A year after the shooting death of a neighborhood hero, a Hartford billboard is a larger than life reminder of the loss that lingers
A year after Jaqhawn Walters was shot and killed around the corner from his childhood home, the memory of the beloved basketball star and hero of Hartford’s North End now looms larger than life over the neighborhood.
His absence has devastated his family and the scores of neighborhood kids, budding basketball players and rappers who looked up to Walters, known as “JQ.” But two billboards that now display his image — and a message against the gun violence that killed him and permeates the city — have become a pilgrimage site for those who still look up to him.
A project of his mother’s, the signs are a salve for the community where Walters was a role model among his peers, a big brother to neighborhood kids and universally loved, even by feuding factions in the streets.
It brings Trician Salmon comfort to see people smile and take selfies with her son’s picture, even as she and her family struggle with the reality of life without Walters.
“Even today, I got four people crying to me on a phone that I can’t even console because I’m hurting myself,” she said last Thursday, three days before the anniversary of Walters’ death.
“He was dealing with a lot. Imagine you have all these people looking up to you,” said Salmon, an assisted living nurse with three living children and a living room shrine to her eldest son. “I didn’t realize it until after he died. He was carrying a world — a city on his shoulder.”
‘Don’t shoot’
For days after Walters was killed on Sept. 19, 2020, his mother caught herself listening for him at the door of 16 Addison St.
Basketball had gotten Walters out of the North End — he was an All-State player at University High School of Science and Engineering, three-time All-Conference and twice a D-III All-American at Albertus Magnus College, and played professionally in Argentina.
But he spent most of his 24 years on a neat, leafy street of two- and three-family homes, on the edge of one of the poorest neighborhoods in Connecticut.
It still felt like he might walk in at any moment, carrying the basketball he used to bring to work every day at the Village for Families and Children, where he liked to start games with the kids.
His mother knew right away she couldn’t stay there anymore — the family moved to East Hartford that December — but Salmon, 43, kept her love of the neighborhood that helped raise her son.
She set out to memorialize Jaqhawn with a street renaming, a municipal process that’s still ongoing, and talked with artists about creating a mural at Parker Community Center, where he played basketball since he was a child, during the tail-end of the gang wars of the 1990s.
“Back then, there was a lot of violence at Parker, but every time I would go there, they would say, ‘Leave him alone. This little man is gonna be something.’ They would just protect him,” Salmon said.
Salmon’s sisters — she has four, and a brother — suggested a billboard; there are plenty of them in the North End, which runs parallel to I-91 and the North Meadows, an industrial zone studded with advertisements. Addison Street is a block north of that zone, and there happened to be one, lone billboard around the corner, halfway between his home and the site of his death.
Salmon got in touch with the owner and local artist Charles Wright, who had created a memorial image she liked of Walters with angel wings, feet planted on top of the world as he prepared to take a jump shot. She had Wright add books at his feet to show that academics provided the foundation for Walters’ success on the court.
He holds the ball low, eyes trained on an unseen hoop. To the left, they wrote “Don’t shoot.”
The owner of the billboard gave Salmon a two-for-one deal for a second, higher-visibility location at the intersection of Albany and Main Avenues. The cost was about $1,800 to print the posters and rent space for one month.
Salmon wasn’t sure how she was going to pay the sum with a nurse’s income. Meanwhile, her other efforts — the mural and street sign — were tied up by bureaucratic processes and issues related to COVID-19.
By the spring, her grief felt compounded by new incidents of violence. At work one day in April, she broke down in tears over the deaths of two boys, ages 3 and 16, in shootings that occurred less than a mile away and two hours apart.
She found herself crying in her boss’s office.
“I was just having a meltdown, and she was like, ‘What’s going on?” And I told her, ‘I’m looking at this picture, and I want to do so much with it, and nothing’s falling into place.’”
Her supervisor and the executive director of Benchmark Senior Living agreed to help Salmon pay for the billboards. They split the bill three ways.
Still beloved, still missed
On July 19, Gerri Hamilton was driving up Albany Avenue with her 9-year-old son Isaac when he shouted, “Mommy, mommy, look! Look at JQ!”
To the right, against the clouds and bright blue sky, was Jaqhawn Walters, or “JQ,” who Isaac recognized as his older brother Leroy Collier’s closest friend.
“I couldn’t believe it. I could not believe it,” Hamilton, 38, said.
