another. We’ve got to really put our ankles in the ground and say, ‘No more with this stuff right here. It’s gotta stop.’ Because the only way we’re gonna stop this stuff – and I hope people are listening to me – is through the people in the community.”

Hill said the shooting deaths of the mother and son – the 18th and 19th homicides of the year in Hartford – should be a wake-up call for residents to get involved in violence prevention.

“Stop sitting in your house saying, ‘Oh, it ain’t my child,’” Hill said. “It one day can be your child. You gotta come together, work together. We are a community.”

Beckman says the community is best positioned to help stop the killings.

“A lot of us know when someone is going to commit a crime,” Beckman said. “If we see something or hear something, say something.”

Responding to so many shootings takes its toll, Brown said. As he walked away from reporters Wednesday, he expressed frustration.

“I have to deal with this all the time,” Brown said. “I’m sick of it.”

Chris Polansky joined Connecticut Public in March 2023 as a general assignment and breaking news reporter based in Hartford. Previously, he’s worked at Utah Public Radio in Logan, Utah, as a general assignment reporter; Lehigh Valley Public Media in Bethlehem, Pa., as an anchor and producer for All Things Considered; and at Public Radio Tulsa in Tulsa, Okla., where he both reported and hosted Morning Edition.
Mark Mirko is Deputy Director of Visuals at Connecticut Public and his photography has been a fixture of Connecticut’s photojournalism landscape for the past two decades. Mark led the photography department at Prognosis, an English language newspaper in Prague, Czech Republic, and was a staff-photographer at two internationally-awarded newspaper photography departments, The Palm Beach Post and The Hartford Courant. Mark holds a Masters degree in Visual Communication from Ohio University, where he served as a Knight Fellow, and he has taught at Trinity College and Southern Connecticut State University. A California native, Mark now lives in Connecticut’s quiet-corner with his family, three dogs and a not-so-quiet flock of chickens.