C

lifford Ryan hung his coat in the atrium of A. Dewitt Funeral & Cremation Services as he had dozens of times before.

Ryan was at the Feb. 1 funeral for Mya Killeen, 14, who was shot and killed the week before. He looked to the chapel’s entrance, where people signed a book for Killeen’s family. Two of his signs, which read “OG’s Against Violence,” stood in the foyer for mourners to see.

The recording of a violin played softly from overhead speakers. He took off his gloves.

“Man, I’ve been here way too many times,” he said quietly.

Killeen is the most recent victim in a string of youth homicides in Syracuse. Half of the 24 people killed in 2018 were under the age of 21, according to the Syracuse Police Department.

Politicians across the city are trying to find ways to curb the sudden increase in teen violence, and so are activists. After a chain of shootings in early July 2015, Ryan created OG’s Against Violence to stop violence before it happens. It’s what he dedicated his life to after his 17-year-old son, Duriel, was shot and killed in 1999.

Ryan walks the streets of Syracuse with his signs, trying to make change through a “hands-on approach,” he said. He looks for fights to break up. He gives presentations at schools. He’s stood in the middle of brewing riots, fights and shootings, using his sign as a final cry for peace. He has a slash on his neck from a knife wound, and he’s held up his sign to block a gunman’s aim, Ryan said.

He has learned to walk the thin line between law enforcer and community member. He wants to prevent violence, but he also wants to mentor violent kids. He hates the increase in the number of guns in his community, but he would never grab a gun from someone. He would rather change the actions of at-risk youth in the city than see them locked up.

“What (society’s) approach of dealing with that is ‘Wait till they do it, lock them up, throw away the key and let’s try to keep the other kids away from them,’” Ryan said. “Now that’s effective. But when they do that, the violence is still there … That individual is still there.”

After almost five years, “OG’s Against Violence” has become Ryan’s brand. His signs peek out from windows on his block of Bradford Street and throughout the city.

He doesn’t own a car, but he’s made navigating the city a science: He can get from the South Side to the Westside in 10 minutes. He can get from the Westside to the Northside in 20 minutes. He walks in freezing temperatures, and he walks on weekends.

But frequent visits to the funeral home take their toll on Ryan. After every shooting, Ryan goes to the spot where the bullets were fired and holds his sign as a symbol of solidarity. But he decided against it the day of Killeen’s funeral. This time he needed to unwind.

He removed his hat, walked to the chapel entrance and wrote his name in the book.

Ryan sat down in the living room of his Bradford Street home less than an hour after the funeral ended.

He once saw five young children playing “drive-by,” where they pretended to shoot bullets out of toy pistols. Ryan walked up to the kids, called them together and smashed their toys, before giving them $10 each. The issue wasn’t that they were playing, he said. It was what they were playing with.

In 2017, a nine-year-old boy accidentally shot and killed his younger brother with their father’s gun, Ryan said. Loindale Johnson and James Springer III were 15 and 12, respectively, when they were shot and killed in 2018. In October, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) sent state troopers to Syracuse to help stop the gun violence.

Sitting on his couch, Ryan posed a question: “Where are all of these guns coming from?”

Hasan Stephens, founder and CEO of the Good Life Youth Foundation, said many children in Syracuse search for three things: self-esteem, identity and money. They often see guns as an avenue to achieve a sense of maturity and identity.

“It suddenly gives them a sense of power in a city that makes them feel powerless,” he said.

Stephens aims to teach children financial literacy and life skills through hip-hop, which he said helps teens find their own identity. Without this outlet, many children turn to violence, he said.

Lepa Jones, president of Mothers Against Gun Violence, an anti-gun activist group in Syracuse, said she is still trying to find the reason for the increased violence.

She said the city’s youth are in a “spiritual war” right now.  Many kids are dealing with so much death around them that they have to protect themselves before they get hurt, she added.

While sitting on his couch, Ryan mulled the circumstances of Killeen’s death. A 14-year-old girl was shot. A 13-year-old boy is suspected to be the shooter.

“That’s why you see me out here doing this. This is why you see me walking in the cold,” he said. “Why do you think I set them signs up at that funeral? (Because) they know what it represents.”

In mid-January, city residents gathered at the Southwest Community Center for a “State of Our Community” meeting. Six panelists spoke about different ways to reach out to the city’s youth.

Ryan stood up from his seat in the back of the room.

“After this meeting is over, if there’s something you have that I can get involved with as far as the community is concerned, please give me your information,” he told the audience. “I’m going inside the schools, I’m going inside the youth centers, in support of every single program here in the city. I’m reaching out to the little children in the street.”

Ryan had vowed to see the fight until the end, but lately he wonders when that end might be. Money was tight. He needed work. He lobbied other organizations and local politicians to offer him funding or work in the field, and at times he felt that he was on the cusp of sustainability. But still, he was unemployed. And time was running out.

Coran Klaver, an english professor at Syracuse University, started to write grant proposals for Ryan. The two met when Klaver asked Ryan to join her ACTS Community Violence and Youth Task Force last year.

She has helped create a board of directors for OG’s Against Violence, and she is working to make it a 501(c)(3) organization.

For now, OG’s Against Violence is sustainable, she said, but only as long as Ryan is healthy enough to keep walking. She does not want him to change his mission, so she works behind the scenes to handle the business side of OG’s Against Violence.

It was the first time that people sat down and made a team with Ryan, Klaver said. The organization can be sustainable now that there are more people supporting his mission, she added.

“We (are) almost there. It’s taken a lot of sacrifice, but when you’re doing something like this, it takes that sacrifice,” Ryan said. “There isn’t a program out there that didn’t start from the bottom and sacrifice what I’m sacrificing right here. So I understand the process.”