Every night on my walk home I walk through Art Alley, an alleyway covered, wall to wall, in graffiti. It’s your typical stuff, names, quotes, maybe a tribute from time. They have tried to paint over it countless times, but there was no point. Within a day the walls would be covered. They even tried putting up cameras at some point; which didn’t work at all because they just painted over it and, or, broke it. And no one wants to stand and watch becuase, “ you don’t know the typos of people that like to spray paint, what if they are gangsters, hoodlums, or even criminals.”

It worries a lot of people that I walk thru here, especially at night. During the day the alley is more of a tourist attraction, but due to all the reasons stated before no one likes to come here at night. I couldn’t really care less, a lot of the regulars know me as a regualr, so they don’t scare me much. Most of them are just teens trying some new, just finding a way to express themselves. every once and a while tourist try to paint things too, but they normally paint over other peoples things in the process(which if you don’t know is a no-go in the spray painting community.) So the regulars try to scare them out, or give them a taste of their own medicine.

Most of the art there I can acknowledged was cool, even if it was just a tag with a cool font. Most of the art would be different each week, due to tourist covering up stuff and regulars not likening their old work so they cover it up themselves.

One night when I was making my commute through the alley I saw this huge mural of one of the ‘regulars’ circling around his head it said, “You will be remember”. It turns out, the previous night the cops came to try and cut back all the graffiti, during this time Bart, the regular, who now had a mural, was there. He was cooperative, but the cops still shot him (They are calling it a hate crime).

I remember I stood there staring at that mural for at least 5 minutes before I finally moved. His mural made headlines, it turns out his parents didn’t know he got shot, becuase after the cops shot him they just left taking the body with him. There was only one witness, since everyone ran away when the cops showed up. When he told people at first they didn’t believe him, but once the moral was up people started to ask around and they couldn’t find him. A missing persons report came out and one of the cops confessed, stating, “ I can’t live with this anymore, we need to to go jail. that kid didn’t deserve this, and we don’t deserve to be let go Scott free. I am sorry to the family and friends of Bart #########. And I am sorry boys for turning us in.”

The cops all lost their badges. They were able to find some body-cam footage to prove everything. The cop that came clean was, and I say this lightly, appreciated. (In he since that he came clean and could’ve gotten away with it, and he was very cooperative in court, but what he did was wrong and shouldn’t be forgotten or forgiven that easily.) In this body-cam footage they found out it was the cops partner that shot him and had the idea to hide the body. Becuase of this they gave the firsrt cop 2 years in prison and 3 years on probation along with not being able to be a cop again (he also had a really hard, more hard than normal, time getting a new job). While the second cop was sentence to life, he had a bail, but not even his family was willing to pay for it.

Becuase of this incident I was banded from walking there by my mother. Before I was going to move away I decided to walk through the alley one more time. When I walk through I saw the mural was still there, it was like it wasn’t even touched. I looked at it and smiled, it had been 2 years since then. I guess he really will be remembered.