Faith Group Stands Vigil At Milwaukee Homicide Sites

In Milwaukee, a faith group has started another year of holding prayer vigils at the site of homicides.

In a low-income neighborhood on North 1st Street in Milwaukee, five people gather to pray. One of them is Joyce Ellwanger, who prays: “Pray that we in our witness can continue to say: this is unjust and unacceptable to us and and to You.”

The group gathered outside the home of Precise Martin, a 17-year-old who was shot to death last week while he and a 21-year-old friend were playing with a gun. This prayer vigil and a later one on the Milwaukee’s near west side also remembered three other recent shooting victims.

Sister Rose Stietz helped launch the prayer vigils about 15 years ago, as part of the group Milwaukee Inner City Congregations Allied For Hope. This morning, Stietz prayed for an end to gun violence, noting the sizable resources recently devoted to finding a stolen Stradivarius violin.

“God, as we look at all the energy that went into finding a $6 million violin, we know that we could do more to end the violence if we really put our minds to it,” she prayed, “so make us of a heart and mind to do that.”

Father David Preuss is pastor of the nearby Catholic church, St. Martin de Porres. He’s been attending the vigils for five years, he says, to help hold all lives as important.

“If we come to the point where we just throw lives away,” he said, “we have lost something of our soul.”

The number of gun homicides in Milwaukee is down this year, compared to last year at this time, but Father Preuss expects to be attending more prayer vigils, anticipating shootings will continue in the city.