HUNTINGTON -- Perhaps the house at 1410 Charleston Ave. will always be remembered as the place where four Huntington teens lost their lives in a tragic and brutal shooting.
The May 22, 2005, incident, labeled a drug-related homicide, shook Huntington to its core, and to this day affects the families who lost loved ones, and the larger community in general. The case remains unsolved.
The past may be irrevocably anchored to the location, but the Rev. Bishop John Martin said it's what the residence, now known as Hope House, can offer down the road that counts.
"There is a point of contact with the past, but what is important is looking toward the future with hope," Martin said, at the third annual Memorial Eucharist for Victims of Violent Crime.
The names of Megan Poston, Michael Dillon, Eddrick Clark and Donte Ward, the four who were killed in 2005, were read aloud as they are each year, along with the names of those who preceded them in crime-related deaths going back to 2002.
There were also new names read and memorialized this year, such as murdered Marshall student Leah Hickman, who was found strangled to death and placed in a crawl space in her apartment building in December, and arson victim Deanna O'Brien Vandixhorn, who was killed in a house fire on Collis Avenue earlier this month.
Martin said it was time to "draw a line in the sand" in Huntington against violent crime, and against drugs, which have been connected to many deaths, both accidental and deliberate, in the city in recent years.
That mission will be the purpose of Hope House, which was bought by All Saints Anglican Church, and, with some extensive renovation, will become a site not only to memorialize the victims of the 2005 shooting, but also to mentor younger generations.
"I want to instill in you that the monument of Hope House be a living memorial, not a dead memorial," Martin said. "Do not think of it as being an end, but a beginning.
"When children ask about the Hope House, we don't have to go back to all of the (past), but talk about hopes and dreams," he added. "If we're going to have a memorial, let it be a place where we have hope."
Martin said that mission should be extended to the entire community throughout the city of Huntington.
"We have to have hope and believe that Huntington doesn't have to be a place of death," he said. "We need to turn this around in this city.
"We're in a moral flood stage ... we're seeing evil in the form of addiction to drugs," he added. "We cannot appease darkness, we must oppose it wherever we see it. We cannot give darkness a refuge in Huntington."
The key, Martin said, is to encourage the youth to accomplish positive goals.
"We need to tell them they can make it," Martin said. "We need to tell them they can exceed their own dreams. We need to start peddling hope."
Before Martin spoke, city Director of Administration and Finance Brandi Jacobs-Jones read a proclamation from Mayor David Felinton, proclaiming May 17, 2008, as Hope Day in Huntington, and extending that proclamation to the third Saturday of each May in the city from now on.
The event began with a march from Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to the parking garage to a parking garage near the Hope House, where the memorial service was conducted.
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