The first of its kind, a garden in New Haven remembers local victims of gun violence
Valley Street and West River curl protectively around either side of the New Haven Botanical Garden of Healing. A group of twenty-five volunteers gather at the entrance of the garden, just beyond the reaches of West Rock’s shadow.
Marlene Miller-Pratt leads the group on a tour. Though small in stature, she carries herself with an authority that compels her audience to listen closely. Her background as an educator shines through: until recently, she taught science at Hill Regional Career High School, but today she has a more somber lesson for the volunteers.
“We have become part of a community that none of us want to be a part of,” she says.
Twenty-six years ago, Miller-Pratt’s 20-year-old son Gary Kyshon Miller was shot and killed in New Haven. In 2021, Miller-Pratt led the creation of the United States’ first permanent memorial garden dedicated to victims of gun violence.
Gary is one of the 676 people memorialized on the walkway of bricks known as the Magnitude Pathway. The pathway unfurls from the garden’s entrance toward the plaza, where benches bracket a lone elm tree in concentric semicircles. Separated into clusters by a series of stone slabs—one for every year since 1976—each brick bears the name and age of a victim of fatal gun violence in New Haven. Now spanning more than half of the garden’s length, the stretch of names inches further each year.
In the past year alone, twenty-three people have died at the hands of gun violence in New Haven—an increase from sixteen in 2022—averaging one fatal shooting every two weeks.
“And then we forget about it two weeks later,” Miller-Pratt says. She gestures toward the bricks. “There was really a life here. This life was 20 years old, that life was 14 years old, and we have a problem.”
II.
In 2012, twenty children and six adults were fatally shot at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, an incident which marked the deadliest mass shooting in Connecticut’s history. Since then, Connecticut has tightened its gun control laws. State legislation mandates universal background checks and bans assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. There has not been another mass shooting in the state since Sandy Hook. But legislative changes have failed to address individual incidents of gun violence.
These day-to-day shootings, which frequently involve non-assault weapons, fall disproportionately on poorer, predominantly Black communities. One study published in 2022 found that the rate of death by firearm homicide is 22.5 times higher for Black men than other Americans. Recent profiles of New Haven communities suggest that lower-income neighborhoods experience higher rates of gun violence.
A gun goes off; a community splinters.
“Those guns need to be turned in,” Miller-Pratt says. “But they’re not, because [their owners] are scared someone else might have the gun—not realizing that if they use the gun, they cause havoc for another family.”
After losing her cousin to gun violence in 2019, Hannah Foley ’24 first became involved with the garden as a leader for FOCUS, Yale’s community service program for rising first-years, and as a supervisor for a green skills internship program with Common Ground High School. While searching for victims’ next of kin, Foley was surprised by the number of leads her group would find through word-of-mouth. Students would mention victims’ names at the dinner table, and their parents’ eyes would light up in recognition—I know his sister. I went to high school with her.
“It’s almost like a tree,” Foley says. “Someone along the way knows somebody who’s been affected, which is really hard to think about.”
By gathering all names into a single place, the garden presents individual shootings as interconnected under a larger epidemic of violence. It makes room for victims of day-to-day gun violence in the conversation that often leaves them out, demanding that they, too, are not forgotten.
III.
Typical sites for remembering the dead, such as cemeteries or war memorials, are static. Inscriptions on a headstone. A lone statue in the park.
Gardens, however, pulse with life. When Miller-Pratt moved back to New Haven in 2015, nearly twenty years after her son had been killed, she discovered Yale’s Marsh Botanical Garden. The life that thrived in this space—fish rippling through ponds, flowers swaying in the breeze—created a sanctuary for healing.
“That’s all I want to see,” she says. “The life that’s there.”
In 2018, Miller-Pratt attended a Survivors of Homicide support group meeting and discussed the idea for a memorial garden. Her vision resonated with three other mothers who had lost their children to gun violence: Pamela Jaynez, Celeste Robinson, and Winifred Philips-Cue. Through the Yale School of Environment’s nonprofit Urban Resources Initiative, the four women collaborated with the architectural firm Svigals + Partners, which had worked to rebuild Sandy Hook four years after the shooting.
“From listening to the moms…I knew that [the garden] needed to be a place that had a progression,” explains Julia McFadden, a designer for the garden who had also managed the Sandy Hook project. “An experiential type of place versus a single monument.”
The Lost Generation sculpture at the center of the garden embodies this principle. Inspired by Miller-Pratt’s belief that “for every life lost to gun violence, generations cease to exist,” the piece relies on shifting perspectives. A faceless aluminum family towers over the grass, each member strategically placed to create the illusion of alignment as the visitor steps through the entrance. As the visitor walks along the Magnitude Pathway to the other side of the garden, the family fractures.
Visitors who slow down and look closely can make out their own silhouettes on the metallic surface.
“I wanted it to be as reflective as possible,” says lead architect Marissa Mead, who designed the sculpture. “I had hoped that people would be able to walk up to it and see their faces in it.”
From the other side of the garden, the sculpture morphs again. As the visitor looks back from the circular plaza, surrounded by greenery and vibrant perennials, the family unites once more.
IV.
Since the garden’s opening, the URI has held weekly volunteer sessions in the summer to maintain the garden. Volunteers emerge from each session with arms aching from weeding, but leave behind a greenspace dotted with new blossoms and fresh mulch.
Miller-Pratt begins each session with a tour of the garden. One morning, as she leads the group through the Magnitude Pathway, a soft voice asks if they can pause by the bricks representing the lives lost in 1995.
Shantay G., who asked to be identified by her last initial for privacy concerns, steps forward and points to one brick. A classmate. She points to another. A friend. Her voice does not falter.
“I mean, I can’t even count the people I’ve lost alone on my fingers,” she would later say. The death of her uncle was particularly difficult: she describes him as a dancer and a protector, but keeps the rest of his memory to herself.
Though Shantay had spent years passing the garden while commuting from New York to New Haven, she could not muster the strength to enter the space alone. Volunteering alongside the garden’s founders finally encouraged her to step foot into the garden and share experiences with other people who had also lost loved ones.
“Listening to their stories provides a way of healing,” Shantay says. “[The victims] are not forgotten because their lives meant something too.”
While death prevails in a cemetery—coffin closed, headstone lodged—the lifeline of memory keeps flowing through the community that gathers in the garden. They work to restore what grief eviscerates.
The corners of Shantay’s eyes crinkle up in a smile. “Community involvement. That’s what makes us whole.”
V.
The New Haven garden has inspired the creation of other memorial gardens across the country. In May 2023, Pamela Jaynez and other Hamden residents received mayoral approval to construct a similar site in Eli Whitney Park. Miller-Pratt lists off other cities that have built gardens of remembrance: Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Durham.
Every second Saturday in June, soon after the flowers reach full bloom, members of the New Haven community gather in the garden for the Annual Day of Remembrance. Speakers such as Mayor Justin Elicker, State Senator Martin Looney, and Police Chief Karl Jacobson take turns reading the names of every person memorialized in the bricks.
Last year, it took thirty-seven minutes to read each name. This year, it takes forty.
At one point, a mother wishes her son a happy birthday. He would have been 31. She ends her list of names the way every speaker does: “Say their names.”
“Say their names,” the crowd repeats.
After the mayor reads the final name, community members reach for each other. Miller-Pratt sits down and gazes at the pathway. Under the shade of the trees, she waits for the day the bricks stop growing.
– Calista Oetama is a sophomore in Davenport College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal.
Photography by Gavin Guerrette.
