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Wearing Their Respects

Tribune photo by Kelvin Ma

Edwarnesha Gaye, niece of Felicia Lynette Hines, holds a picture of her aunt at a rally calling for community help in solving her unsolved murder. Other friends and family members wear T-shirts with Hines' picture.

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By SARAH HOYE, The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 13, 2008

TAMPA - It has been six years since someone shot and killed Felicia Hines, the 24-year-old victim in a homicide that remains unsolved.

But even now, at least once a week, her sister, Keisha Sutton, wears one of several T-shirts she owns that honor Hines.

Sutton, 29, wore one in September when she spoke at a Tampa rally for unsolved slayings. Her family also attended. They all arrived in matching white T-shirts stamped with an oversized photo of Hines resting her chin on folded hands. The text read: "In Memory of Felicia Lynette Hines 7/6/77-12/7/01."

"I wear the shirts because she should not be forgotten, and she should be here on a daily basis," Sutton says, adding she hopes the image of her sister may help solve the case by enticing people with information to come forward. "I can look down and have her there. ... I cannot let her rest without her killer being brought to justice."

Media coverage, particularly of funerals, has placed a spotlight on memorial T-shirts in the Tampa Bay area. Following the unsolved slaying of Cedric "C.J." Mills - a Jefferson High School football star shot at his home last April - friends and family wore T-shirts emblazoned with the young man's image, a tribute they continue today.

The custom started in the early 1990s in black communities following the crack epidemic, which infiltrated inner cities and resulted in an increase in homicides and drug overdoses. The shirts quickly became the norm among gang members and eventually trickled into the community at large.

The trend has spread outside urban areas and into the suburbs. It has also grown beyond memorializing just homicide victims and now is used to commemorate others who die in an untimely fashion, such as car accident victims and soldiers killed in action. And it has gone beyond T-shirts, too, with memorial tattoos and car window decals.

The action of wearing the shirts is part tombstone and part testimonial, says Karla Holloway, an English professor at Duke University.

"Our children want to have their say in these moments. This refusal to let death end is our children calling attention to this loss ... they force strangers to take notice," says Holloway, author of the cultural burial rituals book "Passed On: African American Mourning Stories." "These children are grieving, and they are, psychologically, helping themselves when we society have not."

Anequa Williams of Tampa immediately had a tank top made in honor of her 21-year-old cousin, Kennethia Keenan, after Keenan was shot and killed in June. Williams, 25, keeps the fading memorial, adorned with a photo taken three weeks before the death, folded neatly in a chest of drawers.

"I was in total disbelief when I got the news. I just needed something for myself," she says, pausing. "It was the first time we had experienced anything like this. I did it so I can always have a memory of her."

A Cry For Help

Despite claims the shirts may glamorize death, crime and mayhem, they are a cry for help, says Brett Mervis, an anthropology doctoral student at the University of South Florida. When a friend of Mervis' was stabbed to death in 1994, he and other friends wore memorial T-shirts in the victim's honor.

"It's an extension of paying your respects, and it's a cry for recognition," says Mervis, who is researching urban youth culture for his dissertation, including the use of memorial T-shirts. "It's like, this is what's going on in our community, this is what's afflicting us, and yet nothing has been done about it."

The shirts are public mourning and social criticism, similar to roadside memorials following car accidents, Mervis adds.

"They are essentially shrines," he says. "I mean, how many more black and brown faces have to be memorialized on T-shirts before we start investigating this?"

The demand for the shirts rises when the homicide rate increases or when someone popular, such as Mills, or famous, such as rapper Tupac Shakur, is killed.

Tampa is no exception when it comes to violence. The city had 28 murders last year. That compares with 25 in 2006, according to Tampa police. In 2006, the national murder rate increased 1.8 percent from 2005, according to the Uniform Crime Report released by the U.S. Department of Justice.

"I wish this story would die, but it doesn't. We ought to think about how we're burying our children," says Holloway. "The graveyard memorial is walking toward you at the mall."

A Growing Business

With the shirts becoming an increasing trend among urbanites, it makes death a viable business for Tampa printing shop owners who play an essential role in the fashion statement.

"You know when they come, it's how they look, it's how they ask," says Victor Couture, owner of Fly Couture, a custom clothier at University Mall in "Suitcase City," a transient neighborhood that's no stranger to crime or death. "It creeps me out a bit; I mean, someone just died."

Couture says "RIP" shirts were one of the first custom orders he received when he opened his clothing store last fall. A young Tampa man had been killed over the weekend, and a group of his friends - close to 15 deep - came to Couture's store. They wanted memorial T-shirts made for them to wear to the funeral.

Couture doesn't have specifics about the death. He didn't want to know what happened. He says he's there to provide a service, regardless of how unsettling some orders may be. His store makes an estimated 60 memorial T-shirts a month. Depending on the level of customization and labor needed, the price can range from $20 to $250 per shirt.

The 32-year-old business owner is among a handful of Tampa vendors making T-shirts memorializing the death of loved ones. Another is Tony "Tru Love" Robinson, the animated, fast-talking owner of Street Legends at Tampa Flea Market on Fowler Avenue. He charges an average of $20 to $30 per shirt.

"I try not to get attached," the 40-year-old Tampa resident laments with a thick New York accent, adding he stopped tallying the "picture tees" he makes.

"It's making me realize that we have a real problem, and we're losing a lot of males to violence."

Tribune researcher Stephanie Pincus contributed to this report. Reporter Sarah Hoye can be reached at (813) 259-7832 or shoye@tampatrib.com.

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