When he was studying for his bachelor’s degree in sociology, Melquain (Mel) Jatelle Anderson transferred from a community college to John Jay College of Criminal Justice. His mother had attended John Jay College, where she had obtained her master’s in public administration. Mel wanted to get his bachelor’s degree there and then go on to law school—but the 27-year-old never got that chance.
As he walked towards a local store with headphones on near Downtown Brooklyn’s Farragut Houses, Melquain was shot to death by 24-year-old Tavon Diaz. On Oct. 25, 2017, Diaz got a gun, ran up to Melquain and shot him in the back. He then stood over him and shot him four more times. Diaz shot him solely because Mel was friends with someone Diaz was having problems with.
Melquain was Michelle Barnes-Anderson’s only child. She was initially devastated by his murder, but she said that as she saw how gun violence not only takes away an individual but also overwhelms families, she realized she had to do something about it. Barnes-Anderson created the Melquain Jatelle Anderson Foundation (MJAF), a nonprofit community service organization designed to honor her son’s ambitions to give back to the community.
The MJAF provides emotional and financial support to families who have suffered from gun violence. The organization holds a regular set of in-person and virtual get-togethers for the mothers and siblings of gun violence victims.
“We support anybody dealing with gun violence, and we’ve even moved beyond gun violence,” Barnes-Anderson said. “We deal with violence, period, because some of the mothers—their children were stabbed or died in a car accident. We moved beyond that because death is death, grief is grief. It doesn’’t necessarily matter how it happens; you’re still going through something.”
When Melquain was murdered, he had a 3.5 GPA in college. He also had a pregnant girlfriend. Barnes-Anderson didn’t think it was fair that because he was murdered, all the successes he had in his life were gone, too. She worked with her sisters, Xenia Barnes and Khadedra Miller, and other members of MJAF to begin pushing politicians to pass legislation that would allow New York State schools to grant posthumous degrees to the families of students who were killed and would have been eligible for graduation.
With the help of Assemblymember Phara Soufrant-Forrest and State Senator Jabari Brisport, Mel’s Law was passed in October 2023.
“This bill is quite simple,” AM Soufrant-Forrest said during a posthumous degree get-together held by MJAF on May 28: “Every college institution within the CUNY and SUNY system has to have a policy about posthumous degrees, for not only victims of crimes, but victims of a disease such as cancer or traumatic events. Understand that when you send your child to college, you’re not sending that child alone. You’re sending that child with all your prayers, your love, your hope, you’re sending them on the path that you don’t know but only God knows. And you’re backing it up with some dollars, so when that child is taken away before their time, we know it’s all on God’s time, but when that child is taken away from us on this earth, what do we have left of all that hope and that investment?
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“Institutions should have a policy for that. It’s not about the degree, it’s about the legacy.”
Posthumous degrees are important for the families of victims, Barnes-Anderson said, because they remind family members about what that child’s life was about. “It helps the siblings and the children to move forward, to have hope, and to have a vision for themselves, like yes, they can do it—they didn’t finish, but I have to finish it out. It’s very important to have that be the last paper that goes on your wall and not just a death certificate. Let’s give them the posthumous degrees to show that this is what they were like, let this be the conversation. That would be the piece on the wall that people would go ‘Oh, wow, that’s what your someone was about?’ That’s the conversation to have.”
Engraving Melquain’s name in history
Since Barnes-Anderson’s mother lived at Farragut, Melquain had grown up visiting the Houses and had a few friends there. Diaz, the boy who shot him, was new to Farragut; he hadn’t been raised there. “I don’t even understand how this guy, with something against one of my son’s friends, he felt like, ‘Oh, that’ll be a way to hurt the friend.’
“He told the police my son was just collateral damage,” Barnes-Anderson remarked. “He had nothing against my son. That, I don’t even understand, I don’t even understand it.”
Diaz was caught soon after, convicted of second-degree murder, and sentenced to 20 years in prison, but his act of anger left long standing ripples of despair.
Barnes-Anderson said she was initially so devastated by her son’s loss that she couldn’t function. “I believe they caught [Diaz] a month later. I couldn’t tell you the exact time because I was going through so much. I actually was hospitalized four different times for trying to commit suicide. I just couldn’t deal with it. I was…heavily drinking and using my medication at the same time. I could not accept that this was happening. To this day, I still don’t accept it; I look at my son as if he’s still alive.”
One of the ways Barnes-Anderson trained herself to cope was by looking at how her son’s murder affected her family. She saw that one of Mel’s younger cousins had been sent off to college soon after the incident, with practically no one to help him manage his pain. “Nobody was looking at him because everybody was so worried about me, so that got to me. I was like, I need to come out of this: I’m not hurting everybody around me while I’m hurting. Grief is just (that) you don’t know what to do with the breath you breathe when you’re going through that. You lose your child, it’s like, what do I do? I don’t even know what to do.
“But I had to figure it out: I got to make this boy’s name great because he didn’t get the chance to do it. And that’s how I just moved to trying to prevent another child, another mother, from going through what I’m going through.”
Through MJAF, Barnes-Anderson has sponsored employment training programs, given away books, and subsidized “Still a Mother” Mother’s Day gift baskets for victims’ parents. MJAF gives out scholarships and puts on art shows during Disrupting The Hate Week, October 21 through 25 (dates which mark the day Mel was born and the day he was murdered), a week that Mayor Eric Adams issued a proclamation for in 2022, making it Disrupting The Hate Week throughout New York City.
One of her greatest efforts was publication of the book “The Sky Has Caring Eyes,” for her granddaughter, Melkenzye Anderson, who was born a few months after Mel, the child’s father, was slain. The book was designed to help small children talk about and understand death.
“I didn’t want her to live in this shadow of ‘I don’t have a dad,’ so she thinks he lives in the sky, he sleeps on the cloud,” she said. “With the book, she talks to him and when she wants to have a visit with him, she takes a nap, and she feels like he comes to her in her dreams.
“I have to give her something to be happy about and not just feel she doesn’t have a father. She feels like she still has him, even though she’s learning that she’’ll never see him because he’s in the sky.”