Well, this is strange. Related??
(no link)
EVEN STRANGERS KNEW WHO DIED
Modesto Bee, The (CA) - March 30, 1994
Author/Byline: GLENN SCOTT,; Bee columnistEdition:
Headlights burning in the noonday sun, the cars rolled one after another down Church Street.
(snip_
“He was murdered.”
The questioner stopped there. He watched in silence as hundreds more cars took the corner. Better not to ask if she knew where the young man had died.
She might know.
Every death is sad. Every life sacred. All random violence deplorable. There is no sense in weighing one loss against another or rating the quality of grief.
And yet no one who attended Sulu Palega Jr.’s funeral on Monday could escape the obvious: that some deaths carry great consequences. And this was one.
The Palega family belongs to the Samoan Congregational Church of San Francisco, but the funeral service was held in the huge cathedral of St. Paul’s. It was the only church large enough to handle the crowd. And even then, a hundred or more of the 1,250 mourners waited outside. No more room.
“I’ve been associated with this parish for 23 years,” said the Rev. Tom Seagrave, “and this is the biggest funeral I’ve seen in this church.”
They had come to pay their respects to a young man with great potential who was killed in Modesto.
Killed in Modesto. It is an unhappy association. Arrests suggest the shooters may not be from Modesto. And yet the linkage is there now. If anything, the location added to the absurd sense of loss.
To many who knew Sulu Jr. from the tough streets of San Francisco, Modesto meant safe little suburbia. It was the land of stucco houses, of clean curbs and gutters.
And suddenly it belonged to the most cowardly phrase that any proud friend of Sulu Jr. could stand to utter out loud: drive-by shooting.
After the service and the burial, a few hundred of the closest friends and family gathered Monday at the Southeast Community Facility. It is a new, modular concrete center that Sululagi Palega Sr. oversees as president of the facility commission.
By then, the tears had stopped. Ritual had taken over. The women passed out Samoan food. The grandfather had presided over a long offering of family donations to the assembled ministers of Samoan churches.
Sulu Sr. paused outside on the patio. He said he was “doing better.” It had been so senseless. He and his wife, Dorothy, had sent their son to Modesto every year for the same church-sponsored basketball tournament.
“Whoever did it, we just want justice,” he said.
He hurried away, apologizing. Someone else needed him.
Just then another man walked up asking whether the police had any leads. The man’s name was Vester Lee Flanagan. He was a family friend and ran the operations at City College of San Francisco.
“I guess they’ve got gang problems everywhere,” he said. “But I never heard anything bad before about Modesto.”
Such is the echo of a gun fired once.
It was said that the cameraman who was killed was a “strong Christian”. Is it possible that factored into the killer’s anger?
Is there a copy of the “manifesto” somewhere, or do we only get that if the shooter is a WHITE racist?
Whoa!
1994
“He was a family friend and ran the operations at City College of San Francisco.”
I don’t know how you dig these things up! :-) Good find.
father would have been appx 56
perp would have been appx 20
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Do we know what his last/current job was?
read they pulled his Linkedin page. Odd.
bkmk
I think that is Vester senior. I think his father was tackle for the Green Bay Packers.