Elmer Smith: Shining a spotlight on cold cases, and the loved ones affected by them

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RAQUEEN MACK was a block from home when he was ambushed.

The unseen gunman or gunmen ran him down, firing a fusillade of bullets until the mortally wounded Mack fell between two driveways at 56th and Diamond streets in the Overbrook section of West Philadelphia.

He stumbled along residential blocks, past dozens of windows and doors, on a sunny, Saturday afternoon. But nobody saw it happen. At least, nobody has come forward to say what they saw or heard that day. After almost seven years, it's just another of those cold-case files that get tossed on the stack of unsolved homicides every year in this city.

But it's much more than that for Vernadean Mack.

"Nothing is ever going to bring my son back," she told me yesterday.

"But I'm like every other mother who has experienced this pain. We want someone to be held accountable for what happened to our loved ones.

"Somebody knows what happened. It was a beautiful sunny day. Somebody had to see something".

Paul Smith and Grady Jones are counting on it. The independent filmmakers set up shop at the crime scene yesterday. They retraced Raqueen Mack's last stumbling steps for a segment of their cable-access show called "Unsolved Philadelphia."

The show, which airs Wednesdays at 6:30 p.m. and Saturdays at 7 p.m. on Comcast channels 66 and 696 and on Verizon channels 29 and 30, encourages witnesses to come forward with leads the police can follow.

Smith and Jones have been taping segments since last fall. They finally started getting them on air the first of the year.

"We didn't set out to do this," said Smith, who hosts the show produced by Jones' independent production company, Life Media Studios.

"We were shooting a documentary called 'Philadelphia, A City in Mourning' back in 2006. There were 406 homicides that year, and the prevailing theme was that nobody saw anything.

"We saw a disconnect between communities and law enforcement with all this 'don't snitch' nonsense that was going on at the time."

So far, it's a labor of love. They haven't raised much money to support their efforts, and they haven't solved any crimes yet.

"But we have got some credible leads on a couple of cases," Smith said. "The police are running them down. All we do is turn them over to police."

That's not all they do. What they do best is to provide a forum in which survivors can memorialize their loved ones and vent their frustrations.

"It seemed like the [survivors] just wanted someone to listen to them," said Jones. "Then I came up with the idea of maybe shedding some light on their cases."

Gretjen Clausing, executive director of PhillyCAM, the city's cable-access network, singled the show out for its Impact Award.

"What Grady's doing is a perfect example of what public-access TV should be doing," she said.

"This is not another 'America's Most Wanted' show. They go to memorial services and give the families a chance to grieve their losses."

I watched a recent episode featuring the family of Liliana Acevedo, who was killed by a hit-and-run driver last year. Smith does a stand-up next to a makeshift memorial near the scene of the accident. But the most affecting segment of the show was the tearful reminiscences of three family members who shared their thoughts about Acevedo.

Smith and Jones hope to reach out to a larger audience and share more of that human drama by moving their operation to a larger station. Some wounds will be salved and some stories told.

And, in the process of bringing a community together around this shared grief, some crimes may be solved.

Send email to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: www.philly.com/ElmerSmith