About her son, she has no denial. He is the failure she can't recover from. When the interview ended, she said: "Think of me sometimes."
In June, Vicky Lindsey, whose 19-year-old son was killed in 1995, helped organize a vigil for one of the more anonymous victims on the Homicide Report: Anthony Jenkins, 46, a black man killed by gunfire, whose relatives authorities were slow to locate.
The organizers came together for a man who was a stranger to them because they too feel unseen.
"It is as if we are buried with our children," said Lindsey, who has a sticker on her car that reads: "My son was murdered."
The vigil took place at dusk, at the place where Jenkins was shot. They lit candles and taped to a wall a printout of the Homicide Report chronicling Jenkins' death. Passersby watched, talking among themselves about murder, the police, the media.
"Ain't no one coming to help us 'cause they just say, 'They killin' each other,' " a man remarked.
A black man in a long brown Cadillac slowed down to look, then drove off. The group began to pray. A few minutes later the same Cadillac pulled up to the curb. The driver emerged, weeping. His 21-year-old son had been killed recently, he said.
"I went up the road and the tears just started and I couldn't keep going," he gasped.
Memorial messages stacked up on the blog's comments section. They were often written in the form of a letter to the deceased, sometimes in Spanish, once in Armenian.
"Every night I dream about the different ways I could have said, 'Please don't go,' " wrote one victim's sister. "Where did you go? Why did they take you? What did they do to you? Why? Why?"
The more the killings stacked up on the blog, the more absurd the old media criteria for selecting one homicide over another seemed. Thirteen-year-old boys nearly always made the headlines of The Times' print edition, but 14-year-olds were a tossup. Sixteen- and 17-year-olds were more likely to make the cut if they were girls.
In February, Joseph Watson, a 17-year-old black youth who was a running back on his high school football team, was slain in Athens. According to his parents and police, he had long fought to avoid being "jumped in" by his neighborhood gang.
His killing attracted no media attention, other than on the Homicide Report. Swept under the same rug was Timothy Johnson, a 37-year-old black man, nicknamed "Sinister." His death in Watts in November closed another homicide investigation in which he was the primary suspect.
