When Violence Hits Home: A Word for Rochester After the Roth Street Killing

On Monday night, September 21, another Rochester family got the knock on the door that no family should ever get. A 28-year-old man was rushed to Strong Memorial Hospital and never came home. I did not know Dynell Babers-White. But he was our neighbor — a young man living in northeast Rochester, in a house on Roth Street just north of Clifford Avenue. And when violence takes one of our neighbors, it takes something from all of us.

News like this moves through a city in a particular way. A text, a post, something overheard at the corner store: did you hear about Roth Street? A street name you have driven past a hundred times becomes a wound. You think about his mother, his people, the empty chair at every gathering from now on. Grief, in a city, is rarely private. It ripples.

I write this as a church planter, days from laun

The night shift of grief: learning to lament

What happened on Roth Street

Grief is the right first response

Christians in Rochester don't need a policy answer for everything before we're allowed to grieve. Some of us were raised in churches where sadness felt like a lack of faith. It is not. The Bible gives us a whole book of lament, and "How long, O Lord?" is one of the most repeated prayers in Scripture. God did not edit it out. He canonized it.

Weeping with those who weep is not weakness; it is obedience (Romans 12:15). And we have a Savior who wept. "Jesus wept" (John 1

Preach to your own soul

The night shift of grief: learning to lament

The book of Psalms does something most of our churches are afraid to do. It lets grief talk for a long time. Psalm 88 is the darkest psalm in the Bible — the psalmist's final word is literally "darkness." God left that in Scripture. He did not require a happy ending before He would accept the prayer. That tells you something about how God receives our sorrow over Rochester: He is not waiting for us to get to the bright side. He is near in the psalm that ends in the dark.

Lament is not complaining. Complaining says God is wrong. Lament says God is good and the world is wrong, and I am bringing the gap

The anger beneath the anger

Something haunts me about this story: the two men shared a home. Not a stranger on a dark street — housemates, an argument that spiraled into something irreversible. That detail should stop every one of us, because most of us know what it is to be angry under our own roof.

Most violence doesn't start with monsters. It starts with ordinary people, ordinary anger, and a moment where someone reaches for a weapon instead of walking away. The first murder in the Bible wasn't a war. It was between brothers. The line between anger and violence runs through the human heart, not between good people and bad people.

James writes, "Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God" (James 1:19-20). Quick to hear — listen before you react. Slow to speak — don't let the first hot sentence become the last word of someone's life. Slow to anger — because human anger, even when it feels justified, does not produce what is right.

I am not excusing what happened on Roth Street — justice must take its course. But we should feel the warning in this story, not just the sorrow. The difference between an argument and a tragedy is often one terrible decision. That should humble us, not just horrify us. Jesus said anger itself puts us in danger of judgment (Matthew 5:22) — not minimizing murder, but showing us where murder begins.

Grace for the guilty, comfort for the grieving

There is a part of this story we would rather skip past. Diego Pizarro, 46, is accused of stabbing his housemate to death and now faces a second-degree murder charge. It is easier to grieve the victim and say nothing about the accused. But the gospel will not let us skip him, because the gospel is for the guilty too.

Let me be clear: grace does not erase justice. If Pizarro did what he is accused of, he should face the full weight of the law. The Bible is unambiguous that the state bears the sword for a reason, and Christians do not get to be soft on murder in the name of mercy. Justice for the Babers-White family means a real trial, real accountability, real consequences. Pray for that. Demand that.

Peacemaking starts under our own roofs

Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God" (Matthew 5:9). Not the peace-lovers, not the people who post about peace. Peacemakers. Makers make things. Peacemaking is a craft — practiced, failed at, learned.

And it starts in our kitchens, living rooms, and apartment hallways. That's why this story cuts so deep: the violence happened inside a home, between people who shared a refrigerator and a front door. If peace can't live in our houses, it won't survive on our streets. A city is a collection of households, and Rochester's peace will be decided, in large measure, at kitchen tables.

What does peacemaking look like? De-escalation — stepping outside, taking a walk, calling someone, praying — before you say the thing you can't take back. Forgiveness as a discipline, not a feeling. Getting help — counseling, pastoral care, a truth-telling friend — before anger becomes violence. None of that

What the church has always done in violent cities

When I say the church belongs in this conversation, I don't mean as a commentator. I mean as a participant — Christians have been show

Hope that isn't naive

A blog post won't fix Rochester's violence. But Christian hope was never naive — it was forged in blood. We worship a Savior who was Himself a victim of violence, murdered by the state in His early thirties. He knows what the Babers-White family is feeling, because His own mother watched Him die.

