Lives “Interrupted” Find Space To Heal

By Lucy Gellman, The Arts Paper

The stories filled the room one by one, thick and heavy in the air. Two sons, stolen long before
their time in two separate acts of gun violence. A young woman killed in her mother’s driveway
by a weapon of war. An adult who withstood childhood sexual abuse to protect her siblings. A
detective whose quick assumptions about a victim stayed with him—and are now changing
policing in Hamden.
All of them were interruptions. All of them led to the same room on Edgewood Avenue, where
dozens gathered with the hope of healing. By the end of a single afternoon, all of them had
opened the door to new ways to talk about trauma.
Those stories came to Westville last Friday, as Interruptions: Disrupting The Silence author,
podcaster, playwright and educator Rev. Odell Montgomery Cooper and members of
Connecticut Violence Intervention Program (CT VIP) gathered at BLOOM for “A Healing for
Generational Trauma,” a roundtable dedicated to breaking the stigma and silence around
violence, grief, and intergenerational trauma.
For three hours, roughly four dozen participants cycled through the space, learning how to
address and survive the “interruptions” in their own lives—and stem the spread of generational
trauma that is centuries running. The project is personal to Cooper, who lost her son Jonathan
to gun violence in 2016, and suffered a brain aneurysm the following year, on what would have
been his 26th birthday.
She has since started what she calls “a movement,” dedicated to addressing and ending
intergenerational trauma through a book, play, podcast series and curriculum that all grew out of
her experience.
“Today is about you,” she said Friday, standing beside CT VIP Executive Director Leonard
Jahad. “We invited you here for you. Recognizing trauma was something that I had to fight
through because no one knew how to help me that looked like me. It was untreated. And I
suffered.”
“We know that the trauma in our community has been ignored,” added Jahad, who knew
Jonathan and remembered him as a sweet and talented young adult. He pointed to the
difference in resource allocation that he saw after the Sandy Hook massacre, when the nearby
town of Newtown was able to bring in grief counselors and child and adult therapists. “A lot of
our trauma goes unrecognized and goes untreated.”
To heal, he and Cooper said, people have to find a way to talk about the interruptions that
they’ve experienced. Before an afternoon of aromatherapy, reiki, nourishing food, and an
outdoor fire pit for emotional wellness, the two split attendees into three sections, each led by a
trained facilitator. Cooper and Jahad drifted between rooms, listening as groups got started.
At the far end of the shop, attendees crowded in, slipping into their seats as ivy and fabric
flowers peeked out from the walls. Across the room, there was a cross-section of Cooper’s own
life: bereaved mothers who are part of a group they never asked to join; Hamden Mayor Lauren
Garrett, who governs the town where Jonathan was killed; friends and godparents who had

loved and still love Jonathan; Det. William Onofrio, who was assigned to Jonathan’s case as a
rookie cop.
At the front, facilitator Natasha Koonce-Webster clasped her hands in her lap and looked
around the room, making eye contact with every attendee. No sooner had she asked what
brought them into the space than a steady stream of interruptions began to flow through it. For
many attendees, the specter of gun violence was everywhere.
“An interruption is something that changes what you’re going through,” Koonce-Webster said. “I
think that what happens to a lot of us is that you get stuck.”
From the middle of the room, Patricia Brown-Edwards recalled losing her two sons, Dennis Carr
and Kyle Brown-Edwards, almost two decades apart from each other. In 1997, her 19-year-old
son Dennis was gunned down while sitting in a driveway on Congress Avenue, when a bullet
intended for someone else ended his life. Seventeen years later in 2014, her son Kyle was killed
outside of her mother’s home. Her mother, who is now 93 years old, almost never leaves the
house.
In the years since, Brown-Edwards has had multiple heart attacks, including during a meeting of
a survivors of homicide support group she attends with Cooper. She’s arrived at the hospital
dead on arrival six times, she said. After learning there was no heart disease in her family,
Brown-Edwards recalled asking her cardiologist if it was possible to suffer from a broken
heart—a phenomenon associated with stress that is in fact documented.
Friday, she said, she had willed herself to come out to BLOOM because the act of
grieving—and surviving—is a process with no end point. “I am looking for myself for some kind
of peace,” she said. This year, she is struggling with the additional information that the man who
murdered Dennis will be getting out of prison this year, earlier than his original sentence. Every
time she hears about a legal proceeding, she relives that day.
“I think a lot of people, when they grieve, they think, ‘This is where I should be right now,’” said
Koonce-Webster, who described her own interruption as living with Multiple Sclerosis. “A lot of
times, we just need to be there for people. People will let you know what they need.”
The stories kept coming. Beside Brown-Edwards, Pamela Jaynez remembered losing her son,
and then her nephew, to gun violence. She has since become one of the founders of the New
Haven Botanical Garden of Healing, which sits not far from BLOOM on Valley Street.
As he listened, Omar Ryan nodded knowingly, quiet as he waited to speak.
Now a violence prevention professional with CT VIP, Ryan “was part of the problem” in the
1990s, he said. After ending up in the state’s carceral system, he dedicated his life to breaking a
cycle of violence.
“It’s unrealized trauma,” he said.
“Thank you for being here,” Koonce-Webster said. She looked around to see if people had other
interruptions that they wanted to share.
Onofrio, who was the detective assigned to Jonathan’s case, piped up from the side of the
room. Six years ago, he was a rookie detective on the force. He saw the file for a 25-year-old

