Vigil held in Jericho for murder victims

Past noon Sunday, in a Jericho hall usually rented for weddings and parties, the first reader took the microphone at a candlelight vigil for murder victims. and began to name the dead.

There were more than 600. There were so many it took a team of readers more than 30 minutes to name them all, so many that by the end, the candles were sputtering out.

Fred Klein, the former Nassau district attorney who prosecuted many of the cases that came to trial, was there, almost unnoticed, in a back row, as well as former police Commissioner Lawrence Mulvey and other law enforcement officials.

Mostly, though, the audience was survivors, members of the Long Island/Metro Area Parents and Other Survivors of Murdered Victims. They were a cross section of Long Island: white, black, Hispanic, toddlers and octogenarians, united by an experience that chapter leader Chris Baumgardt likens to being "put in a paper bag, shaken up and thrown out, and you don't know where you are, you don't have any answers, you don't know where to look or turn."

Baumgardt, 62, a retired school bus driver, has been going to the group's meetings regularly for 17 years, and has spent much of the last week at the trial of Christian Tarantino, the man accused of killing her husband, armored car guard Julius Baumgardt, in 1994 during a Muttontown robbery.

In an interview, she described the shock and horror that follow the killing of a loved one giving way to "a sort of limbo" as the criminal justice and parole systems take over the case.

"It will never go away," she said. "You will never have closure." But there is, she said, an "inner peace" that can come from talking to other people undergoing the same experience. She considers herself one of the lucky ones. The people who stabbed Pedro Merrero, 23, to death on a Bronx street two years ago are still at large, said his brother, John Roman, 31. He is raising his brother's children. "I look at them and I see him through them," he said.

Zelda and Fred Kessner of Valley Stream were there. Their daughter, Sheryl, was shot to death 31 years ago in California.

"I wouldn't have made it without the group," Zelda Kessner said. Sheryl's killer is still alive, she said, and "every breath he takes is an insult to me."