A bloody start to 2012: Looking to make sense of senseless violence

A 23-year-old Temple University graduate, hailing a cab after leaving a bar with friends, is beaten to death in Old City.

Three teenagers are killed as a man fires directly into a car in Juniata Park.

A hockey fan from New Jersey is pummeled until he lies unconscious outside Geno's cheesesteak restaurant in South Philadelphia.

What, if anything, do these events - all in the new year - say about war and peace in Philadelphia? Who, if anyone, can make sense of such utterly senseless violence? What scars, if any, do these fatal bullets and raging fists leave on the city's image?

Little. No one. And that depends.

We're off to a bad start, with 17 homicides in the first two weeks of 2012 - the bloodiest tally in the last five years over that span.

Over the long term, though, violent crime has steadily declined in Philadelphia since the 1990s. In Center City, murder, rape, and arson are down by more than 55 percent.

However reassuring those statistics may be to real estate brokers, business owners, and public officials, they are meaningless to the families of victims.

"It's hard to fathom that people value life so little," said Joe Neary, a 61-year-old Upper Chichester accountant whose son Kevin, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, was shot in the neck during an attempted robbery in Northern Liberties before Thanksgiving.

Kevin Neary was walking home Nov. 15 after a night out with friends when a would-be robber shot him, severing his spinal cord. The second of Neary's three boys, he is now paralyzed from the neck down, unable to breathe on his own.

Before the attack, Kevin Neary had been recruiting staff for health-care facilities and waiting tables at Jones and Union Trust, his father said.

"He loved living in the city. He loved the excitement of it, the vibrancy, the whole milieu of being here."

Kevin Neary and his family do not blame Philadelphia for the tragedy, his father said.

But like the other killings and beatings of the last few months, the attack had symbolic power.

For people who hate Philadelphia or big cities in general, every homicide provides more justification for their loathing. More evidence that this home to 1.5 million souls is a place to be feared, a territory ostensibly less civilized, less honorable, less industrious than the more righteous communities outside its borders.

As though evil does not set foot on the campus of Virginia Tech or Nickel Mines, Pa.

When the victim is white and professional and the attack occurs in a neighborhood with relatively little crime, it can provide grist for racial and social resentment, too, and can raise questions about why reports of the daily body counts of African Americans and Hispanics in depressed neighborhoods are relegated to the margins while killings in Center City receive front-page headlines.

City leaders respond the only way they can, addressing both the specific and the general.

"Each crime has a different set of facts," said Mark McDonald, spokesman for Mayor Nutter. "Some issues are more easily addressed by law enforcement or community police relations to build a stronger community."

On Monday, the Martin Luther King Jr. day of service, Nutter will hold a community rally at Bethel Temple Church on Allegheny Avenue in Kensington near the Juniata site where three teenagers were recently shot to death.

"The mayor will talk about how this kind of behavior and illegal guns rip the fabric of our neighborhoods, our sense of community," McDonald said. Nutter will also announce the expansion of a program to promote better communication and cooperation between neighbors and police.

"It won't make the terrible pain of what happened last week go away, but it is a substantial ray of hope."

In the court cases to come, details will emerge explaining how these awful crimes came to be. But in the end, to the victims and their families, perhaps even to the city, the specifics don't really resolve the big questions.

Whether the guys who threw the punches were drunk or were insulted by some inflammatory remark, whether the men who pulled the triggers were raised in hellholes and abused as children, whether the victims should have been more polite, or more wary, or gone home before midnight - none of it can make sense of the senseless violence.

Kevin Neary's father chooses to look at his tragedy in a larger perspective.

More than 80,000 people have gone on his website to extend good wishes and offer help.

The attack, he said, "is not an indictment of young people in general; so many of Kevin's friends are decent, warm wonderful people. And it's not an indictment of the city, either."