But the grief still overwhelms
/The Boston Herald
Nestor "Tito" Herrera should be outside playing in the snow today, trudging through it on his way to school, making snowballs, laughing with friends, his cheeks rosy, his smile bright, his tiny corner of the world a fine place for an 11-year-old boy to be. Instead Tito Herrera is dead, his small body in a coffin on its way back to Puerto Rico, stabbed by another 11-year-old at a movie theater Saturday after a matinee.
If Tito Herrera were 15 and not 11, or big for his age; if he had facial hair, a nose ring, a tattoo, even a scowl, this murder in Springfield would not have made the front page of the Boston papers. It would have been just another sad but not so unpredictable stabbing.
We live in violent times. But Tito was more baby than boy, just a fifth-grader, his school picture the picture of all our children - sweet smile, bright eyes, innocence. Saturday was his first time at a movie theater alone with friends, without an adult. He phoned his mother when the movie was over to tell her not to worry, that he'd be right home. This was a good and blameless boy.
So despite Dunblane and Columbine and the constant random violence that numbs us more every day - How can we grieve at every death? - we grieved at this one.
Grief counselors are working with the children at Tito's school. Grief counselors are now a staple of the America school experience. What will they say? What words are there to explain the inexplicable? "Mostly, they'll listen," says my friend Anne, who is a grief counselor. "These kids are feeling sad and scared and angry. Counselors will listen and try to normalize these feelings."
Normalize.
The 11-year-old, who allegedly took a knife to a movie, then plunged it into Tito Herrera's heart, according to the Department of Social Services, lived in an unstable home and was a frequent witness to domestic violence. "We know that this abuse impacts everyone in a family - mothers and children alike," said Carol Yelverton, spokesperson of the Department of Social Services. The pity moves to perpetrator, the boy with the knife. "Right now he's a very scared little boy who seems overwhelmed," his defense attorney said. Has this very scared little boy seen so much violence that violence is what's normal for him? This unnamed assailant will be tried as a juvenile. This is where the news jumps, to the punishment, because no one can understand the crime.
The alleged assailant, if convicted, will be held by the Department of Youth Services until his 18th birthday. But with further court proceedings he could be held until he is 21. As if punishment is an equalizer. As if jailing for a certain number of days and years, the faceless, nameless boy who committed an act that can never be undone, wipes the slate clean.
This is an eye for an eye dumbed down, the way we have dumbed downed everything. Guilt light. Who is responsible for the death of 29-year-old Carolina Herrera's first-born? She had him when she was 18. She loved him, nurtured him, watched and protected him. Nine months ago she brought him and his three siblings to this country to give them a better life. Now he is dead and we all ask why.
Society killed him. That's the catch-all answer. Our society breeds violence. TV is violent. Movies are violent. Songs are violent. All true. But it wasn't society that carried a knife into the Regal Springfield Plaza Cinema last Saturday. It was an 11-year-old raised in a violent home. Kicked out of one school and sent to another, under the care of DSS, a kid with problems, he wasn't born this way. He was made this way.
One boy calls his mother at the end of a movie, another takes a knife and plunges it into a human heart. There is talk about how this tragedy began, about a conflict between the two boys. But what happened in that movie theater didn't begin there. It began years ago, and it began in the perpetrator's home. A 29-year-old mother who has already buried a husband, is now burying a child. Nestor Tito Herrera, a fifth-grader who loved video games, just 11 years old.