She parked the car and got out with Isaac, who posed for a picture with his hands up to mirror its message, “Don’t shoot,” a rallying cry of the Black Lives Matter movement. Hamilton posted it on Facebook and tagged Collier and Salmon, who didn’t realize her displays were up one week early.
The post immediately took off — nearly 700 people have hit “share” — and prompted other mothers to bring their boys for selfies.
Friends and fans drove in from New Haven, Bridgeport and New York to pay their respects to Walters, who had played one year professionally for Club del Progreso in Argentina, and would have returned for a second season if not for the coronavirus pandemic.
It was just as Salmon thought; her eldest son was still beloved and missed, particularly in the neighborhood he’d escaped and then returned to.
While Walters grew up in the North Main Street area where there’s a long-running street rivalry with Albany Avenue, he’d chosen not to pick sides. As a young man, he invited members of both street groups to his birthday parties, which he called the Hangover. There was never any violence; everyone would party “in peace and love,” as his mom says.
“I had to be a chaperon ’cause I was always nervous something was going to happen, and he would always tell me, ‘Ma, they love me,’” Salmon remembers. “I think they saw something in him that gave them hope.”
“He had a light, a vibration that created a better moment,” Collier says.
Walters also pushed his younger friends to dream bigger than Hartford. For Collier, that meant attending UConn, where he took opportunities to travel abroad and worked as a student manager for the men’s basketball team.
Collier graduated in spring 2020 but was visiting his girlfriend on campus the day Walters was shot twice in the parking lot of the Jam-Roc restaurant at 3395 Main St. Collier rushed to St. Francis Hospital and joined the crowd of friends and family there, praying in front of the hospital doors until Salmon came outside and told them Walters had died.
Hamilton remembers the screams and yells of the young men.
Jason Stone, 33, was charged with murder and has pleaded not guilty. He remains in jail awaiting trial.
A police report from the incident describes how Walters and Stone were seen on camera talking before Walters grabs Stone and pushes him against the restaurant’s door. A witness broke them apart, but as Walters backs away, Stone pulls a gun from his waistband, reengages with Walters and “almost immediately” shoots him, according to the police report.
Once Walters was on the ground, police wrote that it appeared Stone shot him again.
In an interview with detectives, Stone said the confrontation started after he purchased marijuana from Walters outside the restaurant.
After Walters’ funeral, Collier would visit his grave site every day, sitting for hours in the grass. The emotions he usually keeps at bay rushed back the first time Collier saw the picture of his friend on the billboard on Tower Avenue this summer.
“JQ was one of those few people that Hartford could definitely be proud of,” Collier said. “It’s unfortunate ’cause a city that doesn’t have too many things to uplift, to raise, to really hold on to, they get taken away.”
Finding a new purpose
Trician Salmon recently pulled the cover off her old Lexus, which she’d given to Jaqhawn and inherited again when he died. He’d treated it like his baby, and now it had been gathering dust for months.
Salmon suddenly felt like pumping the tires with air and taking it out for a drive. She took it to New Britain to pick her 12-year-old son up from school, and stayed quiet when she saw him hiding fresh tears.
Walters had been a father figure to his younger siblings after their dad — his stepfather — was murdered in 2015.
But with therapy and time, the family is making progress.
Salmon’s daughter, 17, is thinking about college applications. She wants to become a nurse and work with pediatric patients.
Her 12-year-old started building his own video games after he got tired of Fortnite players stealing the clothing he designed for his characters.
Walters’ little brother, 5, dribbles a basketball late into the night. Salmon isn’t sure what he understands of the murders of his brother and father. Their new house is quiet and boring when life used to be filled with laughter, Salmon says.
“They’re used to listening to (Jaqhawn) play his music. They’re used to him coming in the house, sweating them up, taking them to the park, going to the basketball court,” Salmon said. “A big part of them is gone, and I just feel like it’s a loss they’ll never get over.”
The billboards, at least, make everyone smile. And they’re still up now, well into September, even though Salmon only paid for one month. She keeps expecting to see her posters replaced with advertisements, but each time she drives by, there he is on top of the world, getting ready to shoot for the stars.
For Jaqhawn’s old friend Collier, the signs are a reminder to cherish the days you have and strive for better ones ahead. To Salmon, they say that Jaqhawn Walters can still give hope to boys growing up in the hardest parts of Hartford.
“Everyone in the North End needs someone to look up to. They need a positive role model in their life. They need something other than violence,” Salmon said. “So that’s my mission at this point. I lost my son, but I didn’t know my purpose until after he died.”
Rebecca Lurye can be reached at rlurye@courant.com.
