The first thing you see when you walk into the Roseland Community Center off Munger Avenue are the flowers and the teddy bear and the candles and the sign taped to the brick column. "Long live Greg," it says in cursive. "Long live Zacc." Greg is Gregory Horton III. Zacc is Zacchaeus Banks. Both were 17 years old when they were shot to death — right here, on this very spot — during a drive-by on June 30.

There is a handwritten note, too, framed. Some of it is an excerpt from the poem "If Tears Could Build A Stairway" often etched into memorials or read at funerals: "No farewell words were spoken, no time to say goodbye." But someone has taken liberty with the words of an unknown poet. There is, at the end, this offer of advice: "Always tell them *I love you* before they walk out the door."

The note is signed "Roseland Angels."

Here, in this same Dallas Housing Authority complex in the shadow of Cityplace, 9-year-old Brandoniya Bennett was shot to death Wednesday before the sun had gone down. Police suspect a gang member fired into her apartment unit, believing it belonged to a rival who wouldn't answer the door. Police say 19-year-old Tyrese Simmons, the primary suspect in Brandoniya's shooting, surrendered at the Dallas County jail Thursday evening. Those responsible for the June 30 slayings remain unknown and at large.

The residents of Roseland are devastated. And, terrified. Because until a few months ago, the 290-unit complex, where most of the residents have their rents subsidized with housing vouchers, was absent the crime plaguing so much of this city.

"When I moved here five years ago, it wasn't like it is now, with the violence," Gege Coleman said Thursday. "Everything was cool."

Coleman is a community caregiver at the rec center nicknamed The Rose, a large and loud and lively gathering space in the heart of the Roseland Townhomes complex. The center was supposed to be closed Thursday morning, its staff given a blessed week off between summer programming and back-to-school events. But it was was opened Wednesday night after the shooting, to serve as a gathering place for adults wanting to mourn together and children too afraid to be left alone.

A giant yellow rose, meant to symbolize joy, is painted above the gym doors. Thursday morning, boys and men were playing ball. Little children ran amok, some with coloring books in hand. There was a 10-year-old girl lying quietly on a sofa. That was McKenzie, Coleman's 10-year-old daughter. She and Brandoniya were close friends, members of the rec center's dance team.

"And now they'll never dance together again," Coleman said. "She was just a sweet little angel. Everybody loved her."

Brandoniya Bennett, the 9-year-old girl killed at Roseland Townhomes (Courtesy photo)

Brandoniya was such a fixture in the center there are two portraits of her on the wall. They hang next to a framed photo of then-Mayor Mike Rawlings, Philip Kingston (at the time, this district's council member) and Dallas Police Chief U. Renee Hall — casual, laughing, joyful — that was taken at the reopening of the community center in October 2017. The Dallas Post Tribune reported that at the ribbon-cutting, Rawlings said Roseland would prove a safe harbor in a violent world.

"The work that we are doing tonight helps makes us a stronger community, a stronger city," the former mayor is reported to have said. "The kind that is weaving that basket so tight, that it'll never come apart."

During this violent year — Dallas' bloodiest in more than a decade, our police chief nowhere to be found — Brandoniya's death immediately seized our attention. Because this was a child. Shot to death. In her home. Playing, we imagine, safe and happy as summer vacation wore to an end. I was told her mother had already bought Brandoniya's school supplies. And now her friends are traumatized, preparing for their return to a nearby Dallas ISD elementary without Brandoniya in tow.

"Their innocence is being stripped," said Will Dowell, the co-founder of Behind Every Door, which operates The Rose and a similar community center on Bexar Street in South Dallas.

1 / 2Rose Community Center community caregiver Gege Coleman, who moved to the townhomes five years ago and said the complex has always been, to her, a "community ... like family."(Tom Fox / Staff Photographer) 2 / 2A photo of Brandoniya Bennett, 9, hangs around the corner from a photo of former Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, former Dallas councilman Philip Kingston and Dallas Police Chief U. Renee Hall taken in October 2017.(Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)

This is what he means. Coleman told me her 7-year-old son asked recently: What happens when someone is shot in the head? She told him she did not know. His question tore her apart.

"He shouldn't have to see this," she told me. "It's not the norm for a 7-year-old to experience this."

Violence was once the norm at Roseland Homes, the public housing complex built here in the late 1930s atop a black neighborhood demolished by the Dallas Housing Authority. When it opened in 1942, as Dallas' first public housing complex designed for black residents, it cost $3 million — and infuriated white developers who lamented wasting so much valuable land so near downtown. An "economic cancer," they called it in a March 5, 1939, Dallas Morning News story that bore the headline "Realty Leaders Hit Negro Slum Project."

In the 1970s and '80s, Roseland was a violent place plagued by drug dealers who infamously set aflame a nearby police substation. The Dallas City Council approved $13 million worth of renovations in 1980s, but into the early 1990s, killings here weren't uncommon. But as the neighborhood around it developed upward and outward, as land values increased and Roseland Homes morphed into Roseland Townhomes, the complex felt safe again.

"Everyone was like family," Coleman said Thursday about how it felt when she moved here from Pleasant Grove in 2015. "It felt like home."

Roseland had become the neighborhood's anchor, no longer its albatross. And so it has stayed. Until June 30. Until Wednesday night.

1 / 2An architectural rendering of Roseland Homes was published in local newspapers before its opening in June 1942.(Dallas Housing Authority archive) 2 / 2A Roseland Homes bedroom, 1944.(Dallas Housing Authority archive)

"There is a crime problem in Dallas, and it affected Roseland yesterday," Dowell said Thursday morning. "But Roseland doesn't have a crime problem. I don't want to perpetuate this image: Here's another housing project where everyone is violent and unsafe. We are going to get through this. It's going to end. We are not going to stand for it."

Dallas police blame the recent uptick on gangs coming to Roseland from South Oak Cliff and South Dallas, largely because the complex is centrally located. Acting Chief David Pughes told me Thursday police will increase patrols around the complex. Sgt. Leroy Quigg of the DPD Gang Unit said the department is beginning community outreach programs, in neighborhood barbershop and in The Rose rec center. And a DHA spokesperson said they will add more security cameras and patrols.

"Every time someone in this city is shot or killed, I get an email or text, and there is not one time where I just look at it and dismiss it as another number, another crime stat," Pughes said Thursday. "I always want to know more. I want to know what we're doing and what we can do so I don't get the next message."

But there will be another one. Tonight. Tomorrow. Right now.

"When is it going to end," Coleman said, speaking for all of us. "And how?"