Youngstown vigil honors slaying victim, issues call for end to violence

April 29, 2012 at 12:10a.m.

YOUNGSTOWN

Hot wax dropped like tears onto the cold, damp ground a few feet away from the spot where Pierre McKinney took his last breath.

The droplets fell from a white taper that Brittany Thomas, the mother of McKinney’s 4-year-old daughter, was tilting sideways.

Half-way around the circle of about 60 people, all family and friends gathered Saturday evening to remember McKinney, was his 6-year-old son, Tion. Not far from Tion, clutching her own candle, was McKinney’s fianc e, Carrie Spires.

At the crowd’s feet was a simple remembrance — a white vase holding red flowers. On the side of the vase were the words, “Pierre McKinney, we love you.”

McKinney, 21, died Wednesday afternoon, shot in his car in the driveway of a house on Saranac Avenue on the North Side. He had just arrived at the house to pick up Spires’ son when two men in another car pulled across the bottom of the drive and opened fire on him.

After the shooting, he ran from his car to the backyard where he collapsed under the sprawling branches of a maple tree. Spires ran to him from her home three blocks away after her son called her to tell her what happened, and she held his hand while he died.

Police have not arrested anyone yet in his killing. They believe he was shot as revenge for a fist fight that had taken place earlier in the day.

McKinney was, remembered his uncle Charles Bell, thoughtful, energetic and smart. “I’m going to miss a lot about him,” said Bell as the crowd trickled into the backyard before the vigil began.

“He was quiet, laid-back, and kept you laughing,” said his cousin, Tamika Jones. He was planning the next phase of his life, she said. He had enrolled in college and was going to study business management. He and Spires were to be married on his birthday, June 5.

Instead, his family, a close-knit group that McKinney leaned on after he lost both parents in the last three years to illnesses, will bury him next Saturday.

Another man lost, said the Rev. Sylvia Jennings of Oak Baptist Church in Liberty as she led the vigil.

“Another warrior stolen from the city,” she said. “One who was sent here to protect.

“Every man who is here, you’re here by divine order, as keepers and protectors,” she continued. “Now we stand here grieving the loss of another son, another brother and another father, another man has been taken from his family.”

She had strong words for those who are responsible for the loss of so many lives in their own community, likening them to Cain, who murdered his brother Abel in the biblical story and then had to answer God’s question: “Where is your brother?”

“God is asking you to ask yourself: ‘Where is your brother?’” she said.

As men of the community, they should help it, not destroy it, she said. “The people ... should not be afraid because you walk the streets,” she said.

As quiet sobs from the crowd grew louder, the Rev. Ms. Jennings called for the violence to end.

“When is enough,” she said, “of our young men dying in the streets, and all we can do is cry, and go home until the next time.”

“Pierre loved his family; that’s all he cared about,” Spires told the group, her face wet with tears and contorted by grief. “He loved you and I love you too.”