Got to catch ’em all

It was a little less than a year ago that I stood on a corner in Houma and watched the warped ritual of street memorial. I could pick out the ones already lost, the kids with the eyes hardened, leading little ones with eyes still bright, mourning the death of a kid named Corey Butler whose path to an early grave was laid out the day he started playing with guns.

On a corner not far from where I stood was a young man who, like me, eyed the throng. His eyes were sad because they had seen too much. His name is Justin Patterson but the kids know him as DJ Juice, and he knows more about their lives than the custodian in The Breakfast Club ever knew about the pretty white kids with problems that are featured in that particular movie.

He uses his talent as a DJ to reach out, this mentor, teacher and counselor of kids, and the spin is so hot that they dance and mug and rhyme at the events he holds at gyms and other venues, unmindful that words about violence and guns and hidden drug messages are not present. It’s all just cool. They speak to him in a language they understand and he speaks back to them. Earlier this year he toured as the opening DJ for Lil Wayne. If you don’t know who Lil Wayne is you need to keep reading this and if you do know then you need to keep reading this as well.

It doesn’t matter that Juice was named a Hometown Hero by a radio station. It matters that he knows the kids, or some of them, and that they know him too, and that we don’t speak to people like him enough.

On Morgan Street, Juice and I both said that it was sad. The politicians made speeches a few days later and there was a Stop the Violence march.

Then all the kids like Corey Butler went back to their neighborhoods playing with their guns again.

A lot of the killings that occurred between now and then involved street thugs, both black and white, mostly about drugs. But there are these other ones, the young ones, who think it’s just play.

There was talk of a blue ribbon panel of the best minds possible figuring out how to save the kids but that never happened. The men who volunteer as mentors, meanwhile, continue their work quietly, saving who they can. Life on the streets is not Pokemon, and you can’t catch ‘em all. But we must do everything to catch as many as possible.

Last week I ran into Juice again, at Scott Lane Park in Houma, on the other side of Bayou Terrebonne from Morgan Street. This time the victim was a 17-year-old named Roderick L. Davis Jr. A 14-year-old and a 16-year-old are charged with the killing, and the cops have eyed another kid too. None of them got the memo about how we are all doing everything we can to stop the violence, and they didn’t hear the speeches in the Parish Council chamber that amounted to squat. Juice didn’t have much to say at the street memorial in the park, and neither did I, except we looked at each other and both said again that it was sad.

Nobody in the parish government ever called on Juice, one of those who knows what’s up with the kids, or anyone like him, to decide how we are going to stop them from killing each other.

Nobody formed a blue ribbon panel. Nobody took the step to walk the streets where the kids are at, to do the job the mothers aren’t capable of and that the fathers can’t because most of them left long ago.

And that’s the way it will stay unless the lives being lost are those that people with the power to face a crisis head-on think might matter. Maybe then someone will find a way to meet the kids on their home turf, where the killing occurs for now, until it comes to a street near you. •