More than 1,300 people attended the funeral of Thomas Powell on Monday. I wasn't there, but I talked to his mother later and she said she can't stop thinking about her mortally wounded son stumbling across the parking lot to the restaurant where he collapsed. "I keep wondering what he was thinking as he made his way there," she said.

I keep thinking about Powell, too. Interviewing his friends, visiting the store where he bought a shirt before he walked out into the parking lot and was shot, stopping at the restaurant where a nurse eating dinner tried to save his life, I find myself disoriented. I'm struck by the sense that I have slipped into an alternate reality, one in which my definition of normal does not stand and in which fear is palpable.

It is disturbing. Hubris has allowed me to believe that because I have lived in a place 10 years, I know it; I know its neighborhoods and the life of those neighborhoods. The conversations are a reminder that my city is not everyone else's city because in my city I do not worry that someone will shoot down my children for wearing red.

Among those attending a vigil for Powell last week were the parents of Marcus Mason. Marcus was killed on July 22 as he walked with his girlfriend near East 35th Avenue and Olive Street in Denver. Police believe perhaps 20 people witnessed the shooting. They say they are having trouble finding witnesses or gaining their cooperation. Police in Aurora, where Powell was killed on Aug. 4, say they have the same problem.

I don't know if this is part of the "stop snitchin' " campaign or if people fear retaliation. I can tell you this: Marcus Mason's mother is Josephine Baez. His father is Carlos Mason. They live in Montbello, in a two-story home with family pictures on the shelves and their son's ashes in an urn on their fireplace mantel. Marcus had just turned 17. When he didn't come home, his family went looking for him. When his mother returned to their house, the police were waiting.

His parents believe Marcus may have been shot because his shirt had blue stripes. Marcus' girlfriend told them the shooter said nothing. He walked past them, turned and fired into the back of Marcus' head.

Baez tells me: "It just makes me mad to know that, to know that . . . " She starts to sob.

"I picture him out there, snickering, his friends patting him on the back, telling him 'good job,' " Baez says, her tears giving way to anger. "And people know. People know and they just don't want to say anything.

"I hope this guy gets caught, that's all. He was tough enough to pull that trigger, let him be tough enough to look me in the face and tell me he shot my son."

They repeat what was said at the vigil: The community has to take charge and, to start, parents must be better parents. Mason says this as a father struggling with his own guilt, as a man who knows some choices can never be undone. He spent 11 years, most of Marcus' life, in prison for robbery. He was released 11 days before Marcus was killed.

The person who killed Marcus, he says, threw away his life, too. In the absence of an explanation, in the wait for an arrest, fear has taken root, he says. "Some neighborhoods are being held hostage," he tells me. "It's terrible. Just terrible."

Someone knows something.

Do you get frustrated because people don't come forward, I ask Terrance Roberts, the executive director of The Prodigal Son, a gang intervention and prevention effort. He organized Powell's vigil.

No, he says. "If people are scared to talk, I understand. I get frustrated with the whole, 'don't talk to anybody 'cause it's the white man, it's the establishment, it's the police, to blame' when I can guarantee you that 90 percent of Latinos are killed by Latinos and 90 percent of African Americans are killed by African Americans. That can be overcome, instead we blame all these problems on everyone else."

I run this by two black police officers. They say they understand why some people are afraid, especially given the recent murders of one witness in Denver and two in Aurora.

But, one officer points out, such murders are anomalies; people are testifying every day in criminal cases, and there remains shelter in reporting crime anonymously. The other says: "I guess I see things much more simply. It's not that Latinos are killing Latinos or African Americans are killing African Americans that make it more of a crisis. What's troubling me is that we don't seem to value life. Our value system has become distorted. We all have a responsibility to each other and somehow that has gotten lost along the way."

I would tell you that all of this is true and none of it is simple. As of July 18 at 5:30 p.m., 30 people had been killed this year in Denver. Arrests have been made or warrants issued in half of those cases. The number of homicides has been dropping since 2004, when 91 people were killed. This is of much comfort in my city and of little in the other, the one occupied by mothers and fathers who wonder why and who make space on the mantels of their fireplaces for the ashes of their sons.

griegot@RockyMountainNews.com