Weeping for her sons: from Africa to the streets of Boston, Cape Verdean mother tries to stop a wave of violence

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Two of her sons were murdered. Three of her nephews killed. If anything happened to her precious grandbabies, her heart just might stop. So Isaura Mendes stomps and stamps for peace, yelling her message from the rooftops, from her "peace van" and in the parking lot of a community center in the heart of a Boston neighborhood whose streets have absorbed the spilled blood of far too many young men.

This is why Mendes dances in the rain on one recent Tuesday night and no one tries to stop her. She shouts and yells and cries and waves her hands with abandon, as if possessed. The spectacle captures the attention of others in the parking lot. Even those who don't know her personally remember the grisly deaths of her beloved Bobby, then 23, and his brother Matthew, 24, killed in two separate incidents in 1995 and 2006.

So Mendes twirls and chants: "We're gonna continue to be strong. We're gonna continue to talk about peace. We have to be strong. I am strong. I feel I can forgive."

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The crowd stands silent, both horrified and encouraged by this caramel-colored woman whose clipped English is tinged with the Portuguese accent of her native Cape Verde, a tiny island nation off the western coast of Senegal in Africa. Her blow-dried hair is curling in the humidity, but she no longer cares. She has outlived two of her four children, seen one of her children's alleged murderers placed in jail without bail and, this chilly night, is literally screaming for change and closure.

This chapter of Mendes' ongoing story is about her search for the one thing continually eluding her: peace.

Mendes and the crowd are ending their two-hour "peace march" around two Boston neighborhoods, which seemingly attract the most media attention when someone of color gets killed. Many of the dead are her countrymen, fellow Cape Verdeans who long ago waded their tiny archipelago for the big cities of New England. Once here, Mendes says, they caught the "disease" of violence and began to fall prey to murder. Her Bobby was the first to die so painfully, she says, stabbed in the heart while stopping a fight. A teenaged Cape Verdean neighbor killed him, marking the beginning of a decade-long spree of retaliatory killings and a seemingly endless trail of blood in the city's hills.

Votive candles and a lighter get passed around as Mendes continues to dance. As the flames rise and white wax drips into the parking lot of the Freedom House, a pastor calls out.

"We have been through this nightmare for too long. Can I get a witness?" asks the Rev. Jeffrey Brown, co-founder of the Boston TenPoint Coalition, a group known nationwide for its anti-gang violence work. "You want a new Civil Rights Movement? You got one right now. Every child has a right to grow up in a violence-free community."

A young man standing beneath a streetlight mutters "Amen" under his breath. He waves a paper sign covered in shrink-wrap. It reads: "Murder hurts."

Dealing With Death

Weeks before his murder, Matthew Mendes somehow knew he would be the next to die. He was still mourning his brother and his mother feared he could get into trouble if he mouthed off to a beat cop and got taken into custody.

So it was a good thing when a nonprofit organization offered to send both Matthew and his mom to England to speak with at-risk youth about crime. It was April 2006 and finally, after getting on the airplane--the one place in the world where there likely would be no gang violence--Matthew's attitude lightened. As their plane took off, he turned to his mother and said: "Momma, we're on top of the world."

A week later, Matthew portended his own death. As he talked about the 150 or so people he knew--directly or indirectly--who had been murdered in Boston over the years, he answered questions about his own fears. "This is how it is in Boston," Matthew told the Birmingham, England, youth group: "If we don't stop, it'll be too late ... I might be next."

Two weeks later, on May 6, 2006, Matthew was dead at 24.

The day Matthew died, his mother had been visiting the parent of another murdered child. She did these visits frequently, whenever a life was lost on the streets. After the meeting, Mendes came home and curled up with her husband, Pompilio, who is also Cape Verdean and a quiet force in their relationship. Not even five minutes had passed when she and Pompilio heard someone knocking on the door of their green triple-decker home.

"They came and told me my son was shot," she says.

Following the wail of ambulance sirens, she ran outside and around the corner. She found her baby boy surrounded by police and a crowd of young people. His blood ran down the slightly inclined avenue. Someone in an unidentified car had shot him in the back as he ran for a doorway.

She tried to get to him, to push people aside, but the police held her back. She tried to get into the ambulance with him, but the authorities said no. Matthew possibly breathed his last breath as his mother watched him die.