Some of the hundreds of funeral program’s that Angela Williams has collected and put on bullet boards at Mothers Against Murderers Association in West Palm Beach. [GREG LOVETT/palmbeachpost.com]

The memories

Gibson has dozens of photos of her son readily accessible on her phone. Though the memory of her 24-year-old’s body at the funeral home will never leave her, Gibson wants to remember her son as the man who had to FaceTime her whenever he got a shot at the doctor’s office, the father who adored his two children and the one who never ended a conversation without saying, “I love you.”

She said she’d respond, “Love you more.”

The mothers carry photos of the children, don T-shirts with their faces and erect memorials with their names because beneath the hurt, the anger and the push for change is a horror that their children may be forgotten.

Wilson-Leidinger knows a black man being shot to death in the early morning hours in a violent pocket of Riviera Beach could easily be classified as a statistic and nothing more.

“The way he died, it’s like he never existed,” she said about her son, Tavoris Wilson.

But that body left dead in the roadway was her quiet, dependable and respectful boy who would drop whatever he was doing to give her a hand around the house.

When Jean Hart Howard takes the portraits that hang on MAMA’s office walls, she first talks mother-to-mother with the women whom she photographs. Hart Howard, a mom to two boys, said she listens to their stories of early motherhood, of raising teenagers, of losing a child, whatever they are willing to share.

“I’ve never met one mother who wasn’t open and loving and eager to talk. It’s a very bonding experience,” said Hart Howard, who has photographed about half of the 430 members. “There’s a lot of laughter and a lot of joy in all this, too.”

Hart Howard knows the shadow that murder casts on a family. Years before she was born, her father’s older sister was shot to death on the steps of a California college library by an ex-boyfriend. Six months later, her father’s dad died of a broken heart.

More than 70 years later, the pain still ripples through the family.

Both in her family and with the women she has photographed over the past 14 years, Hart Howard has seen how those who talk through their pain heal in a way those who fall into isolation don’t.

“The biggest takeaway that I’ve learned from all of this in the last 14 years is that people really want to share their story, even if its a sad story,” said Hart Howard, a former Palm Beach Post photographer. “It’s really important for people to be listened to and to have connection. … The grief lessens.”

So who was the man gunned down with an assault rifle early on New Year’s Day 2003 in Riviera? He was “a fun-loving young man who loved everyone,” Dixon laughed, “especially me.”

Even as an adult, Manuel, a 1991 Palm Beach Gardens High School graduate who loved math and electronics, would run into her arms “like he was a little kid,” she said. On his last New Year’s Eve, his mom was the one he called at midnight to wish a Happy New Year.

“I want the world to know he was somebody,” Dixon said. “He will always be remembered.”