The late Delores Howard holds a DEA Purple Heart Award for her son, Wallie Jr., that she kept in her living room. Credit: Sean Kirst | Central Current

Two years ago, when Delores Howard died, I told her son Wayne a moment would come when I’d write about Delores, as I knew her. I was working for The Buffalo News at the time, and I want to say Wayne and I met at the Brooklyn Pickle while I stopped back in Syracuse, and he raised his hands in that everything-in-its-time way that Wayne has, and he said:

You’ll know when it’s right.

As in now.

Thirty-five years ago today, police Investigator Wallie Howard Jr. was shot to death while working undercover on an attempted drug buy in Syracuse. He was 31, killed by a 16-year-old from Brooklyn, and it is hard for me to describe for my own kids the kind of emotional impact his death had on this community.

If you were here at the time, you know. It was an impossibly beautiful blue sky October day, and I think many of us recall exactly where we were when we learned that Wallie had been shot. I was also 31 and a dad to young kids — at the same age, and a similar point of parenting, as Wallie — and from day one those parallels pulled me toward what seemed like a high journalistic responsibility:

It was important to write about Wallie, not only as the public legend he had already become, but as a human being doing his best to live his life, like the rest of us.

Wayne Howard and his mother, Delores, at Lake George in the 1990s. Credit: Courtesy Wayne Howard

I was a reporter then, for The Post-Standard. A few months after Wallie’s emotional funeral, through a mutual friend, I sent a note to Delores saying I wanted to take some time to try to write a piece about the way she knew Wallie as a son… to try and capture some of the everyday truths about a guy it was clear so many people loved so much.

Delores was always a private person. I would soon learn just how rarely she allowed her photo to be taken — which explains why several images with this column show only her hands. So I fully expected, once she received my note, she would say: No thanks.

Instead, she agreed to meet me for lunch, and she showed up at the old Brick Alley Grille House carrying a box of things precious to her oldest son — including his drumsticks and a baseball signed by Jackie Robinson that Wallie’s dad brought home for his kid years ago, after the baseball immortal visited Syracuse.

This is no overstatement: The moment — her grace in that meeting — changed my life in this city. Through Delores, whose trust and friendship of more than 30 years opened so many doors, I met not only Wayne and his sister Shelley but Tommy Seals — a police officer, a future city councilor and a childhood friend of Delores at the old Washington Irving Elementary School — and Wallie’s uncle Nate, a giant influence in his life, and an always-expanding circle of friends and cousins who were intensely close to Wallie in childhood, high school and within the police department.

My own kids were little, about to start their own journeys in the Syracuse city schools, and I discovered over the years that the chain of people brought my way, through Delores, extended into every corner of our lives — such as the absolute treasury of soulful guys who oversaw the scholastic oratory competition for the Dunbar American Legion Post.

The way our family locked into the rhythm of community in Syracuse was due, in no small part, to this one act of faith, based on a note from a stranger.

Delores Howard holds a favorite image of her son, Wallie Howard, which she always felt captured his personality; another family photo is superimposed upon it. Credit: Image courtesy Delores Howard

Our connection was anchored by the story I wrote a year after Wallie’s death. What I learned through Delores — and from Wayne and Shel and their cousins and from such confidants as Wallie’s close childhood friend and neighbor at the old Hilltop housing complex, fellow officer Steve Williams — was the sheer scope, brilliant joy and vast impact of Wallie Howard Jr. as a human being.

Thursday, in another visit to the Brooklyn Pickle, Wayne remembered how his brother “was always there to listen to me and offer advice,” a busy dad and rising star within the police department who made sure he was around for his mom and siblings. Wayne said it is impossible not to wonder how different everything would have been if Wallie had lived …

Certainly for Wallie’s children, Wallie III and Cyntia, and for this galaxy of people who loved the guy for his humor and strength and lightning-fast ability to see and adapt and adjust to whatever jolt in life seemed to be coming, a giant part of why his sudden death in such shattering fashion — for all those who knew him well — seemed so inconceivable.

Delores Howard: a well-loved family photo. Credit: Courtesy Wayne Howard

What happened “caused a lot of damage to our family,” Wayne said. But he said “there are people all over the world being damaged” every day by violence. Thirty-five later, he said the only way to cope is by taking “it one day at a time,” to try and focus on the moment — and looking forward, toward where every new decision might lead.

As for Delores, my friendship with her evolved over the years. I became part of the crew of loyalists who would sometimes go to her Clyde Avenue home to rake the leaves — outings often organized by former police chief Leigh Hunt, whose deep loyalty and kinship to Delores continued until Leigh died in 2022, a loss that hit her hard — and we soon learned she particularly enjoyed lunch at the old Broadway Café, with a specific interest in the brisket sandwich.

