Candlelight Vigil

They gathered quietly outside the Oaklyn Public School in Camden County, where 10-year-old Tracy Joy Connors had been a a student. There were many children among them. "I still think about it," said Nicole Maier, 14, a ninth grader at Oaklyn, as dusk fell yesterday. "I was close to Tracy. I feel like I'm here for her. " Maier was among about 50 people who stood outside the school in a candlelight vigil sponsored by the South Jerey Chapter of Women Against Rape. They stood to honor and remember Tracy, who was raped and slain last month.

Each November, when Sister Helen Cole starts planning her annual candlelight vigil to remember Camden's homicide victims, she starts with the latest death and works backward, setting aside an hour for each person. She mails letters of invitation to victims' relatives and hopes the death toll doesn't rise. But each year, a handful of people are killed after the vigil is planned. Last year, a 31-year-old man was killed during the final day of the vigil, and he was remembered, too, sharing an hour with another victim.

At twilight last night, 100 mourners gathered for a candlelight vigil in memory of an innocent family murdered last week when their North Philadelphia home was firebombed. For a few short hours, the dark, blighted streets of boarded-up rowhouses were washed by the tears of neighbors who came together to clasp hands, to pray and to hope. "We've come to believe that God is going to take care of it in his own time," said Patricia Jones, who lost her invalid mother, two daughters and two grandchildren in Friday's blaze.

School orientation is today and classes don't officially start until tomorrow, but yesterday was a long day for Radnor teachers. At 7 in the morning, before entering Wayne Elementary School for meetings, they congregated at Wayne United Methodist Church for an update from union leaders on contract negotiations with the school board. Then, at 3:30 in the afternoon, wearing stickers that read "Solidarity works," they gathered outside the district's administration building for 25 minutes to show their support for union leaders.

Forty-five striking nurses and union officials stood and kneeled, arrayed in the wind and cold last night at Lourdes Medical Center of Burlington County, and prayed. Their 10 Hail Marys, a decade of the Rosary, were part of a candlelight vigil marking six months since they walked off the job at the Willingboro hospital. "I just want to be able to walk back in there again, that's all," said Teresa Laverty of Riverton, a union steward who has worked at the hospital for 49 years.

A Friday night car crash in West Conshohocken that claimed the lives of three young Philadelphia men has been ruled an accident, but investigators are working to determine the cause. Montgomery County Coroner Jeanne M. Ottinger said yesterday that the fatalities were the result of multiple trauma. The car was traveling at "a high rate of speed" when it slammed into a utility pole, Ottinger said. She could not say how fast the car was traveling on River Road. The crash is being investigated by West Conshohocken police.

They were sheltered from the rain by a canopy of trees, but not from the harsher elements of Pennsylvania politics and bureaucracy. So last night, the 10 remaining hunger strikers at Betak, the AIDS nursing home in West Mount Airy that faces a shutdown in two weeks for lack of funds, said they were ready to meet them head-on. During a candlelight vigil joined by about 100 supporters, the strikers renewed their vow to continue their group fast "until somebody in authority can come up here on this porch and say that Betak shall live," as David Fair put it. Yesterday, two strikers dropped out, their health too fragile.

Police Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson said last night that police hoped to make an arrest in the slaying of 13-year-old Jasmine McDonald within the week. Speaking at a candlelight vigil attended by several hundred neighborhood residents in the 5000 block of Ogden Street in West Philadelphia, where McDonald's body was found Friday in an abandoned house, Johnson said he had come to offer condolences to the family. "We will have an arrest hopefully this week," Johnson told the crowd.

Outside the rough stone walls of the Colosseum, where gladiators once fought to the death, a candlelight vigil was held last night to protest Virginia's execution of Derek Rocco Barnabei, Italy's latest symbol against capital punishment in America. Convicted in 1995 of raping and murdering his girlfriend, Barnabei, whose grandfather was born in Italy, was given a lethal injection just after 9 p.m. in the Greenville Correctional Center. The execution, which drew scant attention in the United States, was a widely known case in Italy.

Crime victims will be honored at a candlelight vigil at 6 p.m. Sunday at the Burlington County College Culinary Arts Center in Mount Holly. The event, sponsored by the office of Burlington County Prosecutor Robert D. Bernardi, marks the start of National Crime Victims' Rights Week, a weeklong recognition of victims. The public is encouraged to attend. This year's theme, "Extending the Vision: Reaching Every Victim," targets the need to expand services to all crime victims. According to national statistics from the Department of Justice, more than 50 percent of crimes are not reported each year.

