Vigil

A candlelight vigil for a slain Northern High School student drew dozens of people yesterday, including a star from the television show "Homicide," to seek support for a planned children's memorial museum.Friends and relatives of Wayne Martin Rabb Jr. -- some wearing T-shirts bearing his likeness -- cradled the candle flames against a bitter wind at Belair Road and Frankford Avenue, near where the youth was killed Feb. 6.Lola Willis, an organizer, appealed to the public and politicians to help raise funds for the project dedicated to remembering young victims of violence.

The effectiveness of Rev. Willie Ray's bullhorn may have been diluted across the wide parking lot of the Walbrook Shopping Center in West Baltimore, but his message was clear."

They called it a vigil, but it was more like stoop-sitting -- a group of Catonsville residents hanging out on the steps of the former Catonsville Middle School on a sunny Saturday, talking about what's on their minds.And that, they said, is what made it a vigil. The half-dozen people on the scene yesterday were telling politicians and county school officials that they want the 70-year-old building on Bloomsbury Avenue renovated rather than razed.About 75 people turned out for the vigil's candlelight start Friday night, many of them new to the cause, organizers said.

The family and friends of the 14-year-old Anne Arundel County boy who was killed in a conflict with at least two other neighborhood boys implored a crowd of nearly 1,000 people gathered Monday night at a candlelight vigil not to retaliate. "I want to encourage you tonight to make a choice to give up the violence ... not retaliate, to forgive," Pastor Dennis Gray, of the Riva Trace Baptist Church, told the crowd, many of them teens, gathered at the spot where Christopher D. Jones was fatally injured Saturday in his Crofton neighborhood.

The men and women formed a large circle inside the rotunda of the State House. Some bowed their heads, jammed their eyes shut and murmured. Others cast their gazes upward and spoke out loud. Larry P. Smith strode across the center of the circle, palms upturned, and back again. "Thank you Jesus," said Smith, pastor of Grace of God Fellowship Christian Center in Millersville. "We worship you. ... The aroma of your presence is in this house. ... Wise decisions here. ... Godly decisions being made for us in this house."

On the first anniversary of Darien Ward's killing, about 25 people holding candles and carrying signs that said "Thou shalt not kill" lined up on a chilly street corner to remember him last night. His parents were there. So were a few friends, a group of Quakers crusading against guns and the murder of children, and a Baltimore science teacher who has grown tired of losing his students to violence. "Five kids I taught were killed in 1999," said biology teacher Warren Wiggins. Darien Ward, 15, was the first of his students killed.

On the eve of President Bush's deadline for diplomacy over war, hundreds of people encircled Baltimore's Washington Monument last night, clutching candles and holding signs declaring, "No Iraq War" and "War Is Not The Answer" - a small action that was part of a worldwide vigil for peace. Collectively called Global Vigil for Peace, the vigil was one of more than 2,500 candlelight gatherings, beginning in New Zealand, that crossed the planet in protest of the anticipated U.S.-led war with Iraq.

Outside a stately church on the Park Heights block where 16-year-old Melvin "Dude" Williams was fatally shot this month, more than 200 people gathered last night calling for an end to the violence and drug dealing that rules the Northwest Baltimore neighborhood. The hourlong vigil, called in the wake of a double shooting Jan. 4 that left Williams dead and another teen-ager badly wounded, was held outside Good Shepherd Baptist Church on Park Heights Avenue and featured several speakers.

Jessie Snead stepped off the city bus on Reisterstown Road in West Baltimore and noticed a familiar baby face on the opposite sidewalk, the teen-age boy she saw too often hanging out in the neighborhood. "I saw him and I said, `Hey, boy, go to school,'" said Snead, a community activist. " ... I see these boys out here enough to talk to them and tell them to do something better, like telling them to go to school." The next day, Jan. 4, outside Good Shepherd Baptist Church in Park Heights, 16-year-old Melvin Columbus Williams IV was gunned down.

A spate of 14 killings in 11 days in Baltimore has alarmed church and community leaders and prompted them to call for calm and prayer. In response to the eruption of violence between March 15 and Monday, a candlelight vigil is planned for tonight on Edgecombe Circle in Northwest Baltimore, near where Lisa Renee Brown and Oliver L. McCaffity Jr. were found shot to death in a car Feb. 28. The Rev. Willie Ray, chairman and founder of Save Another Youth...