Wallie Howard III (right) with his grandparents, Wallie Sr. and Delores Howard. Credit: Family photo courtesy Wayne Howard

We would go there, and catch up, and she would want to know what was new in our lives — because Delores, who carried so much, always listened.

In the last years of her life, her longtime kidney disease finally led to dialysis. Wayne drove her to treatment three times a week, making a quick stop together each day at Dunkin’ before he hustled to his next shift as a crew leader in the city’s department of public works — a routine with his mom he still finds himself missing, every morning.

Eventually, initially reluctantly, those health concerns caused Delores to give up her house and move in with her daughter Shel — where Wayne said she was soon as happy as he’d seen her in years, simply for the chance for easy conversation with her daughter and with the grandchildren who were always nearby.

Yet the aching repercussions from her oldest son’s death never really ended. In 2020, Robert Lawrence — convicted of shooting Wallie — was released after 29 years in prison, based on a Supreme Court ruling that mandatory life sentences were unconstitutional for minors. In 2014, during a federal resentencing in Utica, Delores went to court and listened to her daughter Shel, so close to Wallie throughout life, tell Lawrence how much pain their family had endured from his actions, while pleading with him to “get right” with his life.

Seven years later, Delores was intensely aware of the news when President Donald Trump commuted the sentence of Jaime Davidson, freeing him from prison years after he was convicted of murder for planning the robbery that led to Wallie’s death.

By that time, Delores had told me that whatever we spoke of in private, she had no wish to speak publicly about the case — a decision I will continue to honor here. Wayne said he struggled at first with Davidson going free, but it has now been 35 years since Wayne lost his brother, and his only way of moving forward, as a 60-year-old dad, depends on four words:

“I let it go.”

On a community level, today involves a remembrance of vast loss and sacrifice from a specific act of violence — because whatever Wallie would have done with his career, no one doubts he would have done it exceedingly well, the same precedent he always set.

What Wayne said his family never forgets is how Wallie’s death was part of a chain of intimate grief: In 1985, Wayne’s oldest sister, Stephanie, died at 27 of kidney disease. Five years later, Wallie’s first-born son, Najee, died as an infant – only a few years before Wayne and Shel lost their dad, Wallie Sr., who had been divorced from their mom for years.

Wallie Howard Jr., in childhood. Credit: Courtesy Delores Howard

“It was a lot,” Wayne said, “and it affected me in more ways than I can tell you.”

He was particularly grateful at the time for the late Gwen Dowdell, a police detective and a friend of his brother’s who in many ways became a fierce anchor and guardian in Wayne’s life. “She was the third biggest champion I ever had,” he said, putting her in the same circle as his mother and Wallie, and he remembers — at times of particular struggle in his life — how Dowdell was always there, as a mentor, guide and force.

She died at 72, last December. Wayne still grieves that loss.

Delores had a space, off her living room, where she kept a shelf that carried photos of children, grandchildren, friends and family – those here and those lost. Years after Wallie’s death, she told me that in the way a mother recognizes the footsteps of all of her kids, there was a singular sound and energy to the way he always came through the front door as a grown man, the rhythm of his feet in the living room so distinctive she always knew just who it was.

If she happened to be cooking or doing dishes in the kitchen, she immediately recognized he was in the house, even before – as he always did – he called out:

“Mom.”

Decades after his death, she would be in the kitchen and hear the door and sometimes, out of nowhere, for maybe a second – reacting instinctively to sound and memory, rather than hard knowledge – she would think it was her oldest son, coming home.

Two years ago today, Delores was buried alongside Wallie at Oakwood Cemetery. Wayne, as he always does on Oct. 30, will go up there to see them. He will be thinking of how he shared a childhood bedroom with a big brother who always embraced that role, and of a mother who worked relentlessly at a sequence of tiring jobs in maintenance, health care and cleaning to take care of her kids.

Even as a great-grandmother, she was “always fussing about us,” Wayne said – until the day she died at 84.

What he witnessed and remembers is how — when it counted — his mom and his brother were always there for someone else. If you ask him on this hard day about the best way to show honor toward his mother and his siblings, he simply offers the imperative he holds out for himself.

“Don’t forget,” Wayne said, speaking less about this date on the calendar, but of the way they lived.

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Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Central Current. He has been an Upstate journalist for more than 50 years. He held his first reporting job as a teenager and worked for newspapers in Dunkirk, Niagara...