A Creative Teenager Mourned, Celebrated

"It has calmed down, but it's still out there," Iraheta said.

Ventura seemed almost prescient in his writings. In "Moving Out," he wrote about a family that is trying to leave a neighborhood beset by gunfire and other violence. Although he set the play in the Bronx, Patrick Torres, Ventura's playwriting teacher, said the teenager was really writing about his own experience.

Just hours before he was killed, Ventura and his family had visited a house they planned to buy in the Maryland suburbs. Members of the family thought the neighborhood was safer than the 1400 block of Harvard Street NW, where they live, and the larger space would allow Ventura to live with his 4-month-old baby and her mother.

In the play, the children are afraid to spend time outside their apartment because of random violence. The parents, Joe and Jenny, take on extra work to save money to buy a house in Florida.

In one scene, Jenny asks her husband: "Do you think we are going to get out of this neighborhood before something worse happens?"

They don't. But Joe survives being shot by a masked gunman in a robbery. By the end of the play, the family is looking forward to sunny Florida and a trip to Disney World.

Ventura was shot by masked gunmen, witnesses told police.

Police have not made an arrest in the slaying, Graham said.