In 1993, Tina Chéry’s teenage son Louis was killed by stray gunfire as he walked to a Christmas party. The loss of her son prompted her to found the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, which offers support to families victimized by violence. Chéry talked with guest host Margery Eagan about her 20-year quest to bring peace to her community.
> > WATCH: Chéry explains why she made peace with the mother of her son’s killer, and more
A feeling of safety
“Back in the early '90s, you hear the shootings, the murders that were going on — they were in gangs, they just came out of jail,” said Chery. “When you live in a community and all you hear is the violence that’s ongoing, you feel safe because you’re not one of those people.”
Louis Brown was a 15-year-old kid. He had big dreams and wanted to be the nation’s first black president. He wasn’t involved in a gang. In fact, on the day he died in 1993, he was on his way to a Teens Against Gang Violence meeting.
“He got caught in the crossfire of two rival gangs, who were shooting each other,” said Chéry.
How she moved forward
Chéry co-founded the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute in 1994, which includes a “step-by-step guide” for families who have lost a loved one through violence. The program details what the family’s actions between death notification and burial.
“We wanted to provide a safe space, where families can feel safe and validate what they’re going through — listening to their pain, anger, even their thirst for revenge,” she said.
Along with the program, Chéry also provides buttons and T-shirts with the deceased person on them for the funeral. She said the buttons are a message: In the loved one’s honor, what are we called to do?“To live in peace and not retaliate.”
And Chéry has done just that herself. Instead of being angry, she befriended the mother of the man who killed her child. She said it wasn’t easy, but it was necessary:
“It’s a journey. If Louis was the one that shot her son, what would I want? It was a way of reaching out to her, of making this connection and say ‘Look, we’re both suffering here. How do we walk this road together? And what can we do, not just as mothers but as families also, to support each other?’”
Violence in inner cities
Chéry said outrage does exist when it comes to violence in inner cities. It’s just a matter of how the public justifies the violence.
“If it’s massive in places that we don’t think it will happen, then we come out in one voice and we get outraged because we don’t believe these things are supposed to happen,” she said. “Yet when it happens in the inner city, it’s the justification — they were in a gang, these things are supposed to happen in this type of community. So it’s a sense that we as a society have said it’s OK for [there to be] inner-city violence.”
But Chéry’s trying to change that perspective.
“When Louis was killed — once they found out he wasn’t in a gang, he wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time — then all the resources switched,” she said. “And when we begin to shift how do we view, what is our responsibility as a community not just for the individual, yet for the family.”
“We need media as an ally”
Chery has come to believe that media needs to play a bigger role to bring violence in cities to the forefront, so that more people are aware of what’s going on and can do more before anything happens.
“When I say allies, do more than the reporting of the immediacy. Really go deep in — who are the families, who are the victims and who are the perpetrators?”
There are other challenges when it comes to a prevention plan. Chery said society simply sits there and waits before acting. Instead, society should act before anything even happens.
“The challenge is Boston is very turf-driven. We wait until homicide happens to then respond. The idea is what is the preventive part of this work? We all understand what needs to happen in terms of prevention yet as a society we still wait until the children kill another child to then want to reach out.”
What needs to be done
The audience Chéry really wants to target is the children. They’re the ones who are the future and need to live in peace, she said. “This is an opportunity where we as a society need to look at the primary prevention. If we’re still working with all these victims in the hotspots, there are schools in these hotspots. How do we invest some primary prevention in these schools so that the children, the siblings of the perpetrators and the victims don’t continue on the cycle of violence?”
That’s the question that society still needs to answer.
