The legacy of a slain refugee from Congo is motivating members of Denver’s Street Fraternity brotherhood as they struggle to survive gun violence and urban renewal in the city’s East Colfax corridor.
They say they’re embracing the compassion and forgiveness preached by the late Zuwa Goro (short for Zuwayidi Byiringiro), who was fatally shot in an alley at age 27 on Feb. 11, 2022.
They recently gained hope of avoiding displacement.
A $1 million Colorado Health Foundation grant has allowed directors of the Street Frat, a nonprofit center serving young men who are mostly refugees from war zones, to purchase a Disabled American Veterans building where they’ve rented the basement for a decade. Neighborhood groups also got help from city park officials to improve a soccer court nearby — a safe place for teens to be outdoors.
“Goro was a good person,” said Street Frat member Adam Faisal, 21, a refugee from the Central African Republic, who helped produce a commemorative video.
If Goro could meet the teenager who killed him, he would forgive him, said Yoal Ghebremeskel, director of the Street Frat, where Goro worked as an ambassador and helped prepare meals for participants.
A photo hanging in the basement of the Street Frat youth center in Denver’s East Colfax neighborhood on Jan. 4, 2024 shows director Yoal Ghebremeskel (center) working alongside the late Eugene Karekezi and the late Zuwayidi Byiringiro (wearing cap). (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)
Grieving the loss of his wheelchair-bound best friend Eugene Karekezi, a fellow refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, who was shot dead on May 17, 2020, Goro sat at the scene, the same alley between Yosemite and Xenia streets where he’d be killed two years later. Other refugees had gathered around him, speculating about the motives of Karekezi’s killer. Goro “waved down” their conversation, saying: “’Leave it alone,’ ” Ghebremeskel said.
“We all understand that violence breeds more violence. And Goro was a very compassionate person to all. He said we needed to be compassionate, even toward that individual, considering whatever had led him to this.”
Neighborhood resident Trevounce Duckworth, 19, is scheduled to be sentenced Monday in Denver District Court for killing Goro. Denver’s District Attorney officials said they would prosecute Duckworth as an adult for illegally possessing a handgun and first-degree murder. In August, Duckworth pled guilty to second-degree murder.
The sentencing will bring “a measure of satisfaction,” said Levon Lyles, Street Frat’s program manager. “But, still, Goro is no longer with us. Goro was a peace-loving guy.”
No one has been arrested in the 2020 killing of Karekezi.
Goro knew the depths of violence, which had plagued his life since he was a boy in war-torn Congo and camps crammed with uprooted villagers.
He was born during a civil war where combatants widely abused civilians. He escaped Congo as an infant in the arms of Therese Mukandakezi, his grandmother. They hid in the jungle as marauders ravaged their North Kivu village and rode away with a priest in a truck that carried them to neighboring Rwanda.
Goro lived for more than a decade in a refugee camp until United Nations and U.S. government officials in 2013 cleared them for resettlement — across the world in Denver.
Refugees assumed Denver would be safe, according to Mukandakezi, 74, who lives in Denver with Goro’s friend Rukasa Claude, a former child miner from Congo now working as a rideshare driver.
But the East Colfax area where the federal government’s resettlement contractors concentrate refugees – because U.S. public funding is limited and apartments here are affordable – has been plagued with drug dealing and gun violence.
Yet Goro stayed positive, learning English, heading often to the basement to study, eat, and exercise. He graduated from the New America School in Aurora. His high school classmates voted him “Most Likely to be President.” He worked for a solar company, then turned back to the Street Frat.
He and Karekezi planned to leave Denver and build a better life in Africa. Goro went to Rwanda solo in 2021, locating an uncle who helped him look for opportunities. He was killed when he returned to Denver.
“He was such a thinker and a feeler,” said Street Frat co-founder Dave Stalls, a National Football League Super Bowl winner and civic innovator who in 2016 visited refugee camps in Rwanda to better understand what Street Frat teens had faced as boys. “He wanted to get his life right. He had a huge responsibility weighing on him in supporting his grandmother. Our world has lost Goro, and that is a huge negative for our world.”
