A Lonely Stand Against the Streets

Social worker Ann Brogioli talks with youngsters at a vigil for DeOnt¿ Rawlings, 14, who was shot by a police officer. She had tried to get DeOnt¿ off the streets. (By Courtland Milloy -- The Washington Post)

When Ann Brogioli showed up in the Washington Highlands for a candlelight vigil not long ago, teenagers ran to greet her with unabashed affection. Neither D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty nor D.C. Council member Marion Barry, who represents the Southeast neighborhood, was received as warmly when each arrived.

"Miss Bo-jolly," a boy called out, clearly relishing the mispronounced sound of her Italian name. He was standing with a group of stone-faced youths in the courtyard of the public housing complex where 14-year-old DeOnté Rawlings had been shot and killed by an off-duty D.C. police officer.

At the sight of Brogioli, the boy smiled and came over to give her a hug.

"You doing okay?" she asked.

"I'm still alive," he answered.

So far, so good.

For many black youths in the District, where violence is rampant -- where 11 people were shot over the weekend, including a 15-year-old boy who died -- doing okay can mean just staying alive. Brogioli knows the dangers. As a social worker at Hart Middle School, downhill from the Highlands, she has attended the funerals of 12 slain students during the past nine years, including DeOnté's on Saturday.

"The odds are stacked against so many of them," she said, surveying the homes whose occupants she knows so intimately. Many of her nights and weekends are spent with some of the city's poorest residents, seeking medical and financial help for them, trying to coax their children off the streets and back to school, and grieving with them when the streets win out.

Of roughly 560 students at Hart, Brogioli estimates that 150 are in need of "intensive social services." Try as she might, she can't help them all.

"A few weeks ago, I came to school and found DeOnté waiting in my office," recalled Brogioli, 39. "He had been missing for a month. The police believed that he had witnessed a murder and wanted to question him. But DeOnté was nowhere to be found. Then he just shows up in my office. He said he was tired of being on the streets and wanted to get back in school. It was one of those rare moments where you have to act quickly."

Brogioli made arrangements for DeOnté to attend a summer education program. But the moment passed before the boy could enroll. He returned to the streets and was killed soon after in what police say was a gunfight over a minibike that had been stolen from the home of a police officer.

DeOnté's friends sought out Brogioli for consolation. One of the school's more promising students had responded to the boy's death by declaring: "I'm not going to be killed; I'm going to be the killer." Brogioli cried for days.