Our faith does not offer a God who watches suffering from a distance. It offers a God who entered it — betrayed, tried unjustly, beaten, executed between two criminals. The cross means God is not a stranger to Roth Street. Whatever this city suffers, it suffers in the presence of a Savior who suffered first.

And because He rose, death doesn't get the last word. That doesn't erase the pain — the resurrection didn't undo the cross; Jesus still carries the scars. But the pain isn't the whole story. One day God will wipe every tear, and the swords will be beaten into plowshares (Isaiah 2:4). John saw the end of the story: "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away" (Revelation 21:4). Read those words over Roth Street. Death shall be no more. No more knocks on the door at night. No more empty chairs. That is not a wish. That is a promise, sealed in the blood of the One who died and rose.

And for the valley between here and there, we have the Shepherd's promise: "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me" (Psalm 23:4). Notice — through the valley, not around it. God does not always airlift us out of the dark places. He walks us through them, rod and staff in hand. Rochester is walking through a valley. The promise is not that the valley disappears. The promise is that we do not walk it alone.

The future is not an endless cycle of Roth Street.

What you can do this week

Reflection without action curdles into sentimentality. Here are four things you can do this week:

1. Grieve honestly, and pray by name. Pray for the family of Dynell Babers-White — for comfort, the funeral, and the months after, when everyone else has moved on. Pray too for Diego Pizarro — for justice, and for the reckoning that leads to repentance. "Weep with those who weep" is a command, not a suggestion.

1. Check on a neighbor. Knock on a door. Learn a name you don't know yet. Much of our city's violence grows in isolation — people unknown, unseen, unconnected. Be someone who knows a neighbor's name this week.

Join us

If you're a church seeker in Rochester — tired of the violence, tired of grieving alone, looking for a community that's honest about the darkness but anchored in real hope — we'd love to meet you. Rochester NY Affinity Church launches Sunday, September 27. Come as you are. We're going to talk about grief and grace, anger and peace, and the Savior who entered our suffering to end it. Learn more at smsnovel.com.

This Sunday, September 27, we launch — not because Rochester's pain is solved, but because it isn't. We need a church that weeps with those who weep and then gets up and makes peace. If you are grieving, come grieve with us. If you are angry, come let the gospel get underneath it. If you are hopeful, come help us build.

1. Practice de-escalation in your own house. Memorize James 1:19-20. The next time anger rises under your roof, be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger. Walk around the block. Call a friend. Pray before you speak. Peacemaking is a skill, and skills are built by repetition.

1. Join a community that practices peace. You can't do this alone. Willpower fades; community sustains. Find a church where people will know your name, pray for you, and help you become someone who makes peace instead of breaking it.

1. Support the grieving tangibly. Grief has a long tail. The funeral will come and go, and then the family of Dynell Babers-White will face months of ordinary days without him. If you learn of a fundraiser, a meal train, or a memorial, contribute. Show up. The church's love is proven in the months after the cameras leave.

1. Be present on your own block. You cannot heal Roth Street from a distance, but you can know the people on your street. Walk your block. Introduce yourself. Be the neighbor who notices. Peace spreads the way violence does — person to person, house to house.ets. The future is a city with no more death, no more mourning, no more crying, no more pain.

Trip Lee has a song called "Sweet Victory" that I keep coming back to in weeks like this — about feeling the thorns where his crown was supposed to be, weak but alive, limping but still running. The hook declares: "I feel thorns where my crown was / I be weak, but I'm alive / From the dusk until dawn, yeah / I'll survive 'cause I got / Sweet victory / Nobody can take it from me."

That's not triumphalism. That's a man who knows what thorns feel like, singing about a victory suffering can't touch. We don't deny the thorns — the grief is real, the loss is real, the limp is real. But we are weak and alive, because Someone else wore the crown of thorns and walked out of the grave. Sweet victory. Nobody can take it from us — not violence, not death, not the darkness on any street in Rochester.

Until then, the church is called to be a colony of that future — ordinary people learning, slowly and imperfectly, to live like the resurrection is true. Every act of peacemaking, every de-escalated argument, is a preview of the world God is making. Rochester doesn't need our despair. It needs our hope — the kind with scars on it.

