HOLLAND (WHTC-AM/FM) — Friends and family held a candlelight vigil for murdered 14-year-old Troy “T.J.” Wells at Kollen Park Saturday, Feb. 16, 2019. (See the photo gallery.)
The sounds of quiet conversations, tears and sometimes sobs punctuated the silence, often muffled by the sound of people attempting to navigate the ice-covered hill leading to the fountain. Many carried shiny blue or red balloons,
One mother, holding a toddler on her hip, stood back from the crowd, at first. She preferred to be identified only at “the mom who rented the room.” She was replaying the details over and over in her mind. She’d gotten the room for her daughter and four other girls, all high-school juniors. They planned a night of goofing around, mani-pedis, and planning for Saturday’s Snowcoming dance at Holland High.The mom had run home to toss in a load of laundry; she got a frantic phone call from her daughter, and the nightmare unfolded.
TJ, she said, was in the hotel with his older sister, who’d stopped by the room to see her friends.
By Saturday night, many who’d planned on attending the dance were standing around Kollen Park’s shrouded fountain as the sunset painted the western horizon, a crowd of 30 or so people, mostly in silence, holding candles, holding hands, sometime hugging and sobbing, feeling a bitterness deeper than the 13-degree windchill.
They expressed utter disbelief that the boy they knew as T.J. is gone, forever.
On Saturday night, Vernice Perry, of Chicago, stood among the crowd at Kollen Park. “He was not in no gang. He was just a a baby,” she said, adding that she’d cared for him from 3 months old to age 7. “He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. .. an innocent person, a baby. My baby.”
“My heart is broken. I have a very heavy heart right now,” she said. He was “a loving,kind boy” who loved to dance.
“Whoever did it, I’ll be glad when they catch him,” she said. “A person that ain’t lived half his life. Still a baby. Fourteen. … I’ll be glad when they catch him. I feel sorry for his mother, but she can see her son. We can’t.”
Toward the end of the vigil Glinisha Brown, the mom of one of the girls in the room, spoke up, telling those gathered that this is not the first time, or second time this has happened “and won’t be the last. Wake up. The Devil don’t fight fair. He don’t. And it’s a hurtful feeling to lose a son, a brother, a sister and a friend. It gotta stop. It has to stop.”
Brown said later that she understood Wells was visiting the girls’ room with his older sister, and may have stepped into the hallway. It’s unclear, she said, why the shooting started or how Wells was involved. She expressed shock at the types of guns involved, which she said appeared to military-type guns. She maintains, as did Wells’ aunt, that Wells was not involved in a gang.
“Sometimes people really are innocent bystanders,” she said. A few moment later, she said many of the girls had younger brothers who were close to their older sisters, adding, “It could have been my son.”
She then said a prayer, one of thanksgiving, mercy and grace, commending Troy Wells Jr.’s soul to God. Some let their balloons float into the sky, a few entangling in nearby tree branches. Other laid flowers at the fountain’s base, where clusters of small candles flickering in the growing darkness.
