On a rainy Saturday, a Cleveland mother and father walked up to a lengthy banner that stretches across a green side yard in Collinwood, a memorial bearing the names of 2,323 young people.
Clevelanders Dana Pugh and Barbara Griffin-Pugh found their son's name among this list of the lost.
Daanarh Notti Pugh was 22 when he was shot and killed in Cleveland Heights. His parents saw him for the last time the day before, at his sister’s birthday party on Nov. 12, 2017.
“He was happy. Easy going. He was in college, working.” Griffin-Pugh recalled. “Helpful. Wow, you’d call him, and he'd be right there.”
Her son's name is one of hundreds on the Wall of Sorrows. It’s an outdoor banner listing all victims of homicide age 25 and younger in Cuyahoga County, from 1990 to 2025. Local advocates unveiled the memorial Saturday.
Dana Pugh said the wall provides a communal space for healing.
“When I think of the sorrow, when I think of the tragedy, when I think of the anguish that we as a family feel, and then to have to multiply that by 2,300 other incidents, other families that are impacted and that may feel the way we feel, it's incumbent upon us to come out, to talk about it, to remember the names of our fallen,” Pugh said.
To have a permanent, local place to display the names of homicide victims has long been the goal of Cleveland advocate Judy Martin. A previous version in East Cleveland was torn down more than a decade ago.
Martin’s son, Christopher, was shot and killed during a carjacking attempt in Cleveland in 1994. Soon after, she began tracking the names of all the other young people killed in the county.
"98.9% of the kids on that wall were not doing anything wrong when they were killed," Martin said through tears, as she saw the wall for the first time Saturday. "I don't care if they had a problem before or after, but they were all in the wrong spot at the wrong time."
For decades, Cleveland advocates like Martin have hosted vigils for the families of homicide victims. The wall is a project of her organization, Survivors/Victims of Tragedy, and its partner nonprofit, Black on Black Crime Inc.
The memorial wall is located at the Dialogue Center, a Collinwood meeting space and church that serves as the headquarters of Black on Black Crime Inc.
That nonprofit’s founder, Art McKoy, likened gun violence in Cleveland to a "war zone on our streets."
In total, Cuyahoga County has seen 5,519 victims of homicide since 1990, according to the advocates' list. Rates of violent crime have slowed in recent years in Cleveland despite spiking during the pandemic.
But a sense of urgency is still needed to address the broader causes of community violence, Martin said, as young people continue to be shot and killed.
Looking to the future, McKoy said Black on Black Crime Inc. is raising funds to create benches and a garden around the Wall of Sorrows.
