Rosa completed the program five years ago. Now, emulating Ulrich’s approach, Rosa pulls participants out of bed and drives them to work beginning at 7:30 a.m. (“There’s a lot of cursing,” she said.) She takes their calls on nights and weekends and buys them lunch at TGI Friday’s when they don’t feel like talking.
“You have to be tough with them and can’t show weakness -- but try to be understanding, too,” she said. “I can’t push them too much, because then they won’t trust me.”
Beat cops and probation officers, too, trust her with information about people on all sides of gang conflicts. Because of that information’s sensitivity, she has set her phone to delete messages every 24 hours, in case she loses it.
Jonathan Velasquez, Rosa’s boyfriend of nine years and father of her two sons, said the job consumes her.
Rosa, with long, light brown hair and a scar above her lip, doesn’t disagree. “This is my way to give back to this community I once helped destroy,” she said.
Rosa is one of Roca’s top-performing workers, according to its metrics, including how many times she reinforces the organization’s message in talks with the men in her caseload.
Stolen Sneakers
Rosa had those conversations with Aguilar earlier in the weekend of the shooting. Learning that someone had stolen some marijuana, $400 and a pair of Air Jordan sneakers from one of Aguilar’s friends, Rosa had spent much of the weekend calling her young people to emphasize the consequences of retaliation -- death or jail, either option severing the men from their families and their ability to earn a paycheck.
Aguilar had little room for error.
Raised mostly by his mother and grandmother in Revere, next to Chelsea, he was 12 when his parents divorced, he said. An uncle who stood in as a father to him was stabbed to death the same year.