Rochester's grief is not an abstraction

To those of you in northeast Rochester: I know how this goes. The rest of the city reads a headline and moves on. You don't. You walk past the house. Your kids ask questions. The block feels different — quieter, heavier. Trauma has a geography, and the people nearest to it carry the most of it.

If that's you, hear this from a pastor: you are not invisible. Your sorrow proves you are still human in a place that gives you every reason to go numb. Don't. Numbness feels like protection, but it's surrender. Grief, offered to God, is resistance — your heart refusing to accept that this is just how it is.

And to Christians across Rochester: who is grieving near you? Do you know your neighbors' names? When violence happens two streets over, does anyone from a church show up, or do we just change the channel? Our witness in this city will be decided by our presence. Are we the kind of people who show up on Roth Street — not with cameras, not with agendas, but with casseroles and prayers and time? Meeting up in bleeding cities since the beginning.

In the first centuries, when plagues swept Roman cities, the pattern was always the same: the wealthy fled, and the Christians stayed. They nursed the sick — their own and their pagan neighbors alike — often at the cost of their own lives. That witness came from a conviction: every person is an image-bearer of God, and love is not a feeling but a practice. They also refused the cycle of retaliation. In an empire that answered insult with the sword, they would not return evil for evil. The way of Christ was the cross, not the knife: absorbing evil rather than multiplying it.

Rochester is not ancient Rome, but the assignment is the same: a colony of the coming kingdom, where grace interrupts cycles of retaliation and the ordinary means of grace slowly remake violent hearts into gentle ones. Slow work. It doesn't trend. But it is the only thing that has ever changed the moral fabric of a city: converted people, living converted lives, on the same blocks where the violence happens.

That's the vision behind our church plant. Not a church that drives in from the suburbs for a service project and drives home — a church that lives here, grieves here, and practices peace here, until the peace starts to spread. It takes more strength to walk away from a fight than to win one.

The church should be training people in exactly that — forming them, in small groups and honest friendships, into people whose first instinct in conflict is grace rather than retaliation. That is what the gospel has done in violent places for two millennia, one converted temper at a time.

Peacemaking also means teaching the next generation. Our children are watching how we handle anger. Every time we de-escalate instead of exploding, we are preaching a sermon they will remember longer than anything said from a pulpit. And every time we explode, we are teaching them the same. The homes of Rochester are classrooms, and the curriculum is our temper. What are we teaching?

And peacemaking means pursuing reconciliation, not just avoiding conflict. Walking away from a fight is the first step. Going back later — humbled, honest, asking forgiveness — is the second. The gospel does not just call us to be less violent. It calls us to be reconcilers, people who rebuild what anger broke. That is slow, awkward, humbling work. It is also the work of God in the world.

But hear the harder word too. The gospel announces that no one — no one — is beyond the reach of grace. The apostle Paul called himself the foremost of sinners, and he had blood on his hands before he had a ministry. Moses was a murderer before he was a deliverer. The thief on the cross was hours from execution when Jesus promised him paradise. The church does not get to decide who is too far gone. That is not our jurisdiction.

Why does this matter for you? Because every one of us stands closer to the accused than we want to admit. Not in what he did — in what we are. "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). We have all made terrible decisions. We have all nursed anger that could have gone further than it did. The line between us and the guilty is thinner than our comfort allows, and grace is wider than our imagination permits.

So pray for Diego Pizarro. Pray for justice, yes — and pray for the reckoning that leads to repentance. Pray that in a jail cell, he meets the Savior who meets guilty people. That is not betraying the victim. It is believing the gospel all the way down. The cross means God can forgive a murderer without minimizing the murder. If grace were only for the respectable, none of us would qualify. The church that only condemns violence afterward, but never disciples people in handling anger before it erupts, is locking the barn after the horse is gone.

Paul gives the peacemaker's rule for every relationship: "If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all" (Romans 12:18). As far as it depends on you. You cannot control the other person's temper, but you can govern your own. That is the part that depends on you — your words, your hands, your decision to stay or to walk away. Most arguments do not explode in the first minute. They build, sentence by sentence, until someone crosses a line. Peacemaking means interrupting the build: the apology offered early, the room left before the shouting starts, the prayer prayed in the hallway instead of the insult thrown across the kitchen.

