In a healthy city, children cannot die by violence on Christmas, NYE | Theodore Decker

The photograph that accompanies the obituary of De'Aire Craighead is a nice one, taken as he leaned against what looks to be a porch post on a bright summer day.

But it is a photo on the boy's National Gun Violence Memorial Page that drives his age home.

In this image, De'Aire squints as he smiles at the camera. He looks like he isn't quite sure what to do with his hands, holding them in the way that kids can when they are feeling just a little bit awkward — when, for instance, an adult is taking their picture.

De'Aire was 16 years old when he was shot to death in Columbus at 3 p.m. on Christmas Day. Police know the shooting occurred during some sort of dispute in North Linden, but they have not revealed much more than that and not reported any arrests.

De'Aire was the 137th person killed in Columbus in 2022. Three more people died before the year came to a close, including 15-year-old Unique Prater. She was found dead by gunshot at 3:45 p.m. Saturday on the Near East Side.

More:Northeast Side continues to be deadliest area in city, despite decline in total homicides

"Told jokes almost 24/7," someone has written on her memorial page. The accompanying photo of her looks like it might have been taken as she delivered one of those jokes.

Homicides in Columbus dropped by a third last year, down 65 from the record 205 killings recorded in 2021. But the 140 killings are still the fourth highest total ever recorded in the capital city.

More:Here's where homicides have occurred in Columbus

For an indication on how little has changed, look to De'Aire's death on Moon Road, a residential street that runs only about three blocks west from Maize Road before dead-ending against the sound wall along I-71's northbound lanes.

I wrote about Moon Road just three years ago, when two homicides occurred in a week's time.

The residents I spoke with then weren't giving up on Moon Road, saying it still offered them a sense of neighborhood in a quiet corner of North Linden. But the flurry of violence in 2019 did fluster them. And it hadn't been the first.

In 2015, a woman was arrested in the beating death 10 years earlier of a man in his apartment at 721 Moon Rd. Police said it resulted from a dispute over a money-for-sex transaction.

The suspect, who was a drug-addicted prostitute at the time, told a Franklin County judge at her bench trial in 2016 that she had acted in self-defense, but the judge convicted her of aggravated murder and sentenced her to life in prison with no chance of parole for 20 years.

Twelve years before that murder in 2005, two men were arrested at an apartment next door, at 723 Moon Rd. They were charged with killing a 17-year-old boy from Detroit a few days earlier at a nightclub on the Near East Side.

In that case, a dispute led several men to pull guns. A witness later said one gunman announced, "I don't care who I hit." And four bystanders were: the deceased boy and three others who survived.

That nightclub is long gone, but it stood less than a mile away from the spot where15-year-old Unique Prater was killed this past New Year's Eve in the 1200 block of Atcheson Street.

This block is at the historic heart of the turf of the T&A Crips gang that takes its name from the Near East Side intersection of Trevitt and Atcheson streets. The gang was identified in a 2021 street violence study as having the most deaths among their ranks during the nine months of homicides that were reviewed. Six victims and two suspects were linked to the gang.

But the violence tied to the T&A and this block in particular stretches back much further and reached beyond the gang's members. It was right here, where Prater died on Saturday, that a young motorist named Alix Reese was struck by errant gunfire during a gang war in 2010.

She fought on as a quadriplegic for almost nine years before dying of complications of the catastrophic injuries in 2019 at the age of 34.

Theodore Decker:Alix Reese fought until the very end

Yes, there were fewer homicides last year than the year before. That is a good thing. But we can't be so complacent as to live contentedly in a city where lethal violence becomes an accepted part of life, where children are murdered on Christmas, on New Year's Eve, on any day of the year.

Theodore Decker is the Dispatch metro columnist.

tdecker@dispatch.com

@Theodore_Decker

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Columbus homicides: Stubborn violence diminishes holidays and city