Hartford families face agony of fatal gun violence, long for justice as police seek arrests. ‘We didn’t lose them, they were taken from us.’

The presence of grief in the room was palpable as Sally Oliver shared the story of her 21-year-old son Brian Oliver’s killing in 2021.

An aspiring rapper, Oliver was gunned down early the morning of July 19, 2021 outside an Irving Street home after an argument and fight during a party at a North End home a few blocks away, according to court records.

For Sally Oliver and others, the mood visibly changed when she shared that the Hartford Police Department was able to locate and arrest a suspect in her son’s death, Joshua White, who was charged in October 2021. Oliver thanked the Hartford detective assigned to her case, for working to make this arrest happen.

This step toward justice is the hope carried by many community members who joined a Mothers United Against Gun Violence session with the entire Hartford police homicide team and detectives with the Hartford Police Department’s Cold Case Unit.

One of those city residents Deborah Gaston , who lost her 24-year-old son, Andre Gaston, Jr. to gun violence on Orange Street early on the morning of Oct. 5, 2022.

Police responded to the area of Orange Street for two ShotSpotter activations and found an unresponsive man suffering from multiple gunshot wounds and applied life-saving measures until emergency services arrived. The man, identified as Gaston Jr., was taken to Hartford Hospital and was pronounced dead.

“He was ambushed and slaughtered, shot 27 times. And nobody knows anything. There were several people at his funeral. And I heard all the good things he did for people. I kept telling him, ‘stay out from over there. You don’t live over there, you don’t live over there. Stay away from there,” Gaston said.

While she acknowledges that her son was selling marijuana at the time, Gaston said she tried to warn him and help him to understand that the people he was hanging out with were jealous of him, because, she believes. they could tell he came from different circumstances than they were in.

“It just hurts my heart to know that (the killer) had to leave him like that. Like I told him, you try to fix people, fix yourself first. Fix yourself. And I had told him, just a week before. I said you keep pushing your number closer and closer to the top. I said, you can’t keep playing with God,” she said. “OK, it doesn’t work. You can’t keep running over here working and coming back over here. It doesn’t work that way.”

The day before Gaston was slain, there was a carjacking and his mother said she was scrambling to call everyone to see if her son was the victim, but she was able to reach him that day and confirmed he was not there, as he was at his job.

The very next day, she said that she received the call from a family member that her son was slain - yet, no one has come forward to say how he was killed, which she does not understand.

“I just don’t get it. I mean, these kids are listening to this demonic music, and smoking and sniffing, whatever the heck they are doing. And everybody’s just losing their minds,” Gaston said.

Gaston said her hope is for city police to keep arresting individuals that are causing trouble in the streets.

“These are your streets. Now, you are not going to tell me that you don’t know what’s going on. I mean, y’all see these kids [and] know they don’t live there. I don’t care. Keep arresting them. I don’t care if you arrested him 30 times, maybe he would still be here,” she said.

Hartford saw 39 homicides in 2022 compared to 34 in 2021, according to police statistics released to the Hartford City Council’s Quality of Life and Public Safety committee. Homicides in 2021 increased 40% from 2020, when the year ended with 25.

The number of homicides in Hartford in 2022, however, was the most fatal violence since there were 46 homicides recorded in 2003, according to Hartford police.

Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin has noted that the increase in the number of fatalities is partly “a reflection of the fact that so much of this violence is so intensely personal and arises from personal disputes that escalate quickly and tragically when there are guns present.” Police also have said the majority of the homicides reported in 2022 were due to personal disputes, though alleged gang- or drug-related killings did occur. The city has numerous public and citizen-run organizations that work to end violence; a new program is Peacebuilders, which focuses on the city’s high-risk youth.

Oliver was one of the young people working with the Compass Youth Collaborative, which works to stop the cycle of violence in Hartford, Warren Hardy, 48, a youth activist and counselor for the organization said at the time Oliver was slain.

Mothers United Against Violence Founder Henrietta Beckman said the organization put the session together to allow community members to ask the homicide team and cold case unit direct questions about slain loved ones.

Hartford police Sgt. Anthony Rykowski the department’s homicide and cold case teams are working to bring closure for families, to bring awareness, and make a difference in the city.

Mothers United Against Violence leader Deborah Davis told grieving community members they must empower themselves to communicate with detectives working the cases.

“Don’t sit back, be proactive. We’ve had moms that have really dug in and dads and they’ve really dug in and they went to the next level, we need you to go to the next level…,” she said. “And appreciate the fact that [police] did come up. They are so busy, but they came out to make sure that they can communicate directly with you.”

Rykowski said the department never forgets the cases, no matter how much time has passed.

“People want answers, and we want to give them to you, more than anything. Everyone sitting up here, we take these incidents seriously, we take it personally. We are the ones that come out to your house and we have to give you this devastating news,” Rykowski said. “We also want to be the ones that bring you to closure, that’s something we all take very very seriously.”

“We’re constantly re-evaluating evidence. If there’s something we can do, that when the incident happened we didn’t have the capability to do, we want to revisit that,” he said.

Andrew Woods, executive director of Hartford Communities That Care, Inc., which responds to violent crimes throughout the city, said such forums are not something that happen in all communities.

“Mothers United Against Violence is an organization that actually pulls people together to really try to resolve a lot of these crimes that impact us in our community,” Woods said.

“And it is work that is taking a toll on folks that do this work in a very significant way that a lot of people don’t fully understand or appreciate,” he said. “It’s troubling to see your faces, every time this happens. But it’s also troubling to know that people that get out of their beds, like this [organization], to support families like mine and yours, do not necessarily…get the acknowledgement, respect, and the resources that they need.”

Mothers United Against Violence founder the Rev. Henry Brown said the department’s homicide and cold case teams never gives up on cases.

“It might seem like you can’t get an answer. You don’t have an answer. But I can assure you they’re still working,” Brown said.

Davis said is a courageous act for community members to speak out.

“This is the part of the work that we understand more than anyone else, I think, because we are victims. And now we’re survivors. We’re going to be a survivor and the voice for our children. And for our loved ones that were taken from us. We didn’t lose them, they were taken from us,” she said.