The smell of grilled hot dogs spreads a semi-festive mood over this gathering in front of a small house on Condor Avenue, near Michael Way and Smoke Ranch. De’Arney Austin lived here. The Brinley Middle School eighth-grader died not too far from here, gunned down at 1 a.m. on November 1 as he returned from a Halloween party.
As it’s done often in the last year, when bullets end lives in West Las Vegas, Metro’s Safe Village team sprung into action. A reactive strike force of community leaders, preachers, cops, gang-intervention specialists and concerned citizens, the team hosts a combination memorial service/outreach where the violence occurred. Backers of the initiative say it’s led to a reduction in crimes. But the ultimate goal is to empower neighborhoods, prevent violence, bring criminals to justice and render their service obsolete. That means getting people to come forward, they say. The streets talk. Someone knows the killer. Silence is complicity.
A makeshift stage fronts the curb in front of Austin’s home. Generator-powered lights illuminate the off-white one-story, highlighting a tree festooned with football jerseys and four chairs placed in the grassless front yard, on which members of Austin’s family sit on a recent Friday evening, watching as friends and strangers say kind words about him.
Onstage, Austin’s 15-year-old brother Chris Falinko delivers a eulogy about how his brother is in a better place and looking down on us, about the depth of a younger brother’s loss and intensity of a grieving mother’s pain, about the mythological invincibility of youth, about being honest with your parents (“If you’re in a gang, tell them”). He seems more interested in the celebrity of his brother’s legacy than in finding the killer(s).
The night stretches on. A Christian rapper drops redemptive rhymes and talks about how God saved a wretch like him. Young boys toss a football in a street as police, their squad blocking vehicular traffic on Condor, watch. When the food is ready, a slew of young people make a beeline for it. Austin’s mom, Jasinta, puts on a game face for the cameras. She misses her son. Please, someone, anyone, help find who did this. Time will tell if her plea, reinforced on this night by a village of caring strangers, is answered.