Oh Mai hits a return shot to Daniel Montelongo Montoya at Street Frat on East Colfax in Denver on Thursday, Jan. 4, 2024. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)
The 25 or so current members of Street Frat are the latest of hundreds of young men who have participated since the program began in April 2013. Many knew Goro. Photos on the basement walls showed Goro. Last month, a half-dozen newcomers, migrants from Mauritania, arrived after school at the refuge, curious. Membership is free and open to all young men aged 14 to 24.
Slogans posted on the walls tout Street Frat values: cooperation, self-esteem, and dreams for themselves, their families, and the United States. In the gym, exercise and boxing activities encourage becoming “positive warriors.” Street Frat members each week redistribute donated food.
“When I was growing up, Goro was preaching positivity,” said Street Frat member Idris Noor, 21, a refugee from Somalia who has nearly completed a four-year degree but had to pause his studies at the Community College of Denver this year for financial reasons.
“If people were in and out of trouble, he would tell them to focus on earning money, focus on school. I looked up to him as one of the leaders. He knew everybody and he respected people. It was tough to see him go,” Noor said.
When Noor’s older brother, Omar, was murdered along East Colfax in 2019, shot in the back, Goro guided Idris through the pain. “He was so calm. When I was telling him about it, he was like: ‘Your brother means a lot to me, the community, to everybody. His memory has to stay with us.’ He said: ‘It is all about your perspective, how you want to view your brother’s life.’ At the time, I really needed that. I was crashing out.”
The guidance instilled strength. “He was telling me: ‘You cannot change the past. So live for your brother. You can use this to motivate yourself.’”
Noor recently began work for a building security company downtown. Once he can afford a car and an apartment, he’ll complete his last semester for the degree in business administration, he said. Then he’ll seek training to become an electrician. “With my degree, I could start an electrician business. I grew up mostly here in Denver so I would like it to be in Denver.”
Street Fraternity employee Response Muhire serves dinner to people at Street Frat on East Colfax in Denver on Thursday, Jan. 4, 2024. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)
But the new Americans in the neighborhood around Street Frat increasingly see staying will be difficult. Denver’s leaders in 2019 designated the East Colfax corridor as “blighted.” City leaders have embraced urban renewal redevelopment as a remedy to poverty and crime, which has led to the construction of high-end townhomes and apartments where rents approach $2,000.
“The families that Street Frat supports cannot afford that,” Colorado Health Foundation senior program officer Ageno Otii said. “It’s a question of affordability. We have that question all over Denver.”
Disabled American Veteran owners concerned about violence, which has discouraged members from coming to the area, decided last year to move out. Violence “was one of the guiding reasons why we decided to find a new location,” in Aurora, DAV chapter adjutant Andy Grieb said. DAV gave Street Frat directors an option to buy the building “because we wanted them to continue with their mission in the neighborhood,” Grieb said.
Closing the deal is scheduled for March 25, using the $1 million grant, with Street Frat directors aiming to raise an additional $900,000.
The prospect of owning their building along East Colfax has generated excitement. Street Frat staffers were mulling a banner that says “Spread Love” and an expansion to enable support for an anticipated surge of teen migrants from Venezuela. Many residents of the East Colfax corridor “want to have the opportunity not only to stay but also to benefit from redevelopment,” Otii said. “Street Frat has that opportunity.”
The new soccer court nearby in Verbena Park is safer than the heavily worn astroturf mini-field in the New Freedom Park. A metal placard laid into the concrete dedicates this “futsal” soccer court “to the young men lost to violence” in East Colfax. “May this court be a space for peace, community building, sisterhood, brotherhood, and personal and communal growth that will strengthen the fabric of our East Colfax neighborhood.”
Yoal Ghebremeskel stands outside at Street Frat on East Colfax in Denver on Thursday, Jan. 4, 2024. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)