Back- to-back prayer vigils for two young men murdered a couple of weeks apart would be tough, even if temperatures weren’t hovering in the mid-20s.
But Saturday’s services were even more compelling as the victims, 26-year-old Andrew Dockery and 20-year-old Terrelle Suggs, both of Aurora, were members of the same extended family.
Dockery’s vigil was held in the 400 block of Melrose Avenue in Aurora, where he was killed in a drive-by shooting as he was standing outside around 7 p.m. New Year’s Eve. Some of the same mourners who gathered to pray on this far southeast side street then traveled to the second prayer vigil held near the intersection of Orchard and Jericho roads, where Suggs’ car crashed after he was shot in the head Jan. 13 by someone in another vehicle.
“It’s hard to comprehend,” said Luanda Dockery, stepmother to Andrew Dockery and aunt to Terrelle Suggs. “The family was still struggling to deal with Drew’s murder when we got hit with the second death.”
“God,” she added, tears yet again gathering in her eyes, “is the only thing getting us through this.”
While the same-day vigils for two relatives is unprecedented, it was not the first time family members were killed in separate shootings and so close together.
The Rev. Dan Haas, who has led these public outdoor services for murder victims for more than two decades, recalls two brothers, also killed within a couple weeks of each other, in the early days of Aurora’s surge in gun violence. The second victim, he said, prompted the first prayer vigil in 1994, led by the family’s priest, the Rev. David Engbarth, now retired as pastor of Our Lady of Good Counsel Church and living in Florida.
Haas and Engbarth formed the Prayer Coalition for Reconciliation and began holding these services after the second brother’s death, to bring more attention to the city’s escalating murder rate back then. And although gang violence has seen a dramatic decrease since those dark days, Haas and the other ministers who gathered Saturday at the sites of Dockery’s and Suggs’ slayings continued to call upon individuals, families and the community as a whole to come together so no more blood is shed.
At this stage of the investigation, neither Aurora nor Montgomery police are ruling out gang involvement in both slayings. And the message Haas hit home time and again at both Saturday vigils was that “retaliation is not acceptable.”
“We can’t resolve conflict by violence against each other,” he declared, first to the crowd that gathered on Melrose Avenue; then again to an even larger group that congregated off Orchard Road just north of Jericho Road in Montgomery.
Haas and other ministers who’ve had a front-row seat in this fight against gun violence, including Warehouse Church Pastor Randy Schoof, used their few minutes in front of each vigil crowd to ask for divine help, not only in healing families but the community, as well.
We are our “brother’s keeper,” they emphasized. And right now, the blood of our brother is on the ground.
“Revenge is not the answer,” Haas said. “But rather, love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you.”
After reading the names of those murdered in 2016, Aurora’s Community Coordinator Cheryl Maraffio also asked for cooperation from those attending the vigil on Melrose Avenue, where Dockery was killed in the final hours of that year. Neighborhood groups, working with city officials, can make a difference in bringing calm to the area, she said in her plea for a few good leaders to step forward.
“We want to hear what you have to say,” she told them. “We want to hear your voice.”
Likewise, police from both jurisdictions (Aurora: 630-256-5500; Montgomery: 630-897-8707, ext. 9058) want to hear from those who could offer clues to these drive-bys that not only claimed more lives but drew two families, some of them intersecting, into mourning.
“You look around, you see people and you wonder, do they know who did this?” asked Terrelle’s mother, Ayanda Suggs. “Do they know what happened but are choosing to stay quiet?”
“Murder was not in the plan for them,” said Haas of the two young men whose names on white crosses now join the list of gun violence victims.
“They did not get to see their talents, their potential, their futures realized.”
Dcrosby@tribupub.com
