Making a mark

From a parent's nightmare -- a son locked up for murder -- a community festival was born

RALEIGH -- For the people who flocked to Southeast Raleigh's ninth community festival on Saturday, the event was about free hot dogs and music, maybe a little face-painting for the kids.

But for Valerie Scotland, the woman who stays up nights planning the event, it's about a shooting that happened on a dark street corner nine years ago, a split-second decision that left her teenage son imprisoned for murder and sent her searching for a way to coax some good from the horror.

"The night he was sentenced, I cried all night long," said Scotland, 41. "And then I had a dream."

The dream was of a movement that would change the future of Southeast Raleigh, a place where so many fatherless boys were abandoning school for a life of drugs and guns. From that vision, the Annual Southeast Raleigh Community Outreach Day was born.

After nine years, it is still a modest event: about two dozen community groups set up under tents in a city park, a moon-bounce, a DJ and free school supplies, hot dogs and cotton candy for all. But Scotland hopes that while people are there they will pick up information on home ownership, get a health screening, maybe talk to someone about gang prevention.

"It leaves a mark in people's minds that someone cares about them," said Melanie Rackley-Meadows, a volunteer Scotland recruited three years ago. "A lot of these kids, and the parents, too, they have to have it drilled into them: You have to shape what happens to your life."

That's a lesson that Scotland's oldest son, Richard Bennerman Jr., now 25, is learning in the worst possible way.

In the early hours of Sept. 28, 1998, Bennerman was one of a group of teens selling drugs on a corner on South Saunders Street. A customer was accused of passing a $1 bill instead of a $20 bill and was shot to death. Bennerman pleaded guilty to firing the fatal shot.

The victim, a longtime crack cocaine addict, left behind a 5-year-old son.

Scotland, a single mother of four boys, says now that she was working two jobs, trying to dig her way out of poverty, and that she wasn't paying enough attention to realize her son was wrapped up in drugs.

After his arrest, she woke up to reality with a jolt. Suddenly, she was angry at all the parents, like herself, who had failed to guide their children, angry at all the absent fathers, at the politicians who made promises but never really changed the community, at the schools that didn't help troubled students.

She wanted to change it, and she decided to start with a festival.

Faith Smith, 21, a family friend who has known Scotland since she started the festival, said Scotland went door-to-door, asking businesses in Southeast Raleigh to donate money and school supplies.

The first year, only a few dozen people showed up. But Scotland kept working. Each year, word spread further and a few more businesses agreed to sponsor.

"I know God has a plan," said Scotland, who now works as a human resources manager in Research Triangle Park. "Whenever I want to stop doing this, there's something that won't let me."

This year was one of those years. Several of her usual sponsors pulled out, and she was in the midst of a divorce and a move to Clayton. But six weeks ago, she recruited three good friends, and they pulled the festival from the ashes. Scotland said it took more than one 3 a.m. shopping trip.

On Saturday, several hundred people gathered under a blazing sun. Teens in baggy pants, grandmothers and babies in strollers shared the grounds of Sanderford Road Park.

"There are probably gang members out here right now," said Lisa Weber-Brglez, a crime prevention officer with the Raleigh Police Department. "If we can stop just one person, then she's made a difference."

But Scotland knows as well as anyone that changing the path of troubled teens is not easy. Since her eldest went to prison, another of her boys has landed in legal trouble for drugs. Two of her boys have dropped out of school. None has a father involved in his life.

She admits she has made mistakes. The child of a schizophrenic mother and an absent father, she grew up bouncing between relatives in New York and Raleigh. She moved in with a boyfriend at 14 and had her first child at 16.

Scotland still cries when she thinks about what has become of her son and about the broken family his crime left behind. She still wonders what she might have done to prevent it.

But on Saturday at least, she had no time to dwell on her grief. The hot dogs had run out, and the vendors needed more tables. No one knew how to work the cotton candy machine, and there was no ice for flavored-ice cones.

Scotland hustled off into the crowd, smiling and hugging everyone in her path.