MOTHER SAYS SLAIN SON'S VIRTUES BEING OVERLOOKED

Dennis Richmond's mother, her boy shot dead in the street at age 21, wants
it known he wasn't a ``monster.'' ``I want people to be fair. They didn't
know him. He was a young man. He had a heart as big as all outdoors,''
Lillie Richmond, 42, said Thursday at her home, 2017 S. Park St.

She was upset by a Wisconsin State Journal story pointing out her son's
extensive criminal history. Police say Richmond's death likely was related
to that history and that he probably was gunned down by someone he knew. No
one has been arrested.

``People over this way, they knew he'd take his shirt off his back if you
needed it. He would grab a puppy and give it love and kindness, before he
would to an adult,'' she said. ``If you be at the funeral, you'll see how
well he was loved, that he wasn't the monster the paper portrayed him to
be.''

Richmond had a juvenile record, plus adult convictions some of them
multiple for battery, obstructing police, hit and run, drug possession and
criminal damage to property.

He was slain early last Saturday at Center and Fisher streets, not far from
his mother's small, gray bungalow. He had been released from jail March 31
and worked at a car wash. The night before his death, he took a young woman
to her high school prom.

Richmond was the youngest of five children brought by Lillie Richmond to
Madison, when she fled St. Louis in 1978.

``It got so dangerous there, I wanted to move to a better and safer place
for my children,'' she said. ``Madison was so beautiful when I first came
up here, I just fell in love with it.''

She doesn't find Madison beautiful anymore.

So many people fled urban ghettos for Madison's safety and opportunity,
that some crime and violence inevitably tagged along, Lillie Richmond said.
``Now, there's some really mean, nasty people here,'' she said. ``It's
nothing like when I first got here.''

Dennis Richmond spent his high school years at the Ethan Allen reform
school for boys. ``He did graduate from there,'' his mother said.

``I did basically everything I could, to turn him around,'' she sighed.
``He grew up, basically, on Simpson Street, and we had a fire there, so we
moved to Bayview (apartments) and then we moved to Somerset (Circle). And
it looked like all hell broke loose over there.''

She grappled with how to explain exactly how and why her son, whom she
loves as any mother would, slid deep into trouble.

``I don't know,'' she said, finally.

"They grow up so fast and things change. I did the best I I could. I was
always worried about him, always. He had a bad temper. He was always
standing up for somebody else - that's where most of his problems were."

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)