Mourners at the funeral of a man who was stabbed outside his north London home in June have been urged to take responsibility for tackling the epidemic of killings of young people in their community.
David Bello-Monerville, 38, was killed in the early hours of 19 June. Three men have been charged with his murder.
His parents, John and Linda Burke-Monerville, have said he was deeply engaged in campaigns for justice over the separate killings of two of his brothers.
Joseph Burke-Monerville was shot in 2013, aged 19, in a case of mistaken identity, and Trevor Monerville was stabbed to death in 1994, aged 26. Nobody has been convicted of either killing
At a service at the Arc church in Forest Gate, east London, on Friday, Prof Gus John, an academic and equality and human rights campaigner, addressed hundreds of mostly black mourners, all dressed in white at the family’s request.
He called on the black community to take action against violence.
“The responsibility for displacing this scourge from our community is not Boris Johnson’s or the Metropolitan police’s. That responsibility lies with ourselves,” he said. “We attend these funerals with numbing regularity. The number of them suggests that we are a generation of traumatised people. The inheritance of the trauma of slavery is being revisited on our children daily.”
He referred to the loss of life during the Troubles in Northern Ireland and said the loss of young lives in the black community was different.
“There is no war causing this family to have lost three of their children. We are burying our children who are fatal victims of people like themselves. Let us not become desensitised to these killings. Let us not see it as normal for young people to bury young people like themselves. We have the power to do something about this.
“None of us is safe unless we make sure every one of our children is living a purposeful life. We have to take collective responsibility. History should never find us wanting. We have to ensure that young people are not leaving their homes intending to go out and be murderers.”
Pastor Nims Obunge told the congregation: “We stand with a family whose trauma and grief cannot be quantified. We must not allow David’s death to be just another death. In our streets we must seek to challenge the means by which David lost his life. No parents should have to bury their children.”
Linda Burke-Monerville entered the church calling out the names of her three dead sons: “Where is Trevor, where is Joseph, where is David?” She told the congregation: “My heart is burst like a riverbank.”
She and her husband previously told the Guardian that the loss of three of their seven children felt like a “terrible dream”.
