We are all to blame for death of Samore

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

I'm looking for someone to blame. If I can blame someone or something, then I can put the death of 13-year-old Samore Vassel out of my head and get on with the pretense that life is manageable, and we can keep the wolves from our doors.

Samore Vassel lived in Dorchester with his father and younger brother and sister. Last week he was in Brooklyn, visiting his mother, when he was shot and killed. The boy had told his mother he was going to a movie with a friend. But he and his buddy went off to meet a couple of girls instead.

There's nothing inherently dangerous in this. I used to tell my mother I was going to the library. Who hasn't fudged the truth a little, especially at 13? Who hasn't said they were going one place only to go to another?

The boys were with the two girls in an apartment in Crown Heights when someone - no one has been arrested yet - shot Samore in the head and his friend in the back. Samore died, his friend lived.

This is just a moment in the life of a big city.

The murder of a young black boy in Crown Heights is so tragically redundant, so routine, that the New York Post didn't even report it. The murder of a young black Boston boy is so common that it shared a page with another murder.

For Samore's father, however, the murder is anything but routine. He's wracked with grief at his son's death and he's blaming himself for what happened.

But it is not his fault. Patrick Vassel, a native of Jamaica, went to great lengths to protect his son, who was a good kid, who had never been in trouble, who wasn't allowed to be around trouble.

"If he went to a movie, I would drive him, and at 8 o'clock, no matter where he was, he should be home."

He even drove Samore to New York to protect him. "I don't allow him to take the bus. That's how careful I was."

All the way in the car, into the city, he talked to his son about the dangers in New York.

"When we got there I said, `Be careful now. This is New York, not Boston.' "

But how can people be careful of things they don't understand? If you don't have murder in your heart, how can you know the heart of a killer? If you don't feel hate, how can you know what hate inspires?

The fact is we all think we're safe, believe we're safe, until something happens that shows us we're not. Then we look for ways we could have remained safe. We look for someone or something to blame.

When the Central Park jogger was raped and brutally beaten a few years ago, almost everyone blamed the victim for being in Central Park in the first place. If she hadn't been there, it wouldn't have happened.

It's the same with everything - accidents, disease. We seek out all the specifics and then figure out ways in which the pattern doesn't fit us.

We couldn't make it through a day without this defense mechanism. We'd never leave our beds, let alone our houses, if we actually contemplated all the things over which we have no control.

But this disassociation has aided and abetted the epidemic of crime that has resulted in 13-year-old boys being shot to death on summer afternoons. It's like Valium. It gets us through the days, but it deludes and deceives.

Blame is our psychological salvation but it's killing us, picking us off one by one, because instead of being in this fight against violence together, we're separate, divided and worlds apart.

These are the sobering numbers we all need to look at and deal with if 13-year-olds are ever to be safe in this country - not gunned down, as if they were in some Third World country:

More than 2,200 murder victims in 1991 were under age 18. Between 1987 and 1991, the number of teens arrested for murder increased by 85 percent.

In 1991, 10- to 17-year-olds accounted for 17 percent of all violent crime arrests.

Who is to blame for Samore Vassel's death?

Not Samore and not his father.

His murderer is to blame, along with a society that's in denial, a society that produced Samore's murderer and thousands just like him, a society that is doomed unless it stops blaming and categorizing victims and starts blaming and punishing their attackers.