‘We need a season of peace’

‘We need a season of peace’
By Laurel J. Sweet  |   Friday, November 26, 2010  |  http://www.bostonherald.com  |  Local Coverage

The Rev. Jefferey Brown, of the TenPoint Coalition, speaks to the press on Thanksgiving in front of the Quick Stop market, the scene of an October murder. He announced a campaign called ‘Season of Peace.’
Photo by Mark Garfinkel

Standing in unity before the shuttered superette where a Roxbury mother buying groceries was cut down last month by an AK-47-wielding maniac, local ministers, police and prosecutors yesterday called on Hub thugs to brush the chips off their shoulders and lay down their guns this holiday season.

“We need peace,” said the Rev. Jeffrey Brown, executive director of the Boston TenPoint Coalition. “We are tired of the random violence. We are tired of grandmothers getting shot. We are tired of children getting shot. We are tired.”

It is the fourth consecutive year city officials have appealed to common decency to silence the gunfire, but with the homicide toll at 69 and five weeks left in the year, “if ever we needed a season of peace, this is it,” Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley said.

Murders have skyrocketed by a staggering 60 percent since this time last year, when the city recorded 45 homicides, according to Boston police.

The last few months of the decade have been marred by mass carnage, including the senseless slayings of shopkeepers and Richel Nova, the Domino’s pizza deliveryman hacked to death allegedly by youths in an empty Hyde Park house for the change in his pockets and the hot meal in his hands.

Citing “an attitude of indifference,” Brown said the rising death toll isn’t just about gangs and drugs, “but issues of anger, of rage.”

Tahitia “Tye” Milton, 39, was headed for the door of the Quick Stop convenience store on Warren Street in Roxbury on Oct. 23 when a still-at-large madman gunned her down and sprayed the neighborhood market with bullets from an assault rifle. The owner was also hit, but survived.

This year’s Season of Peace theme, Turn Your Back Against Violence, will be featured on cards and billboards gracing the sides of MBTA buses and subway cars and distributed to small businesses.

“The message is, we need a break,” transit police Chief Paul MacMillan said. “We need a season of peace.”

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