Maureen Shepherd imagined her nephew’s last moments as she stood over a trail of his blood April 14 on Dabney Street. Shot in the neck and chest, James Mason, 46, must have staggered from the sidewalk and then slipped, she thought. The stains ended at the gutter.
“The blood trail told his story,” she said Saturday, after a meeting of LIPSTICK, an activist group whose name stands for Ladies Involved in Putting a Stop To Inner-City Killing. On that April morning, Shepherd knew she had to act. “I want to be my nephew’s voice.”
Her nephew’s killer has not yet been caught, she said.
Mayor Martin J. Walsh vowed at the meeting to work to drop the rate of unsolved homicides in the city, especially among people of color.
“The numbers are so much higher of people of color who have been murdered that we haven’t [solved],” he said. “There’s some fundamental changes we have to make in the way that we do our business in the city of Boston.”
A Boston Herald report showed racial disparities in the number of unsolved killings, which total 336 in the past 10 years. Black men were killed at 10 times the rate of white men, and only 38 percent of the killings of black men were solved compared with 79 percent for white men, the report said.
Walsh also noted that police have taken 757 guns off the streets this year, between the city’s gun buyback program and police work. Last year, the total number of guns taken all year was 657. Shootings are down by about 32 percent, he said, but homicides are up by four.
“We know that one kid, one person, is too much,” said Walsh.
Citizens for Safety, the umbrella organization for LIPSTICK, was presented with a $10,000 in donations during the meeting. LIPSTICK’s mission is to curb gun trafficking, training women to reach out to other women to stop them from buying, carrying, or hiding guns for their husbands, boyfriends, or other men in their lives.
Ruth Rollins, LIPSTICK’s program director, said she joined the group after her 21-year-old son, Warren Daniel Hairston, fatally shot in 2007.
“After losing a child, I never wanted anyone to go through what I went through,” she said. “That’s what made me get involved . . . looking at how are these guns ending up in our communities?”
Shepherd, too, is determined to try to make sure that her nephew’s plight does not befall another. Mason was schizophrenic, she said, and the family believes he was killed because a group of men did not like how loudly he played his music in his home to drown out the voices in his head. Boston Police were not immediately able to comment on the circumstances of Mason’s death.
Shepherd wears a cross around her neck and a button on her shirt with Mason’s smiling face. The button reads “With Faith Comes Forgiveness,” but Shepherd admits she has not forgiven Mason’s killer.
“Not yet, I gotta be honest,” she said. “I’m very angry.”
Globe Correspondent Claire McNeill contributed to this report. Evan Allen can be reached at evan.allen@ globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @evanmallen.