Their sons’ lives ended in gunfire. In grief, they found a second act.
After losing their children to gun violence, these moms turned their ‘pain into purpose,’ performing in a play to empower and uplift other grieving women.
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Tiffani Evans laced her fingers with the women clothed in all black.
With their heads bowed and their eyes closed, a voice reverberated through the room over the footsteps in the hall of the nearby theater and the nerves in their stomachs.
“Thank you for allowing us to tell our stories and keeping our son’s names alive, God.”
“Mhmm, yes God,” Evans responded.
“We thank you, God, when we felt like there was no way God, when we felt like we wanted to kill ourselves after our sons left us, God,” Ja’Ka McKnight said in prayer, shaking her clutched hands, “you still gave us the energy and the strength to get up every day and push forward, Father God in the name of Jesus, to rep our sons’ name, God, and to help other mothers out … that are unfortunately in this same sorority as us.”
“Yes, thank you,” the women said.
There they stood, eager to take the stage of the Theatre Lab in downtown D.C. to share their stories of motherhood. But the monologues would go beyond labor pains, late-night feedings and raising boys. Just as the mothers remembered how they brought each of their children into the world, they would stand beneath bright lights telling an audience how their sons left.
One was 13, shot by a 12-year-old after a night of playing games at a Dave & Busters. The oldest was 29, shot 22 times during the deadliest month in recent Prince George’s County history. The youngest, Evans’s baby, was 8; he was killed by a stray bullet while eating dinner and playing video games on one of his favorite nights, Taco Tuesday.
Evans carried the grief that weighed her down in the weeks after she buried her son. She would lay in her bed night after night crying out to God for relief. She drank to drown the hurt. She questioned her purpose in life after the boy who made her a mom died.
In that darkness though, Evans found a way through. One by one, she connected with five other mothers who also knew the pain of having a child killed by gunfire.
Under the steady hand of their “brother” Prince Hamn, a community organizer and anti-violence activist in the Washington area, the group became the “Strong Azz Mothers.” They have spoken out at events in the nation’s capital to uplift other mourning families, advocated for gun control legislation and mental health support, and even held a closed-door meeting to talk with D.C.’s mayor about gun violence in the city — all while leaning on each other to navigate their grief.
After about 10 weeks of coaching this summer, they turned their experiences of motherhood, loss and empowerment into their biggest display yet: a play called “Turning Pain Into Purpose: Say My Son’s Name.” They had hoped if a broader audience could hear their stories, something in the community might change — no more mothers crying over dying sons.
Before stepping onto the stage, Evans kept her eyes squeezed shut as she listened to the end of McKnight’s prayer.
“This is our beginning. … God, allow us all to remember our lines.”
ACT I: The ensemble
The room at the top of the stairs in Evans’s home still has the signs of the 8-year-old boy who would have turned 10 this year — signed football jerseys, trophies, photos from a first birthday.
A clear plastic case also sits on a dresser. The case contains the small black glasses that used to rest on her only child’s chubby cheeks and one of the locs that shot off his head the day stray gunfire sprayed through his cousin’s apartment and killed Peyton John “PJ” Evans.
“My brother grabbed it after the shooting,” Evans, 36, said.
Days of shuttling her son to football practice and saving up to pay for training each month to help him reach his NFL dreams turned into days alone in her dark bedroom.
“I just screamed to God out of anger, pain, love, serenity. I wanted discernment. I wanted to understand what my assignment is,” Evans said. “And He gave it to me.”
Healing slowly came as she began telling her son’s story — from how he came out during birth “like a football” to the scrimmage his team won hours before gunshots took his life. Balancing her full-time job as a government worker, a violence interrupter and youth football coach, she used her voice to speak out against gun violence at community events and town halls. But an even larger purpose grew beyond her individual pain.
What about the other women struggling with the slayings of their children?
She called on Hamn, her high school classmate turned lifelong friend.
Hamn, 36, had seen the effects of gun violence in his community through his organization, “Making a Difference,” which provides mentorship and resources in the Prince George’s area. Helping out mothers, for him, would present a new way to make a difference.
In 2020, after 11-year-old Davon McNeal was killed by a stray bullet following a July 4 anti-violence cookout his mother, Crystal McNeal, had organized in Southeast Washington, Hamn marched in the crowd with her at a memorial balloon release.
At a candlelight vigil almost a year later, Hamn stood beside McKnight to honor her teenage son King, who was shot and killed in a parking lot crowded with other children in Capitol Heights, Md., in April 2021.
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Evans also knew the same women, connecting with them through the years in the community, youth football or social media. When PJ was killed, Evans remembered getting a hug from Veronica Edmonds, a mother whose own son was slain a year later.