Black man, killed close to a restaurant and bar that had a reputation for getting violent. He
assumed Jonathan had been drinking.
“I couldn’t be more wrong,” Onofrio said, his voice shaking at points. At the time he was
murdered, Jonathan was a budding audio engineer with a job as a barista, working and living in
New York City. Onofrio hadn’t seen any of that. When he met Cooper, “I think I failed to pursue
the trauma she was going through,” he said. “I was very procedural.”
He remains grateful for the guidance he got on the job—and the grace that Cooper extended to
him. In 2016, Cooper told him “to step back” and rethink everything he thought he understood.
When he did, he learned the deeper story of who Jonathan was—a gentle, artistic spirit whose
smile lit up a whole room. A young adult who loved his family so much that he’d come back from
New York for his cousin’s birthday. He was driving home from that celebration when he was shot
and killed at a traffic light in a case of mistaken identity.
“I think learning from each other is one of the best things we can do,” Onofrio said. Six years
after Jonathan’s death, his time with Cooper has changed how he thinks about his role. He talks
about internal biases, trauma, and hard-to-unlearn assumptions with other cops on the Hamden
Police force. He also thinks about internalized and vicarious trauma—and talks about it with
fellow officers.
His voice splintering, he said that sometimes he gets home after a day on the job, and wakes
his kids up just to let them know he’s there.
“I think we get so used to seeing it on t.v. that sometimes we get desensitized to it,” Koonce-
Webster said. “When will we start caring about every child like that’s our child?”
From the center of the room, Darlene Galberth remembered how after the murder of her
daughter outside of the family’s home, “no one came to show concern.” She was exhausted and
angry, she said. Cooper, who had appeared in the doorway, listened attentively without saying a
word.
“How do we address it and take care of ourselves?” she said after a long pause.
Finding The Healing
In BLOOM’s “Yellow Room,” facilitator Melanie Pettigrew-Lee ran through a different set of
interruptions. With her marker flowing across an oversized pad of paper, she got to work writing
down people’s responses to their thoughts about the word “interruption” and the connotation it
held.
The words “stop” and “unplanned” bubbled up as Pettigrew-Lee wrote each of them down. As
attendees kept talking, some suggested more finite examples such as death and domestic
violence.
“When was the last time you felt an interruption that made you feel not normal?” Pettigrew-Lee
asked, leaving the floor open.
Martina Campbell immediately chimed in to answer the question, tying her loss of normalcy to
when she was sexually abused by her step-father as a child.

“The healing comes from telling a story over and over again, and helping someone else get out
of it,” Campbell said. “And because I went through the experience, I can see it in others before
they get to where I got.”
She dispelled the notion of healing through forgiveness, saying that other emotions can coexist
equally alongside the healing process and serve as a catalyst for change. She acknowledged
that for years, she has carried the grief and the trauma so others in her family don’t have to.
Friday, she was laying some of that burden down.
“So yeah, I’m angry,” she said. “I’ve always been angry. But the healing comes from saving
someone else. Because I had siblings, too. And I allowed myself to be the victim so they
weren’t.”
“You know, it’s easy for us to say that hurt people hurt other people, but caring people care for
other people too,” Pettigrew-Lee responded. “And sometimes we care at the expense of
sacrificing not only our sanity, but also our safety.”
Teaching people to talk about breaking that cycle is part of the work, she said. Across the
space, snippets of conversation floated through the air, each followed by a suggestion on how to
speak about them. As she headed towards a CT VIP table outside, facilitator Shaina Smith said
that her work is now dedicated to making sure people have the vocabulary to talk about that
trauma.
Born and raised in Bloomfield, Smith has lived that herself: she was the victim of sexual assault
when she was a child. It was only years later, when she was 19, that she learned the words for
what she had experienced. She got to the point where “I know I can function with it,” she
said—and she’s trying to pass that message on.
“You know how they say music is the universal language? Unfortunately trauma is too,” she
said. “You’re never going to meet somebody that doesn’t have trauma. So that’s what I’m trying
to convey to the adults, and to the youth too. They don’t know that they have a voice. That
you’re allowed to speak of your trauma.”
Back inside, BLOOM owner Alisha Crutchfield-McLean said she was glad to host the
roundtable, and would welcome the Interruptions crew back anytime. She and Cooper met
years ago, introduced by a cousin well before the Edgewood Avenue storefront was open. They
bonded over not just their hometown—both hail from Boston—but the fact that they’d both
experienced death of loved ones as a major interruption in their lives.
“We just instantly connected,” Crutchfield-McLean said. “We’ve been friends since then.”
It was that sense of connection that made her excited to open the space to attendees Friday,
Crutchfield-McLean said. When she opened just over a year ago, her vision for the space was
driven by a desire to gather community. Now, she’s doing it.
“BLOOM is blooming,” she said. “It takes on a mind and an energy of its own. I just nurture it. I
maintain it. I make sure that it’s good to be ready for people every day.”
Learn more about “Interruptions,” including how to bring the curriculum to your place of work go
to www.revodellresilience.com