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"Good grief" May 30, 2004 His creativity was astounding. My son, Jesse, would come to my shop, pick up a piece of wood, and carve a fish out of it. From the time he was a kid, it was natural for him to draw and spend his time making things. In high school, he got interested in mixing music. That's where much of his creativity went, and he became very good at it. When he was at Emerson College, he had one of the first rap shows on the radio. He was walking home from a friend's house in Cambridge where he had been mixing music. He ran into an acquaintance walking in Central Square, and they saw this gang of six or seven guys harassing people as they came along. Jesse and the acquaintance ducked into the projects and were followed in. The gang confronted Jesse. They asked for his leather jacket, I guess. I don't know exactly what the conversation was. They beat him, took his jacket, and stabbed him to death. Then they turned around and murdered the other person walking with my son, Rigoberto Carrion. There was a witness who said it was their plan to do somebody some harm. It wasn't about the jacket; that was just a trophy. One of them just wanted to use his knife. My only child had just turned 21. It was January 25, 1990. I'm an artist. For a year after my son's death, I couldn't do anything. When I did get back to work, the only way I could do it was to make something that Jesse would really like. It would be a gift to him. It was a bench cast in bronze, a little quirkier than other things I had made. The other thing that happened in my work, I'm just realizing, is I started to make birds. Part bird, part angel. They were for my son, and they were my son. Rising up. This summer, 14 years after Jesse was murdered, the Garden of Peace will open in Boston on the plaza between the Saltonstall and McCormack buildings, near the State House, as a memorial to victims of homicide. The idea for the garden happened in a very roundabout way, with several people thinking about it separately and, by some miracle, being thrown together. I was thinking a lot about a need for a place where parents, friends, and relatives of homicide victims could somehow be together. A public place for people to gather. After my son was murdered, the only time I felt some degree of relief was when I was around other people who had experienced the same thing. As supportive and wonderful as friends and family were, they couldn't feel the pain in the same way. My contribution to the garden is a 15-foot cast-bronze sculpture of three ibises in flight. The ibis in Egyptian mythology is a symbol of wisdom, truth, and resurrection. It represents in my mind something rising heavenward, that transcends the violence. I want it to be an uplifting image, to bring people peace and pleasure. Landscape designer Catherine Melina envisions a black-granite orb in the garden to represent the incredible grief one feels after the loss of a child. Circling this huge sphere will be a dry riverbed with stones that have names of homicide victims, all with some relationship to Massachusetts. The riverbed will culminate in a small body of water to represent hope. Beyond a cascade of water will be my sculpture. It has helped a lot to be involved in something that was positive. I hope the garden will be a place where people feel comfortable sitting with their thoughts. Also, a place where teachers can bring schoolchildren to think about violence in our society. It's hard to imagine a little park being able to make much of a change, but it would be wonderful to think that it could at least increase some people's awareness.
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