Denver Councilman Albus Brooks’ plea Tuesday evening in George Morrison Park was as purposeful as it was plaintive.
“Get off social media,” he pleaded. “Be in this community. Be with your neighbor — that’s what’s real.”
In front of a crowd of several hundred residents and community leaders, the councilman condemned the toxic energy that he says has been building recently on Facebook and Nextdoor as a swath of northeast Denver grapples with the horror of two men gunned down in the Cole neighborhood this month.
He pleaded with his neighbors not to “point fingers” at one another on social media but instead to come together because “we need to be healed.”
“You have been going through a lot these last few weeks,” Brooks told the crowd, which included Police Chief Robert White and safety manager Stephanie O’Malley. “We will not allow violence to hold us hostage in this neighborhood and in this community.”
Then, grabbing a megaphone and chanting “Peace” to the rhythm of feet pounding asphalt, Brooks led the throng down Gilpin Street, from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to Bruce Randolph Avenue, where the crowd gathered in a circle.
Along the way, the group stopped to place a pot of flowers on the spot where Nolan Ware, 22, was shot dead outside Denver Gospel Hall on Saturday.
The young father, nicknamed Crazy Eight, , 61-year-old Abdul Rahim Muhammad, who had been killed two weeks earlier in his yard less than two blocks away.
Police while some community leaders think Muhammad’s death involved gang violence as well.
A rash of gang-related murders and assaults is .
There have been 17 homicides in the city in 2015. That is twice as many homicides as at this point last year.
Mayor Michael Hancock on Monday pledged that “as a city, we are not going to stand for it and we are going to throw every resource at this problem.”
“These gangs cannot continue to tear up our neighborhood,” Tina Ware, Nolan Ware’s aunt, said Tuesday. “We’re tired of the gunshots. We’re tired of what’s going on in this community.”
She pleaded against acts of retribution for the deaths of Ware and Muhammad.
She said the cycle of violence has to stop at some point.
“You don’t want to stand here and feel this,” Tina Ware said. “Let it go. Enough is enough.”
She then led the gathering in a prayer.
“He didn’t deserve to die the way he did,” she said of her nephew. “He was somebody.”
Nolan Ware was the father of a 2-year-old and a newborn, according to a family member.
He had run into trouble with the law when he was younger and still was on parole in a community corrections program.
Several people during the gathering Tuesday evening, including Nolan Ware’s mother, Tonia White, wore blue T-shirts displaying his picture and spelling out the grim parameters of a young man’s life cut short:
“1993-2015.”
John Aguilar: 303-954-1695, jaguilar@denverpost.com or twitter.com/abuvthefold
