Monica Yant Kinney: Bound by blood, and how it spilled
Two brothers, raised with care, are slain 8 years apart.
April 18, 1999: Barry Kennedy, 22, is shot to death while talking with friends outdoors in the 1300 block of West Jerome Street in Hunting Park in what prosecutors call a motiveless murder. (His killer would be sentenced to life in prison.)
March 26, 2007: Marc "Marco" Kennedy, 29, is shot to death talking with friends outdoors in the 1300 block of West Jerome Street in Hunting Park.
Two brothers, same demise, same block, eight years apart.
Police aren't saying much about the latest Kennedy killing, Philadelphia's 94th of this bloody year. Homicide detectives don't have time to ponder a single family's fate when the murder rate is rising by a corpse a day.
In life, the Kennedy brothers were not the statistics they became in death.
They grew up with a mother and father who worked and prayed hard. The week before Marco's death, the electrician-in-training was approved for a mortgage to buy his first house, in the Northeast.
None of that eases the ache.
Mothers like Gretchen Kennedy who lose sons to the streets of Philadelphia grieve just as deeply as those whose soldiers die in a foreign war. It's just that Saving Private Ryan makes a better movie.
"These are hurt people out there on the streets," Ted Kennedy tells me a few days after burying his second son. "Hurt people hurt people."
All in the family
The Kennedys honored their own. Gretchen named her only daughter after herself, and Marc Ted Kennedy after his dad. In all, there are two Marcs and three Barrys. Well, there were.
Gretchen works in child care; Ted is a director at a John F. Kennedy Community Mental Health Center methadone clinic. He wore his National Guard uniform to Marco's funeral.
The couple divorced when the boys were young, and Ted moved them to Bensalem, but they also spent time living with Gretchen. Ted took them camping and hunting and had them play Little League and join the Christian Service Brigade.
"Everybody was, 'Yes, sir. Yes, ma'am,' " Ted said. "I told my sons, 'You cannot be on these street corners, because some people have no morals and you do. You will think first when someone approaches you, and those guys don't think. You can't compete.' "
But they tried, a little.
Barry was arrested on gun and drug charges in 1998. The cases were dismissed after his death. Marco was arrested in 2002 on simple assault charges that were dismissed three months later.
"Barry had one run-in, but he got wise," his sister Gretchen, 25, told me as three generations of Kennedys gathered in front of Grandmom's place on North Carlisle Street last week. "All Marco wanted to do was fill his big brother's shoes and take care of the family."
Marco's mother can still taste their last steak dinner.
"I would really love to talk to the guys who killed my sons," she said. "I'd ask them, 'What would you like me to tell their boys?' "
Who will be Dad now?
Barry left behind two sons; Marco, trying to emulate his dad, doted on the three boys he had with two women.
"He took care of all of us," Marco's girlfriend of eight years, Tiffany Myers, 26, told me. "He lived for those boys."
Since Marco's murder, 5-year-old Namier has peppered his mother with questions she can't answer.
"When I'm 29, am I going to go to heaven with God? Who's going to be my dad now?"
"Dad" will be a village of women plus Pop-Pop, who handed out Talking to Your Kids About Funerals pamphlets he got at church.
For now, Tiffany, Marco's sister, and a former girlfriend are bunking with their four children at Tiffany's place in Germantown.
"We've got to stick together so these boys don't grow up so mad that someone took their fathers that they go out and do something stupid," the boys' Aunt Gretchen said.
Tiffany's aunt, Tamara Boney, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, said the key would be teaching the children to embrace life.
"Just because it happened to their fathers doesn't mean it will happen to them," Boney told me. "You live right, do right, have faith, you'll be OK."
And if the Kennedy boys ask why their fathers were murdered the same way on the same street eight years apart? She'll say it was their time, and a violent time.
Monica Yant Kinney |
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