We Need Justice Too-McKeesport

Mae Hudson is quick to praise Autumn Perkins for starting the We Need Justice Too!!! Facebook page calling attention to unsolved Black homicides. She even joined the page, having lost her son, Carlos, when he and his cousin, Jana Randolph, were fatally shot from another car as they drove along Riverview Street in August.
That case remains unsolved, like more than 50 others in McKeesport over the last decade involving African-American victims. That was something Hudson thought needed attention, so she asked her cousin, V. Fawn Walker-Montgomery, a McKeesport council member, for help. The result was the We Need Justice Too–McKeesport meeting held earlier this month at the McKeesport Elks Club.
Before the meeting, Hudson also assembled two poster boards filled with photos of those victims whose cases remain unsolved. Everyone stood as the names were read.
Walker-Montgomery said the rally wasn’t about setting up another Facebook page or organization, or people just talking without looking for solutions, it was about getting answers.

“We want answers to these murders that haven’t been solved,” she said. “So we invited the Allegheny County police and the community, and we had a conversation.”
Any homicide outside the city of Pittsburgh, but still in Allegheny County, is investigated by the county police. County Superintendent Charles Moffett attended the meeting, as did one of his detectives, along with two assistant district attorneys and McKeesport Mayor Michael Cherepko.
 
Walker-Montgomery said she was pleased to see the county taking her invitation seriously, because people are complaining that when there is a homicide, detectives interview family right afterwards, but then never return calls for updates.
“I lost my son to this violence and no one has called me about anything,” Theresa Walker told Moffatt directly. “And I would like some answers.”
Moffatt told the audience they are partners with 129 municipal police forces, and have experts in specific crimes, but that spreads them thin. But he said, he needs the residents’ help too.
“We need cooperation from the citizens,” he said. “You can’t give up your homes and neighborhoods to some thugs.”
Though Moffatt and the other county officials spoke to several residents privately about cases, Hudson said it wasn’t enough. She wants these killings given same level of attention as the murder of the Wolfe sisters.

“Look at this. This is a state of emergency. Sure they showed up, but it was the same old rhetoric, the same script. We knew everything they were going to say,” she said. “They say they need our cooperation. We say they need to do their work. The street knows what’s going on. Why don’t they?”
Hudson said the young people doing the killings are not being pressured at all by police, and everyone knows it.
“I told them what someone told me, ‘if you want someone dead, bring them to McKeesport and kill them. They’ll never find who did it,’” she said. “We want these murders solved, 50 of them. I had another board with the ones they actually have solved. You know how many there were on that one–seven. They need to do their work.”
This last weekend Tezjuan Taylor, 20, was shot three times around 1:30 a.m. on May 17 in the 500 block of Fifth Avenue. County police have issued an arrest warrant for 19-year-old Jason Webb, also of McKeesport. (See sidebar.)
Walker-Montgomery has scheduled a follow-up meeting for May 29 to review suggestions made at the first meeting that she as a councilwoman can act on locally. It will take place at 6 p.m. at the Healthy Village Learning Institute, 100 Boyd St. in McKeesport.
 
 
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