By Bill Mckelway
Media General News Service

Hundreds of mourners heard testimonies and eulogies urging an end to violence among young people in Powhatan County yesterday as 19-year-old Rashad Jamel Brown was buried in a country churchyard.

“I lived the life. I know the life,” the Rev. Stevie Trent thundered in St. John Neumann Catholic Church, filled with more than 500 people, earlier in the day.

He warned young people to have the courage to walk away from bad influences and the thug life.

“If you want Shad’s memory to mean something, then from this day forward, do the right thing,” Trent said.

Trent said he was drawn to street life as a young man. Now 34 and pastor at a church in neighboring Cumberland County, he pleaded with young people yesterday to ward off the temptations of drugs, wrong-minded friends and violence.

Brown, a 2008 graduate of Powhatan High School, was the father of a year-old daughter and a classmate of shooting victim Tahliek Taliaferro, who was killed two years ago. Brown died last week of a stab wound to the chest as a fellow victim tried to drive him to safety.

Powhatan authorities have arrested Dennis Edward Merchant Jr., who turns 20 next week, on murder, drug and multiple malicious-wounding charges. Police say Merchant stabbed Rashad and wounded two others at a home on Bell Road, where generations of Brown’s family have lived.

Authorities have said gunshots also were fired but have declined comment on why Merchant was in the area alone or what provoked some sort of altercation with Brown and a group of his friends.

Yesterday, two of the wounded victims served as honorary pallbearers. And Lolita Bell, Brown’s mother, heard from a man who also lost a son to violence speak of the lingering pain and the need to turn to God.

Tommie Canty, whose son TJ was shot in the back of the head Dec. 25, 2007, in Newport News, became friends with Lolita Bell while working for the Virginia Lottery years ago.

“We took my son off life support the day after Christmas,” Canty said, standing with his wife, Ann, near Brown’s gravesite at Mount Zion Baptist Church yesterday. “Lolita came to his funeral; now I’m at Rashad’s.

“I can only hope the message is getting through.”

More than a dozen of Brown’s friends surrounded the soggy gravesite yesterday, watching Junior Childress and John Langhorn methodically dismantle the burial site trappings and fill Brown’s grave with wet, red clay soil.

They hugged and cried and whispered long after the front loader was silent and others had straggled back to the church.

Childress, 66, used to dig the graves by hand and helps the funeral home with grave work when he’s not driving trucks for Tyson Foods.

He said burying the young is the hardest part of the work.

Related Articles:
• One man dead in Powhatan, another is charged with second degree murder
• Pastor warns mourners at Powhatan funeral
• Fight started over $400