How Camden families deal with loss of homicides

Cary Soldevila was driving to a Walmart store to grab pineapples for the holiday ham and shrimp for the seafood salad - both her son's favorites - when she detoured onto Cove Road in Pennsauken.

It was about 10 a.m. Christmas Eve, and Soldevila wanted to see her son, Ernesto Torres.

It had been eight months since Torres, 22, had been shot to death in Camden during a fight over a girl, and this dreary morning - the start of the first Christmas without him - was especially hard on Soldevila.

She turned into Arlington Cemetery and Bethel Memorial Park, and headed toward her son's grave. A rain-soaked Christmas tree stood in front, displaying a picture of Torres tightly embracing his mother in their Camden kitchen. "In my heart forever," the ornament read, with an angel hugging the rims.

Soldevila, 44, unrolled a pink-and-white towel in front of the grave. Then she lay, for hours, at what she calls "the only place I feel peace."

"I asked for him to come in my dreams," she said, "and give me a hug."

Across Camden this new year, parents like Soldevila are grieving - preparing dinner for one less child, buying one less gift, delivering one more graveside prayer - as they look back at the toll from a previous year of homicides.

The death count, while it does not tell the full story of Camden, is still much a part of the city's history.

In 2014, 33 people were killed. The total, more typical of years past in Camden, is a reduction from the 59 last year and a record 67 in 2012, when the number of police officers was about two-thirds what it is now.

But the pain lingers. For one person who dies, dozens mourn.

Connect the dots across Camden, and you'll find similar stories of tragedy, loss, and coping - with mixed outcomes.

Evelyn Gomez remembers hearing the TV news story in October 2012, the words regurgitated so many times that year: "A young man was killed in Camden."

Gomez thought little of it until her phone rang later. That man, she learned, was her 30-year-old cousin, Lateaf Anderson. He had been shot at his girlfriend's apartment by an intruder, believed to be a jealous ex-lover.

Gomez hurried to her aunt's home, where her relatives were wailing. This was the first time, she said, they had grappled with a killing of one of their own.

"It was senseless to us," said Gomez, 50, of East Camden. "It was just over a girl."

The family buried Anderson, who left behind three daughters and a son, in Morgan Cemetery in Cinnaminson.

A month later, they lost another member of the bloodline.

Armando Carlo Jr., 32, also Gomez's cousin, was shot on a Camden street for reasons unknown.

The family, reeling from the first slaying, returned to the cemetery and buried Carlo next to Anderson.

Out of their deaths came a new tradition: leaving flowers and prayers at their graves on Christmas. Some family members, though, still find it too difficult to go.

"That pain never goes away," said Lisa Anderson, 50, Carlo's aunt and Anderson's mother. She cries in the shower so the grandchildren, ages 12, 10, and 3, who have begun to ask about their father, don't see her.

"A piece of my heart is missing," she said. "It's a big piece."

For authorities, quelling such pain can be difficult.

Frank Falco, the captain of the homicide unit at the Camden County Prosecutor's Office, keeps a whiteboard of slayings from the last eight years.

The cases - which encompass all of Camden County, not just Camden City - are identified in black marker by date, location, name, manner of death, and case number.

Camden's victims tell a familiar story.

They are often male - only two of the 33 people killed last year were female - and typically are shot. Sometimes, police find their bodies slumped in the driver's seat of cars, other times on the street or in apartments.

What each victim's family suffers is, as Falco simply describes it, "horrible, horrible, horrible."

The motives vary. Drugs play a big role. Fights over seemingly minuscule issues, such as money earned from a motorcycle sale, can also end in death, as one did last year.

But there are signs of hope. The number of homicides in two notoriously dangerous neighborhoods, Liberty Park and Whitman Park, dropped from 11 in 2013 to four last year. Each detective in Falco's unit is now handling about six cases a year, instead of the 10 to 11 juggled during the height of Camden's violence.

In the last year and a half, four large drug networks - which Falco estimates were responsible for a third of the city's violence - have been taken down by local and federal authorities.

"North Camden," Falco said, referring to another historically drug-troubled neighborhood, "has been as quiet as I've seen it in my 17 years."

The number of Camden police officers has reached 390, up from about 270 two years ago. The current officers, many of them in their 20's, are part of the County Metro force, which was created in May 2013 after the disbanding of the city police force. Chief Scott Thomson and his spokesman did not return requests for comment.

A few blocks from police headquarters on Federal Street last week, within the doors of a heated church, a tradition for Camden's homicide victims began to unfold.

At the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Sister Helen Cole lighted a long row of red candles, draping a paper below each with the name of a person killed in 2014.

Cole began the "Vigil for Peace" in 1995 to raise concerns about the city's violence. (She originally planned to march to the mayor's house at 4 a.m. and bang bells and sound whistles to awaken him to the problem.)

Inside the cathedral, victims' families and others - paramedics, teachers, and outsiders who have heard of Camden's struggles - come to pray.

Among some families, there is reluctance to show up, particularly for those who lost relatives involved in the drug trade, Cole said. To her, they should be accepted like any other.

"It doesn't matter how the death occurred or why the death occurred," Cole said. "The moms, the spouses, the kids, they're suffering."

On the morning of New Year's Eve, with several people praying in the pews, Cole silently gazed at a pamphlet, scanning the list of those who died.

She said: "It's still too many people."

For Soldevila, who has spoken publicly several times about her son's death in April, there are now just memories.

Like the time Torres ran outside in boxers and made a snow angel. Or the time he ran up the side of a wall and flipped onto a trampoline.

Soldevila particularly remembers the last Christmas that Torres was alive. The family does a dress theme each year, and in 2013, it was pajamas.

When Torres forgot to bring a pair to his aunt's home, she pulled out a Tinker Bell set. Torres, whom his mother describes as "the life of the party," gladly put them on.

Christmas this year featured fewer smiles. Torres wasn't there to enjoy the ham, and the family gathering, which drew 50 people when he was still alive, attracted fewer than a dozen. Soldevila says everyone is still coping.

"I can't understand how I'm forced to live, to start a whole new year without him," Soldevila said. "It's crazy."

So, each day before work as a cashier in Philadelphia, she drives to the cemetery. There, in front of the Christmas tree and grave, she talks to her son. She hopes that somewhere out there, he's listening.