Thomas Powell will be laid to rest today. If the name does not ring a bell, he is the man known to most news watchers as the popular Aurora barber gunned down in a strip mall parking lot nine nights ago. To his family and friends, he is known as much more than that, and that's the first thing they say to strangers who ask about him.

Since I am one of the people who did not know Thomas Powell, upon hearing of his murder I thought primarily of his occupation. He was a barber, and a barber, like the ice cream man or the mailman or the preacher, is a person we share, someone who binds a group of strangers and therefore occupies a special place in a community's heart.

I think this again when I visit the barber shop where Powell held court - and hold court he apparently did. His station is laden with bouquets, and cards and tributes cover his mirror. One of his friends is folding T-shirts screened with Powell's picture that are selling for $20 apiece to raise money for his family and for the funeral.

A teenager comes to the front door. I don't think he even opens it. He sees the news pasted to the glass, the words, "we'll miss you, Thomas," and the next thing I know, he's bending over as if he is going to get sick, and he stumbles from the door and sinks to the ground and cries.

"You know what makes me so mad?" Mindi Clayton, the young woman folding T-shirts tells me.

"They didn't rob him. They didn't take his car. They just shot him and drove away, and while they got nothing from him, they took everything from us."

A vigil was held for Powell last Wednesday at 9 p.m. in the parking lot at Mississippi Avenue and Sable Boulevard where he was shot while waiting to rendezvous with his 7-year-old son.

Between 200 and 300 people showed up, men, women, children, black and white, many of them crying, candles held aloft.

One of the vigil's organizers, Terrance Roberts, the executive director of Prodigal Son, a gang-prevention effort, took the microphone and asked how many more vigils would have to be held before people came together to stop the violence.

"We are literally committing suicide," he said. "Yes, there is social and economic injustice, but we are doing this to ourselves. We love you, brothers and sisters, but, man, this stuff has got to come to an end. Anybody here, you can't look me in the eye and tell me Thomas had a beef with nobody. Thomas was a good person. We all got our issues, but Thomas had no enemies and he still got gunned down. Where is the hope?

"We have 200, 300 people here tonight. Can we change something, guys? You know how many kids we have buried from Denver and Aurora this year? Can we change something? Do you know how many of your children are putting a blue or red bandanna in their pocket? Can we change something? The power is in the people."

Roberts spotted three little boys holding candles. He called them over.

"Look at these guys," he said. "Look at them. Somebody is going to kill them if we don't do something about this. Look at them. Are you looking at them? In 10 years, somebody may shoot this boy here because he is wearing a red T-shirt. Look at these babies. We got no political power. We ain't got no economic clout. We got dead babies and candles. Look at them. Someone is going to kill them if we don't do something."

I drove away with the image of Powell's mother, sitting on the asphalt, crying on the spot where her son was shot.

After the vigil, I ask Roberts why he thinks Powell was killed by gang members. He says the shooting bears the signs. Powell was wearing a red T-shirt, a gang color. A car (white, compact) was seen speeding from the lot.

Aurora police investigating the shooting haven't ruled anything out. They're asking eyewitnesses to come forward. In the absence of knowledge, the air has filled with speculation.

"I think there's more to it than it was gang-related," one of Powell's friends, Eric Randle, says. "That it was gangs is just something people say because it was a black man and he was wearing a red shirt and was shot. You have some people where you say, well, it might have happened 'cause of their lifestyle, but Thomas? Are you serious?"

No one is saying Powell was without faults. He was arrested in January on suspicion of intent to distribute marijuana. According to the police report, he told the officer who pulled him over on a traffic stop that he had a half-pound of the drug in his backpack. He was scheduled to appear in court on the charge last week.

Do you think there was a connection, I ask his friends. No, they tell me.

"He wasn't a perfect person," Roberts says. "No one is. Even presidents aren't perfect. But, I'm telling you, they gunned down a genuinely good dude. They murdered him. . . .

"That barber shop will never be the same. Killing him, that was a lot deeper than people imagine."

Clayton, the young woman who was folding T-shirts, tells me Powell was her child's godfather.

"The thing all of us want more than anything is answers," she says. "I don't think it was drug-related. I don't think it was gang-related. I think it's easier for people to think it was; that way they can say, 'Oh, that's over there, that's their problem.' Because, see, the alternative means it can't be dismissed. It means it's our problem."

Powell was 30 years old. He was a husband. He was a father to three children, one still a baby. He was close enough to his two brothers to have their names tattooed on the backs of his hands. He had close friends he had known since elementary school. In the barbershop, they prefer to talk about how he not only made people look good, but feel good, and how men and women would wait an hour for him to cut their hair or shape their eyebrows. He was his own person, they tell me, confident and charming, with a humor quick and sly.

"Here's Thomas," his friend, Leland, tells me. "One day, these two women come into the shop and they look a little raggedy, you know. Hair's a mess and all, and Thomas is working on someone else and no one is saying anything and then Thomas says, 'How y'all brothers doing today?' "

Last week, Leland and his brother, Gene, and another of Powell's best friends went to the mortuary, and they cut Powell's hair in preparation for the funeral. Gene did most of the cutting and Leland swept up after him, and they told some stories and laughed.

Thomas would have done the same for us, Leland says.

Yeah, Gene tells me later, "he would have done it by himself, too. It took three of us of to do what he could have done alone."

How to help

• Donations are being accepted at Colorado State Employees Credit Union branches in Denver and Aurora.

griegot@RockyMountainNews.com

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