ThreeSixty -

Part 1: A grieving mother finds forgiveness

BY KATIE MERLE

Mary Johnson didn’t know the man she was going to visit. Three years earlier, he refused to meet her. But now that she had the chance, Johnson said she had to take it.

“We walked up through the parking ramp and about halfway up the ramp I got there and I just broke down,” Johnson said. “I said ‘God, I cannot do this, I’m just not ready.’ ”

But Johnson’s friend calmly pushed her up the ramp and into the doors of Stillwater prison.

“[She] knew that I wasn’t doing this just for myself,” Johnson said, “but that I was doing this for other mothers of murdered children and I was doing this for other mothers of offenders that have murdered.”

Johnson is the founder of the Two Mothers: From Death to Life Healing Group. Her only son was shot and killed 12 years ago. He was twenty-years-old; the man who killed him was 16. Johnson could not believe that her son had died until she was at his wake.

“I tell you reality just slapped me in the face,” Johnson said. “I knew that that was my son. That it was over, and I’d never see him again.”

A reduction from a first-degree murder conviction to second-degree murder left Johnson disappointed in the justice system. Her son’s murderer was given twenty-four and a half years in prison instead of a possible life sentence.

Struggling with the grief, Johnson said that nine years went by before she began to see the importance of forgiveness. She soon founded Two Mothers and began to advocate that the mothers of murder victims and the mothers of offenders come together and grieve together.

“Forgiveness isn’t for the other person [who did wrong]. Forgiveness is for you,” she said.

After starting Two Mothers, Johnson said she began to understand that for her to truly forgive, she needed to visit her son’s killer. At Stillwater prison, Johnson found a man who was sorry for his crime.

She remembers him saying: “If I could have communicated that night none of this would have happened.”

He was referring to her son’s death.

At the end of their conversation, Johnson said she walked over to her son’s killer and he asked permission to hug her.

“At that point all my animosity and hatred for the young man was gone,” she said.

Since their meeting, Johnson has spoken to the inmates at multiple prisons and plans to speak jointly with her son’s offender when he is released from prison.

“He’s got three years left…Now I understand why he couldn’t have gotten life in prison. God has a plan for everything, and there’s a reason for everything,” Johnson said.

Part 2: Youth minister urges teens to seek help, not revenge

BY PATIENCE ZALANGA

Every funeral Shiloh Temple hosts for a young person at the North Minneapolis church makes Pastor Broderick Austin feel like he just lost his own child.

“I felt just terrible,” the youth pastor said. “It almost felt like it was one of my own [children], and that’s the feeling that I hate about it…Thank goodness I [personally] haven’t had the opportunity to do [funerals] for teens.”

In his efforts to fight youth violence, Austin participates in Shiloh’s effort to mediate with gang leaders.

“We’ve even taken it a step further and even tried to get to know some of the actual gang leaders in our community. So we’ve had a couple of meetings with figureheads of the different gangs in the north side to try to come up with some peaceful solutions.“

Austin’s approach to violent youth is to take their violence as a cry for help.

“There’s things that’s going on at home that they don’t understand so they act out in a negative way,” he said.

Austin believes the youth just need to understand that there are people who care about them, and when they feel frustrated they should look for help in more than one place. If they don’t speak up, Austin said, then no one will ever know they need assistance.

“A lot of times we give ourselves excuses saying there’s nobody here to help,” he said. “But at the same time there’s organizations out there waiting for you. All you have to do is say ‘Help.’ You know, I don’t know if you need help unless you say ‘Help.’ ”

Youth however, are not the only ones who need help, said Austin. He believes that parents also need to reconnect with their children.

“I think if parents and teens kinda get together, get on the same page and figure out where exactly the disconnect is, we can then go from that point and figure out what are some of the issues that lead to the violence.”

Just as parents need to reconnect with their teens, Austin said, the community needs to reunite itself in order to combat youth violence.

“Let everybody do it together,” he said. “Let’s make this conscious move together.”

Part 3: Keeping small meanness from getting larger

BY GLORIA WILLIAMS

Vanessa Schulte gets so excited when she talks about her work that her voice gets loud and her hands move to demonstrate what she’s saying.

“A lot of people think, ‘Sarah hits me first; I hit them back’ — that’s self-defense,” Schulte said. “They don’t realize the consequences.”

Schulte, the community justice program coordinator at the non-profit Youth Service Bureau Inc. in Woodbury, holds classes for youths 18 and younger who have been caught smoking, drinking, or for theft, disorderly conduct and other minor offenses.

Her job is to make sure that the small offenses – as small as cursing someone on MySpace, a social networking Web site – don’t get any bigger.

“Violence is anything that hurts somebody,” Schulte said. “So when you think of violence you think of murder and rape and suicide and terrorism and punching and kicking and stabbing. But you don’t think about an attitude … You don’t think about rolling your eyes.”

To make offenders understand the impact their actions have on others, Schulte organizes meetings between the offenders and their victims. Her most memorable meeting happened after six girls vandalized another girl’s home by spray painting curse words on the garage, dumping wood chips in her yard and stringing toilet paper in the trees and yard, otherwise known as “teepeeing.”

Schulte organized a meeting between the six girls and the victim’s family, as well as a set of neighbors – whose young children asked their parents what the swear words meant after seeing them on the garage – and other residents of the neighborhood, about 30 people in all.

Weeks after the meeting, all seven girls are now friends and plan on starting a student group for high school girls to help junior high girls be positive role models.

“It was really neat to see how they kind of came together,” Schulte said. “This is an eye-opener.”

Sarah Fuerst, a therapist at the Youth Services Bureau, interacts with youth on a more individual basis. Fuerst usually meets with them in 50-minute therapy sessions ranging from once a week to once every three weeks. She receives referrals for children with anger management problems or disorderly conduct, mostly during the winter.

“Sometimes young people fight and nobody calls the police, nobody knows about it,” Schulte said. However, when kids are at school, “there’s more people; it’s easier to have conflict,” and it’s easier to get caught.

Fuerst said that the higher stress level experienced by students in the winter might be another reason for increased youth violence.

Recently, Fuerst became involved with students at a Woodbury elementary school where a group of fourth grade girls were being “nasty to each other,” she said.

After providing a group therapy session, Fuerst received positive feedback from parents who want her to do the session a second time.

Just as Schulte teaches classes and helps offenders understand the effects of their actions, Fuerst confronts youth individually and helps them understand how to deal with their struggles.

Both Schulte and Fuerst agree that education is the best way to prevent youth violence by “educating [kids] on what they’re doing is wrong; [teaching them] they are hurting each other, and providing services for the kids, letting them know that … there’s things out there that they can learn from.”