Slaying galvanizes Episcopal Church

From Boston-

Jorge Fuentes did things his own way. “If you’re not being yourself, you’re not having fun,” he would say, flashing a smile.

As a contrarian kid, he sometimes drove his mother and teachers and pastors crazy. But by his late teens, he was a standout counselor at his church’s youth programs. He traveled everywhere on mission trips, doing farm work in Virginia, feeding poor people in New York. He planned to join the Marines.

Then, just over a year ago, came the stray shot, fired from a stranger’s gun, that hit the 19-year-old in the head as he walked his dog across the street from his family’s home in Dorchester.

The death of Fuentes was a loss of incalculable proportions, not only for his close-knit family, but for Episcopalians across Eastern Massachusetts. A thousand people came to his calling hours and a candlelight vigil that followed at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in the South End. The following spring, more than 650 marched in his name at the Mother’s Day Walk for Peace. Last month, Bishop M. Thomas Shaw, just back from treatment for brain cancer, came to Beacon Hill to tell Jorge’s story and demand changes to gun laws.

More here-

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/10/07/the-death-year-old-and-wounding-hope-cause-episcopal-church-reexamine-its-commitment-young/w39oEtRMs6x9jUPzALRz1M/story.html