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"Homage
to murder victims taking shape as memorial park" July 17, 2004 A key piece of a large-scale memorial dedicated to homicide victims was completed yesterday as workers erected a 17-foot bronze statue of three ibises taking flight in a plaza at the Saltonstall state office building on Beacon Hill. The 2,000-pound sculpture is part of an unfinished memorial park called ''Garden of Peace: a Memorial to Victims of Homicide," which is scheduled to open in September. The bronze ibises --inspired by an Egyptian symbol of wisdom, truth, and resurrection -- rose above an uncompleted pool yesterday as the sculptor, Judy Kensley McKie of Cambridge, looked on with friends. McKie called the event ''emotional" as she watched a crane hoist the sculpture from a flatbed truck to its perch on a steel rod. ''It was meant to be, because I had been thinking on my own of the need for a place like this," said McKie, whose 21-year-old son, Jesse, was chased into a Cambridge housing project and stabbed to death in 1990. ''The only way I could address this issue of violence in society is with something visual." Stories of homicide victims abounded in the tearful crowd of about 25 people who stood among construction workers at the memorial. ''This puts all the names together," said Betty Borghesani of Lexington, whose 23-year-old daughter, Anne, was killed in 1990 as she walked from her apartment to a train station in Virginia. ''An individual murder may happen -- one today, two on Friday -- and then we forget about them. But then you see it all masses together; you realize the impact it has on society." The 7,000-square-foot site represents the first time Massachusetts has set aside land for a private project to dedicate homicide victims, said Catherine A. Melina, landscape designer for the memorial. Scheduled to be completed Sept. 23, the garden will be a place for visitors to remember the victims. The facility also includes ''Tragic Density," a granite lens buried into a concrete foundation that Melina said symbolized the sadness and grief buried in the hearts of victims' friends and families. The memorial park is lined with stone walls, yews, a river birch, stone walkways, and a dry streambed. ''It's a dry riverbed because water represents life, and without life, there is no water," Melina said. With a donation, Massachusetts residents and former residents will be able to inscribe the names, birthdays, and date of death of the victims on the footlong stones that will line the streambed when the park opens. McKie and other relatives of murder victims first proposed a memorial in 1995. The plan received a boost in 2000 when MassDevelopment, which renovated the Saltonstall building, donated $200,000. Today, the project's organizers have raised about $400,000, still well shy of their $1.3 million goal to pay back loans for the memorial.
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