In Huntington Station, kids live among the violence

Too much of the debate over the once-Jack Abrams Intermediate School and Huntington Station has been centered on fear. Or anger. And on a decision by the Huntington School Board to take away a vital part of the community that Crescent Muhammad and Keyonee Delgado call home - at a time when the children of Huntington Station need all the support they can get.

Crescent and Keyonee are best friends. Crescent, who is 6, loves Disney princesses; Keyonee, also 6, prefers X-Box games. And they share a love of colorful, plentiful Silly Bandz.

The squabbling, finger pointing and backbiting that has accompanied months of rancor over Huntington Station means nothing to Crescent and Keyonee, both of whom attend - and love - Flower Hill School, which sits in a wealthier part of what is becoming an increasingly bitter and divided school district community.

But while adults - at the school board, in Suffolk County government, in Huntington Town Hall - have spent most of the summer wrangling over what is right and what is wrong in Huntington Station, Crescent and Keyonee did what kids do. During the day, they played. Sometimes in a paved yard surrounded by fencing outside the site of a former synagogue that now houses five rental apartments, including the ground floor one where Keyonee lives.

Wednesday, as Crescent and her mother learned about llamas at a children's program at the Huntington Station branch of the local library, Keyonee's grandmother juggled a scrub brush and a roasting pan filled with bleach and hot water.

"I've never had to scrub blood before," Sabrina Dixon said, as a few members of the Suffolk Police Department investigated a double shooting outside early Wednesday. "But I got to do it so the kids can play," she said.

At night, Crescent and Keyonee are supposed to be able to sleep like children, like the innocents that they are.

Early Wednesday, when a series of shots rang out, Crescent, who lives about a block away from Keyonee, remained abed, blissfully unaware.

Wednesday, Keyonee sat sorting out a monster pile of Silly Bandz at the foot of his bed. When he sleeps, his grandmother said, that's where he usually ends up resting his head.

That made the plate-sized blood stain outside the children's ground-floor window - not three feet from Keyonee's bed - all the more horrific.

At one point, Dixon took Crescent and, later, Keyonee and his sister, and walked with them along the blood trail. "Bad people did this, people who have lost their way, bad people," she said, more than once, in a voice meant to teach rather than scare.

Crescent's mother, Tonya Jackson, stood by, approvingly. "Maybe she will get the message that she is not supposed to try to walk out the door by herself to go and play."

Jackson and her four daughters moved to Huntington Station from Oyster Bay in May. "There are so many children here, it's great for the children. But it's one kind of place during the day and another whole different kind of place during the night and especially on the weekends."

Crescent's mother, Keyonee's grandmother and other residents near the shooting scene would love to explore the possibility of having a curfew for teenagers and young adults who drive them crazy by congregating in yards and outside houses where they do not live.

Wednesday afternoon, Keyonee waited inside with his grandmother until police said it was OK to go outside and play.

"Don't step in the blood, KeKe," his grandmother said.

No child should ever have to hear such words.