The array of twenty or more police cars, some with their lights still turning, had my full attention as I approached a busy city intersection.

Then I saw the young man, shoulders hunched, his hands tucked between his knees as if asleep on the street, dead.

The fist-sized red blotch in the center of his white t-shirt, had the boy been walking, may have passed for designer art.

At the time I drove by there was no crime-scene tape to keep people away but there was no one near him. No one was checking on him, trying to tend to him or comfort him.

A curtain of horror silenced onlookers, people of all ages who lined the periphery of this scene.

His aloneness shook me as much as the knowledge that he was dead, gone, no more.

Minutes before he was surely running, and now, nothing: no breath, movement, dreams, company or future.

Nothing.

And I could not fathom the depth of pain and sorrow that would soon be his mother’s, father’s, brothers’ and sisters’ and all who loved and taught and coached him.

He’d fallen, face away from where I passed by and so I never saw his face.

Where he’d been struck, marked by the red splash between the shoulders of his slender frame, perfectly in the center of his back, is what I did see.

And, and continue to see, over and over again.

May all who loved and all who knew this young man (19 years old – I read in a news report on reaching home) find comfort and peace.

RIP, A. Ray K.

(NOT FOR THE MERCURY)