The killings made headlines in the Washington region. In D.C., 198 people were killed in 2020, and this year, the city surpassed 200 killings before October for the first time in a quarter century. In neighboring Prince George’s, county police investigated 24 homicides in August 2022 — its deadliest month on record.
The women eventually banded together, navigating their new realities that included legal updates in their son’s cases and raising their other children with one less sibling.
“Some people don’t know what that feel like, just to have somebody say they here, and [they’re] really there,” Evans said. “I want to be able to give that to all the mothers. Right now, it’s six of us, but I want to be able to expand that to every mother, because every mother that’s in this club didn’t ask to be in it.”
She continued: “We lived our life, we birthed our children, and I feel like at the end of the day, we should have support like we did when our kids were living.”
Hamn and Evans invited the women to sit side-by-side at a creative arts center in Suitland, Md., last November to host their first event as a group — a roundtable conversation for leaders and community members to discuss solutions to gun violence and hear from the mothers about its painful effects.
Some were afraid to speak, having never uttered the details of their sons’ deaths publicly or knowing the vulnerability that followed. Others were angry, and demanded accountability for why their sons were no longer here.
The discussion focused on discovering: “What is my purpose now?”
Evans wanted all of the mothers to know what they were capable of when they used the power of their words in honor of their children.
A mother whose son had been shot and killed mere weeks before came to the event. After the panel ended, Evans reached out with four simple words.
“Sis, I got you.”
ACT II: Supporting roles
In a classroom tucked behind a staircase, blue chairs encircled the floor. One by one, the mothers filled the seats, gearing up for rehearsal.
“It’s about god daggone time!” McKnight erupted as Evans arrived. The women laughed and embraced before the weekly Friday night gathering at the theater in late July kicked off.
“For the check-in, we’re going to do our internal weather report,” a theater instructor said to the group. “Think of how you’re feeling right now, and what that would look like as weather.”
“Sunny ... a little cloudy,” said McKnight, whose gold hoop earrings grazed her face. “With grief, it’s always a little cloudy.”
“A sunny, dry day. I’m tired,” Evans said.
The idea for the play came from Hamn, who watched a “Life Stories” performance, featuring the experiences of underrepresented groups put on by the Theatre Lab, a nonprofit school of the dramatic arts.
He knew the platform would be ideal for the mothers to tell their stories. They were all on board.
“If you don’t speak for your child or say your story, it goes silent,” Evans said.
The 45-minute performance would feature the women acting out their son’s birth stories and sharing favorite memories from their lives, while also reliving the moments of their deaths.
Once tickets became available in August, the play sold out within hours. Over weeks of rehearsals, the bonds between the women grew stronger as they joked about their painted toes and found joy in each other’s company despite the heavy task at hand.
By acting out their pasts, they reflected on just how much in common they had (a love of go-go music and memories of their grandmothers’ cooking) beyond the slayings of their sons.
At one play rehearsal, Tyeisha Lucas began to cry when she recalled her son’s father and her teenage boy, killed a year apart. The group wrapped their arms around her.
“I break down and cry every day. … I’m just trying to be strong and tell my story like the other ladies,” Lucas later said. “I don’t want to be one of the mothers that just sit around and don’t say nothing.”
The women often found themselves together — in the courtroom feet away from their son’s killers, at the cemetery, at a dinner table or even their group chat.
After Lakisha DeVaughn’s 27-year-old son, Kentrell DeVaughn, was gunned down, she never returned to the Kenilworth neighborhood in D.C. where he was killed.
“It’s some days, I wake up and I don’t want to get out the bed,” DeVaughn said. “And I can text in the group, and they’ll be like, ‘Sis, we got this. Get up. We need you to fight.’ That’s all I need. Sometimes all I need is to hear one of them say, ‘We can do it.’ Just the fact that I know I’m not in this alone.”
On Mother’s Day, Hamn sent videos to the women from each of their son’s gravesites, laying flowers for them when they didn’t have the strength.
When McKnight dreaded heading to a hearing for the boy who killed her son, Evans and Hamn waited in the courthouse beside her. They offered small talk and hugs to help ease the pain.
And when McNeal threw a back-to-school drive in honor of her son, in the same Anacostia neighborhood where she works as a D.C. violence interrupter and where Davon was killed, the mothers and Hamn floated in the crowd as kids filled up backpacks and ran for the ice cream truck.
“Sometimes I’m strong, and sometimes I’m just silent because I be wanting to give up sometimes,” McNeal said. “But being around the other mothers, they keep me uplifted. Prince, he always tells me, ‘Sis, don’t never give up.’”
Two weeks before opening night, the mothers and dozens of others gathered at the top of a hill at National Harmony Memorial Park Cemetery in Maryland. The first time Evans was here, she watched as a small casket holding her child’s body lowered into the ground. Two years later, she was back, but this time with the squad of support she helped create.
