NICOLE MARTIN, MOTHER OF JAEWON MARTIN
It was raining hard all that day. I was going to take him to the mall, but I let him go with his friends instead. So when my cousin called and said that his friend got shot, I instantly started dialing his number. He wasn't answering, but he knew that I didn't like him around troubled kids, so I thought he might be hiding because he wasn't answering.
I finally spoke to the mother of his friend, and she said they were at the hospital, but that they couldn't find Jaewon. I made it to the hospital, and there were no signs of my son, and it came over the radio that there was an unidentified black male at Brigham and Women's. He's not a male — he's a kid — so when I got there I was arguing back and forth with the people, and trying to describe him.
All I remember after that is having the police tell me that I couldn't touch my kid. That was the most hurtful thing. That was my kid — I deserved to be able to say goodbye. It was really hurtful to me and my mother how we were restrained so that we couldn't touch the body. Because of that I couldn't accept it. I went completely blank.
The media coverage was acceptable — even from places that I didn't expect it. They didn't write anything that was a lie — it was just the comments that they allowed people to leave on certain news sites. I had a cousin who was murdered in 2007, and that's when I started to read comments. I could never believe that people could say things like that when they don't even know you.
In my son's case I did read the comments, even though the police told me to stay away from things like that because they're hurtful, and people say nasty things like how every kid that gets killed in the community is on welfare and all this crazy stuff. I've worked my whole life. Certain comments get deleted because of profanity, but then there are other racist postings that don't get deleted.
If the Herald wanted to do something about it, then they could remove the real nasty comments like the Boston Globe does. But they don't, because those kind of comments bring more attention to their Web sites. These days I still read them, and watch everything that's going on, because every kid matters to me now. It hurts to know that other parents are going through what I go through.