In the slaying of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, Mayor Nutter saw a familiar theme that hit home. "Eighty-five percent of homicide victims in Philadelphia are black," he said Thursday night at a rally in LOVE Park. "How is it possible that thousands of black people are killed every year and no one says a word?" he asked. "If it's just black people, it doesn't register on the radar screen. Trayvon was assassinated. " Nutter headlined the antiviolence vigil, the third such local event in less than a week since the Feb. 26 slaying.

About 100 people gathered for a candlelight vigil Thursday evening in Tacony to call for heightened police presence at the site where a businessman was killed in January. Xiang Huang, 27, was shot to death Jan. 20 in front of his wife and baby during an attempted robbery of the takeout restaurant he and his wife owned, Jin House, at Longshore Avenue and Tulip Street. "This is all too common for Chinese immigrants in the city, and we have lived in silence and fear for too far," said Jian Wong, 55, Philadelphia Fujian Association president.

Each November, when Sister Helen Cole starts planning her annual candlelight vigil to remember Camden's homicide victims, she starts with the latest death and works backward, setting aside an hour for each person. She mails letters of invitation to victims' relatives and hopes the death toll doesn't rise. But each year, a handful of people are killed after the vigil is planned. Last year, a 31-year-old man was killed during the final day of the vigil, and he was remembered, too, sharing an hour with another victim.

A second man has been arrested in the fatal shooting of a 27-year-old man during an attempted robbery in Fishtown over the weekend, police said. A funeral service in the meantime is set for Friday morning for Shane Kelly, of Mayfair, a pharmacy technician specialist at Jefferson University Hospital. Kelly was shot and killed about 12:30 a.m. Sunday after he and his girlfriend were confronted by a pair of robbers on the 1300 block of East Hewson Street. Police first arrested and charged Ryan McMunus, 20, from the 2600 block of Sepviva Street in Kensington, with murder, robbery and related offenses in the killing of Kelly, 27. On Wednesday, they arrested Richard Smith, 19, of the 1600 block of Eyre Street in Fishtown and charged him in the robbery and killing.

Homicide victims and officers killed in the line of duty will be remembered on Thursday in Downingtown. The Crime Victims' Center of Chester County will hold its annual Candlelight Vigil and Memorial Service at 6:30 p.m. at the Central Presbyterian Church on West Uwchlan Avenue. The program will include remarks by family members of victims, as well as the reading of the list of homicide victims and fallen law enforcement personnel in Chester County. Weather permitting, participants will take a candlelight walk to the Victims' Memorial at The Ponds in nearby Kardon Park, where a Sky Care helicopter will do a fly-over.

The longtime boyfriend of 31-year-old Stacey Lee arrived at the couple's Point Breeze rowhouse Monday night after work. He immediately noticed something was not right. "The house light was on," said the boyfriend, 39, referring to a small fixture next to the front door. "It's never on. " The boyfriend of Stacey Lee, a transgender person, asked not to be identified for fear of jeopardizing his job. Police do not consider him a suspect, and said he was at work when she was killed.

THEY TOUCHED down at JFK Airport about 2 p.m. on July 2 to begin their "American adventure," eager to learn all they could about our culture before returning to Hungary in three weeks. Among the items on their packed itinerary was a trip to Nyack, N.Y., where the group of 13 students and two teachers was scheduled to go rowing on the Hudson River. Instead, they were thrown into the Delaware River Wednesday afternoon, when a 250-foot sludge barge owned by the city plowed over an amphibious sightseeing boat that had stalled.

Tara Brooks called her cousin Danielle Carter last week for one reason: To tell her she loved her. Carter played the voice mail last night at a candlelight vigil in front of Brooks' home on Upland Street near 61st, in Southwest Philadelphia. "I just called to say I love you," Brooks sang on Carter's voice mail, just like the Stevie Wonder song. Brooks, a 41-year-old grandmother, was shot and killed in a home-invasion robbery early yesterday, police said. Last night, about 30 of Brooks' family and friends came out to grieve and remember the woman they described as loving, kind and caring.