They set up tables, covering them with black tablecloths, and set out build-your-own taco toppings including meats, beans and rice — just like PJ loved.
A giant red and white poster featuring photos of PJ and roses flapped in the wind. Evans said with a chuckle, “Chill out, P, we’re trying to make this nice for you.”
Evans took a microphone and called her crew to the front of the tables.
“We didn’t choose this club; it was handed to us. S0 I want ya’ll to know who these mothers are,” she announced to the crowd. “I push ’cause I got support like this all the time. We understand each other on another level that nobody else will understand. … Nobody can understand us, but us.”
Some of the mothers clung to roses in their hands as they took turns standing over PJ’s metal grave marker that featured photos of his smiling face.
“I want y’all ladies to know I love y’all,” Evans said. “Long live our kids.”
Delicately, they each laid down a rose on top of the earth above PJ as gospel singer Kirk Franklin’s song played.
“May His peace be with you till we meet again … may He give you strength to endure till we meet again.”
ACT III: The debut
After makeup, warm-ups and last-minute line reviews, the women were ready. Their excitement overpowered whatever anxiety remained.
People filled every seat in the 150-chair auditorium.
Just before 8 p.m., the lights dimmed to unveil a bluish-purple glow as Evans, Hamn and the other mothers appeared, emerging from both sides of the stage.
Each mother held a picture frame with their son’s face and a candle. They stood in the dark aura for several moments as an instrumental version of “A Song for Mama” played.
Hamn broke the silence. He spelled out the meaning of MOTHER: “Monumental. Outstanding. Trailblazers. Heroic. Embracing. Resilient.”
Evans took it from there, just as they had rehearsed.
“Being a mother means never taking my title, despite that my son is no longer here,” Evans said with an oomph in her voice.
“That’s right!” someone from the audience called out.
“Being a mother, to me, gave me strength from the day I pushed my son out to the day I buried him,” McKnight said.
The women bellowed their names, as well as their sons’, declaring themselves a “Strong Azz Mother” before placing the photos of their children in front of roses onstage.
They laughed and smiled as they testified about their own childhoods and beginnings. Then one by one, they told the audience where they’re “from.”
“I am from where a child can kill your child, get away with it and we don’t get no justice for that,” McKnight said.
They slowly inched closer to one another, grasping the hands next to them as tears began to well through each retelling. Their bodies rocked from side to side.
“And I am from walking in the house and seeing my son head on the table in a puddle of blood, having to pick my son up and put him on the ground and try to give him CPR,” Evans said.
“I am from spending the morning with my son and that evening I went to go take my grandmother to the grocery store and three guys shot my son up, and there was no way I could help him,” Lucas said.
McNeal went last. She hesitated before giving Lucas’s hand an extra squeeze, her voice cracking.
The audience encouraged her, “You got it.”
“I am from having a cookout on Fourth of July for my community, my son going in the house going to go get a phone charger. Me getting out the car, going to the door and seeing my son laying on the ground,” McNeal said.
“You see this? This right here, this is where we started this at,” Evans said. “ … I’m running into too many mothers who losing their children.”
As the play went on, they acted out hospital room births and church visits, sprinkling joyful memories (like the time Davon scored three touchdowns) with sad moments that drew tears of laughter and sorrow.
“I’ll be to see you,” Edmonds recalled her son had told her. “He never came.” She would receive a call that Anton had been shot, and she needed to hurry. He wanted his mother.
Twenty-two bullets pierced his body — his back, his side, his neck. One grazed his ear. He would live for two more weeks.
“My child left me, I did not know what to do. I did not know what strong was and how to be strong, until I had to be strong,” Edmonds said.
Evans nodded her head as she listened from her seat onstage behind her.
When the monologues ended, pictures of their sons flashed on the screen.
The mothers and Hamn stood in a circle as they spoke each of their sons’ names aloud and poured water into a plant, symbolizing their flowing pain. They leaned on one another’s shoulders, with Evans in the center.
“Repeat after me,” Hamn said. “Strong Azz Mothers, as long as I breathe. Let’s remember their names.”
Echoes cried out from the seats. Then came a moment of silence.
The mothers bowed their heads.
Peyton John Evans.
Davon Thomas McNeal.
King Edward Douglas.
Andre Jamar Robertson Jr.
Anton Tyrone Meachum.
Kentrell Markeice DeVaughn.
The audience clapped.
Evans looked into the crowd, wondering if there was another mother who needed to say her son’s name.
About this story
Story editing by Lynh Bui. Photo editing by Mark Miller. Video editing by Amber Ferguson. Copy editing by Gaby Morera Di Núbila and Jim Webster. Design by Jennifer C. Reed.