And here is the deeper work. Anger is rarely just about the moment. It is usually about older wounds — disrespect that echoes something from childhood, frustration that has been compounding for months. That is why the gospel has to go underneath the anger, not just manage it. Confess it to God. Tell a trusted friend. Get counseling if the fuse is short. The man who cannot control his anger will eventually be controlled by it. The gospel offers something better: a heart being remade, one surrendered moment at a time.to Him because He is the only One big enough to hold it. "How long, O Lord?" is not a faithless question. It is a faithful one, because it assumes God hears, God cares, and God will act. You do not cry "how long" to a God you have given up on. You cry it to the God you still believe in.

The prophet Jeremiah, weeping over a destroyed city, reached the bottom and found God there: "The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness" (Lamentations 3:22-23). Notice the order. He does not start with hope and then grieve. He grieves — honestly, at length — and hope rises out of the grief like the sun. That is the pattern for us. We do not have to choose between honesty and hope. We can have both, in that order, as many mornings as it takes.

So here is a practice for the weeks ahead. When the news breaks your heart, do not just scroll past it. Stop. Name it before God. Tell Him what happened, tell Him how it feels, tell Him what you wish He would do about it. That is not irreverence. That is the Psalms. And somewhere in the telling, you will find what Jeremiah found: that mercy is new every morning, even in a city that feels like it is running out of mornings.

Here is something I have learned about grief: it talks to you. In the quiet moments your own heart starts narrating — nothing will ever change, this city is too far gone. Grief has a voice, and if you are not careful, you will mistake that voice for wisdom.

The Welsh preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones once put it like this: "Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself?" He was preaching on Psalm 42, where the psalmist interrupts his own despair: "Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God" (Psalm 42:11).

The psalmist does not let his soul have the last word. He talks back to it. He preaches to himself. Lloyd-Jones called this "the main art in the matter of spiritual living" — taking yourself in hand and saying to your own heart: hope in God.

I am not telling you to deny what you feel. The psalmist names it: cast down, in turmoil. But he does not stop there. When grief says Rochester is hopeless, answer: God raises the dead. When sorrow says nothing changes, answer: Christ is making all things new. You do not argue with your feelings by pretending. You argue with them by remembering.1:35) — at the grave of His friend Lazarus, even though He knew He was about to raise him. He did not skip the grief to get to the resurrection. If the Son of God stood at a tomb and cried, then your tears over a young man on Roth Street are not a failure of faith. They are the image of God in you, aching at what death has done to His world.

"The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit" (Psalm 34:18). If your heart is broken over Rochester, God is not far from you. He is close.

Charles Spurgeon once said, "I have a great need for Christ; I have a great Christ for my need." Grief reveals our need — and need is the doorway through which Christ walks in. When the news leaves you with nothing to say, you have exactly what Spurgeon had: a great need, and a great Christ for it.

So let me say it plainly: this is evil, and it is sad. We should not rush past that to explanations. Sit in it. Name it. Bring it to God exactly as it is. Lament is not the opposite of faith. Lament is faith, refusing to let go of God in the dark.

According to the Democrat and Chronicle, first responders were called to 37 Roth St. around 8:30 p.m. on Monday, September 21, for a report of an unresponsive person inside the home. Officers found Dynell Babers-White, 28, who had been stabbed at least twice in the upper body. He was taken to Strong Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead shortly after arriving.

Police say Babers-White and his housemate, 46-year-old Diego Pizarro, had been arguing, and the argument escalated. Pizarro is accuse.1Test Heading

# #d of producing a knife and stabbing Babers-White twice. The two men lived in the home together and knew each other, though they did not appear to be related. Pizarro was apprehended Wednesday morning and charged with second-degree murder, and he was expected to be arraigned in CAP Court on Wednesday afternoon. Police have described the killing as an isolated incident.

Those are the facts as reported. Behind them is a grieving family, a 28-year-old life cut short, and a 46-year-old man facing a murder charge. There are no winners here — only loss, stacked on loss. That is why I am launching a new church here — not because I have answers that fix it, but because the gospel has something to say in the middle of it: about grief, anger, peace, and a hope that does not flinch. If we are going to be a church for Rochester, then Rochester's pain is our pain.

I am new here in one sense — planting a church means I am still learning this city's streets and stories. But grief is a fast teacher. It introduces you to a place in a way nothing else can. And what I am learning is that Rochester grieves the way it loves: fiercely, locally, and all at once. When one block bleeds, the whole city feels it. That is not weakness. That is community, and it is worth protecting.