Brendan Halpin knew Adrian Gonzalez, the 17-year-old shot to death early Saturday near Egleston Square. He is so outraged that he has to write an elegy for him:

Adrian was a person who mattered. His death is a tragedy, and the fact that it happens so often should make us outraged, not inured.

How do you feel about living in a country where stuff like this happens? What are you doing to try to stop it?

What I ask of you is to think of Adrian Gonzalez not as a statistic or as a representative of his ethnicity or his neighborhood. Think of him as an individual: a son, a brother, a friend, or as I do, as a cute, energetic, kindhearted third grader who never got the chance to grow up.