David Guizar was 10 years old when police found the oldest of his four siblings, Oscar Martinez, 17, dead on a sidewalk in South Central Los Angeles, shot in a presumed gang attack. The baby of the family, Guizar grew up without a father and idolized his oldest brother. “I didn’t understand what happened,” he says. “I saw my mom going through shock, crying and screaming and disowning her belief in God and all these different things. And I’m just sitting there, basically taking all that in.” In the years after that, Guizar turned to rebellion, gang-banging, violence and self-medicating with drugs and alcohol to cope. Counseling for mother and son might have made a difference, but their desperate need went unmet by a system geared to assist victims once cases are prosecuted — not much help if a murder goes unsolved, as it did with Martinez.
That all began more than 32 years ago. Then and now, murders of young men of color, especially when gangs are involved, are up to twice as likely to go unsolved as those of homicide victims as a whole. This lack of resolution often leaves victims’ families even more alone. “No one really took the time to walk me through the process,” Guizar says, “to explain to me that something had happened that was going to be hard for me to live with for the rest of my life but that things could work out.”
[For more of this story, written by Mark Obbie, go to http://america.aljazeera.com/a...on-and-violence.html]
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