As fear spreads, Fort Worth residents unite for another vigil to ‘honor the lives lost’
For the second consecutive day, Fort Worth residents gathered at a vigil in the week after two mass killings, including one in El Paso in which 22 people were shot to death.
The event Wednesday night in Unity Park, northeast of McCart Avenue and West Seminary Drive, featured live mariachi music, prayer and references to fear among Hispanic residents that they would become targets in similar violence. About 150 people stood in a circle and, as the sky became dark, lit candles.
Rabbi Brian Zimmerman of the Beth-El Congregation in Fort Worth referred in his remarks to another vigil, led by Mayor Betsy Price on Tuesday.
At that event, outside Fort Worth City Hall, the mayor said, “we’re here to celebrate our humanity as one group, to mourn and to honor those who were taken from us too soon.”
“I would suggest that we are not there yet,” Zimmerman said Wednesday. “How can we celebrate lives that were cut down too soon?”
The Unity Park vigil was intended to “honor the lives lost and will reflect the families that are directly harmed by white supremacy,” its organizers said. It was, according to United Fort Worth, a cross-cultural alliance group, “an opportunity for real healing.”
An Allen man is accused of opening fire inside an El Paso Walmart on Saturday, killing 22 people and wounding 25. Hours later, nine people were slain in Dayton, Ohio.
Law enforcement authorities were examining an anti-immigrant screed posted online shortly beforehand and hoped to determine whether it was written by Patrick Crusius, the man arrested in the killings.
The Rev. Wil Gafney, an associate professor at TCU’s Brite Divinity School, said she was buoyed by the diversity, in age, race and perhaps in other ways, of the people who had joined the vigil.
Gafney said she had come “to stand in solidarity with the Latinx community and mourn the loss of life,” she said.
This story was originally published August 7, 2019 at 9:30 PM with the headline "As fear spreads, Fort Worth residents unite for another vigil to ‘honor the lives lost’."