Grace-Filled Moments

ON A COOL, windy October evening, the family of 23-year-old Dominic Amey Jr. stands outside and waits. They’re waiting for someone to tell them how and why Amey, a father of three, was shot and killed behind the house a week before. So they pray and they wait. But there aren’t any answers—at least none that night.

Joe Zelenka, a 74-year-old Catholic, wishes he had answers, but instead he offers the family what he has: prayers for peace and healing.

Zelenka has done this many times (probably too many times, if you ask him) since he began coordinating the Church Federation of Greater Indianapolis’ prayer vigils for homicide victims—many killed by gun violence—nearly 11 years ago. At every vigil, standing at the scene of the crime, Zelenka reads scripture, offers a prayer, and then invites those present to pray aloud if they so choose.

“I think it’s important that we bring God’s presence where violence has occurred,” he said. The vigils pre-date Zelenka’s tenure with the Church Federation—he’s the fourth person to hold the position of vigil coordinator since January 1996, when the Church Federation began holding a prayer vigil at the site of every violent homicide in the greater Indianapolis area.

The federation’s goal is peace and reconciliation, and to that end Zelenka will hold another service—this time for the person who shot Amey. It’s important, the federation believes, to pray for both the offender and the offended. It can be demanding work, particularly in a city where homicides have dramatically increased in the last few years. But Zelenka said the work is worth it when he witnesses the faith and resilience of the victims’ families.

“The rewarding part is to realize that there are families who want to forgive the perpetrator,” he said. “Families will stand at this prayer vigil where their loved one was killed, and they will pray that the perpetrator may find God somewhere along the line.”

ANGELIQUE WALKER-SMITH remembers a time when the Church Federation could make it out to each new homicide site within 48 to 72 hours. But today, she said, that immediacy would be impossible.

“Now it’s just hundreds of families,” she said, “and because of the increased violence and perversions of how violence is being expressed, the federation has been doing the vigils when the families are ready.”

For 19 years, Walker-Smith was the executive director of the Church Federation of Greater Indianapolis, taking over right before the prayer vigils began. The vigils started in response to strained racial relations in Indianapolis 20 years ago, specifically the rioting that took place in July 1995 after a black man was beaten while in police custody. Walker-Smith said the demonstrations exposed racial and economic tensions that had long been bubbling underneath the city’s surface.

“The young people involved were concerned about their circumstances,” Walker-Smith said, noting that the protests took place in a central Indianapolis neighborhood where the black-white divide, not to mention the division of classes, was blatantly obvious. “There were a lot of concerns about increased violence, gangs, and the different things that you would find in impoverished communities.”

In the aftermath of the riots, the ecumenical Church Federation and the neighborhood churches that were a part of it decided to do more to address the needs of the young people, to bring the “cause of Christ to the streets,” as Walker-Smith puts it. As the faith leaders listened and realized that increased violence was indeed an issue, they committed to offer a healing presence at every site of violence.

And the prayer vigils were born.

For more than 100 years, the federation has sought to address the needs of the local community and to foster unity. Now, in addition to the prayer vigils, the group hosts forums to help residents better understand the city’s growing Latino community, provides mentors for incarcerated men, and offers grants to faith-based programs and organizations.

Today Walker-Smith is the associate for national engagement of African-American churches at Bread for the World in Washington, D.C., but she keeps abreast of the situation in Indianapolis. And to be honest, it would almost be difficult not to.

Criminal homicides are on the uptick in Indianapolis—so much so that the city’s violence has made national headlines. For instance, in February 2014 Indianapolis was in the news when seven people were shot to death within a span of eight hours. Five months later, Indianapolis made the national news again when, in a single weekend and within five miles of each other, a police officer was killed in a gunfight and seven people were fatally shot in a bar district.

For the past seven years, the homicide rate in Indianapolis has steadily increased, reaching an all-time high in 2013 with 153 homicides. In spring 2014, the rate of homicide in Indianapolis outpaced that of Chicago, a city recently given the dubious honor of “murder capital” of the U.S. by the FBI.

Most of the recent deaths have been gun-related and a number of them gang-related. The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department estimates that nearly 400 street gangs operate in the city; reciprocal gang activity was responsible for much of the record-breaking violence in 2013. Most of the victims have been young, black males. In fact, of the more than 1,120 homicides that have taken place in Indianapolis since 2006, 63 percent of the victims have been black and 82 percent of them have been male. About half of the victims were between the ages of 11 and 30 when they were killed.

THE VIOLENCE HAS become so pervasive that in spring 2014 Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard—a Republican elected, in part, on public safety—launched a citywide initiative to stem crime in black communities. In many ways mirroring President Obama’s “Brother’s Keeper” initiative, Ballard’s “Your Life Matters” program addresses crime by focusing on systemic issues such as poverty, education, and a penal system that often fails to adequately reorient formerly incarcerated people for re-entry into civilian life.

“The mayor believes we need to have a holistic approach to making our community safer,” Marc Lotter, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, told Sojourners. “The crime that many of our cities, including Indianapolis, are seeing in recent years is really a failure of society over the last 40 years to deal with many of the issues that lead to poverty, lack of education, lack of opportunity, and lack of hope for people in our communities, particularly young men of color.”

Ballard has committed $75,000 to parenting assistance, and Lotter said improving mentorship programs is also high on the mayor’s agenda.

“We can’t just talk about this as a police issue,” Lotter said. “If we never get at the underlying cause, it makes us susceptible to having these spikes [of crime]—these increases from time to time.”

Meanwhile, the Church Federation of Greater Indianapolis has continued with its prayer vigils, even as they become more and more frequent. Lotter said it would be impossible to pinpoint a single issue that has led to increased gun violence in Indianapolis, but Joe Zelenka disagrees.

“It’s too easy to get a gun anymore,” he said bluntly.

And he’s not the only one who thinks so.

Illinois journalists with WGN-TV recently went undercover to find out why more than 3,800 guns confiscated from Chicago gang members had been purchased in Indiana. What they found was a Hoosier gun culture that openly mocks attempts to regulate the sale of firearms, coupled with lax oversight and cheap prices. All this has made Indianapolis a hub for those seeking easy access to guns.

According to the WGN report, the dealers at an Indianapolis gun show joked with the undercover producer and photographer. “It’s so easy here,” one dealer bragged. “We deal with Illinois residents all the time, and we invite them to come to Indiana.”

In terms of gun laws, Indiana is one of only 13 states that require a permit or license in order for a handgun to be carried in plain sight. Only the District of Columbia and six states—California, Florida, Illinois, New York, South Carolina, and Texas—are more stringent, prohibiting open carry of handguns.

In 2011, however, Indiana passed a law allowing people to carry a handgun without a license under several conditions: if they are on their own property, at a shooting range for instruction, or during legal hunting. People are also allowed to carry a handgun, license-free, either on their person or in their vehicle, as long as the gun is unloaded and securely wrapped.

Additionally, in March 2014 the state legislature passed a law—lauded by the National Rifle Association—that allows adults to bring guns on school property, provided that the weapons remain locked inside of a vehicle.

Zelenka said he’s not sure how to fix the issue; he just knows that guns in Indianapolis are the issue. He estimates that at least half of the vigils he does are for gun-related deaths—it’s probably a low estimate given that, at the time of this writing, almost 83 percent of homicides in 2014 were shooting deaths.

Zelenka, a devout Catholic, said that the prayer vigils are his ministry, calling them a “grace-filled” moment. And he’ll keep doing the vigils as long as they are necessary.

“I really feel for the families that have lost a loved one,” he said. “I don’t know what else to say other than to convince them not to despair but to live with the hope that God is on their side.”