Mom: Shooting ‘one of the most horrific things I have ever seen’

Mom: Shooting ‘one of the most horrific things I have ever seen’
By Peter Gelzinis  |   Wednesday, October 27, 2010  |  http://www.bostonherald.com  |  Columnists
It has become this city’s latest shrine to savagery.

Until last Saturday afternoon, it was a convenience store on Warren Street in Roxbury. Now it’s been hijacked by vigil candles and condolences scrawled in spray paint. Everything from “R.I.P. Mom!” to “Love Neva Dies, Only People Die,” now cover both the front of the store and the surrounding sidewalk.

Tahitia Milton, a 39-year-old mother of four, walked to the Quick Stop to pick up a few things Saturday afternoon, only to be cut down by a killer wielding a true weapon of war, an assault rifle.

“It was one of the most horrific things I have ever seen,” said one veteran investigator. Every bit as horrific as the sight of three adults and one toddler laying dead in the middle of a Mattapan street.

“It’s sad to say, but it’s almost as if people around here have gotten used to the gunshots and seeing people die in the street.” Like Tahitia Milton, the woman who volunteered that observation was also was a mother, who has made the same trip to the Quick Stop many times.

“By the time I got down there on Saturday,” she recalled, “they were lifting that gentleman, who I guess was behind the counter in the Quick Stop, out of a car and putting him in the ambulance. It was awful. But lots of people kind of looked at the whole thing as if it was just another episode of ‘Law & Order.’ .”

She drives her two children to and from school every day. She does not allow them out of the house unless she knows her kids are under the watchful eyes of a coach or a teacher.

“They ask me all the time, ‘Mommy, how come we can’t do this or that like other kids?’ I don’t know what to say to them, except that things are different for us. How am I supposed to tell them what happened to that woman just down the street?”

Bouquets of flowers were tucked into the grates that transformed the Quick Stop into a shuttered tomb. Asked how people cope with a neighbor — a mother being slaughtered as she carried a bag of groceries out of a store — the woman simply shook her head.

“That lady was somebody’s daughter, somebody’s mother, somebody’s sister,” she sighed. “Sure, there were people who must have seen it all happen. The sun was out. That police substation was two doors away. But it’s easier to go numb than to go to the police. The way things are going now around here, people just don’t think the police can protect them from the kind of stuff that happened in that store.

“So, you just try to get on the best way you can,” she said. “You live your life looking over your shoulder. It’s no way to live. But we don’t seem to have a choice. Each shooting seems worse than the one before.”

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