Arlene Ward knew the choice she made that night would change the lives of the young people from the housing projects that define Manhattan’s Lower East Side skyline. She sat in the hospital room where her son’s dead body lay, still warm, a tube jammed down his throat after a gunshot to the chest.
Ward grew up in the projects. When she was a child, revenge was an instrumental part of meting out street justice.
“Our mentality is an eye for an eye,” Ward said. “Someone does something to my son, I go out and get the m----------- who did it.”
Ward’s son, known to friends and family by his middle name, Sadonte, was shot outside of a bodega near his building over a misunderstanding (involving a jacket) between rivals from another housing project.
With a simple, wordless nod, Ward said, she could have ordered some young people to visit the same kind of violence on the people who murdered her firstborn.
“They would have been booted and suited,” Ward said. “And did whatever they had to do.”
[For more of this story, written by Daryl Khan, go to http://jjie.org/parents-turn-pain-into-policy/107947/]
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