Perched in a doorless closet off the living room in Brenda Cardenas’ house are photographs of her murdered son.

On the floor below, tennis shoes that belonged him sit neatly in a row.

To feel close to him, sometimes the 38-year-old woman lights candles and meditates inside the closet.

The space has become a shrine to Pedro Garcia Jr., who at age 17 was shot and killed in Macon by another 17-year-old named Tajah Coleman on Villa Crest Avenue in September 2018.

He played youth basketball and help with his stepfather’s construction business. He had gotten in trouble in school at times and had on occasion had run ins the law, his mother said, but never for violence.

On the night he was killed, Pedro had finished his shift at Wendy’s and had encountered Coleman a troublemaker trying to steal a child’s bicycle, prosecutors have said. It is believed that Pedro died over a gold necklace he was wearing.

Pedro’s street corner death on Sept. 17 was one of 24 homicides in 2018, a near-record year for bloodshed in Bibb County. His family lost him just before they were set to move from their crime-torn neighborhood off Houston Avenue to a subdivision across town.

Garcia was killed on Villa Crest Avenue in southeast Macon in September 2018. It was one of 42 homicides in a near-record year for bloodshed in Bibb County. Her son, she says, had at times been in trouble in school, and on occasion run afoul of the law. But never for violence. He had just gotten of work at Wendy’s, where he was a cook, the night he died. He played youth basketball and helped with his stepfather’s construction business.

Read the full story at the Telegraph.

This story is a part of a collaborative reporting project on solutions to youth violence, Peacing Together.