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Providence man gunned down in Hartford Park complex
Tyrone Tate, 26, was in his car when he was shot multiple times, the police say.

07:54 AM EST on Tuesday, December 30, 2003

BY JENNIFER LEVITZ
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- A man who was five days from his 27th birthday was shot to death in his car in Providence yesterday.

Tyrone Tate was pummeled by gunfire around 6 p.m. in a parking lot between 6 and 8 Whelan Rd., part of the Hartford Park public-housing complex.

Providence police detectives last night were following leads, trying to determine who killed Tate. He was shot multiple times and taken to Rhode Island Hospital before being pronounced dead.

The police said Tate had at least two Providence addresses away from Hartford Park. But he spent part of his youth at the complex, said Deborah Wray. She lives at 8 Whelan, a row of townhomes, and is former president of the residents' association.

She said Tate had a mother and a sister, and two children. His father died in 1993. "This happened to a young man who was raised here in Hartford . . . It's not like he's an outsider," she said.

Wray saw the crime scene -- the police, the tape, the crowd -- when she got off the bus at Hartford Park after a shopping trip to the Dollar Store.

She saw Tate's car parked near the trash bin in the parking lot outside her home. It did not appear to be smashed by bullets. The driver's door was open, as if Tate had been getting into his car, or getting out.

The whole scene hurt Wray. She knew what his mother must be going through. Wray's 21-year-old son, Robert Wray, was murdered two days before Thanksgiving in 1997. He was shot in the right temple after he answered the rear door of his mother's apartment.

Deborah Wray was delivering Thanksgiving baskets in the high-rise across the way. She rushed back and held her son while he died. A gunman, who'd had a dispute with Robert Wray, was arrested minutes after the shooting in a convenience store; in 1999, he was found guilty of first-degree murder.

Wray still can't understand why her son died, and she thinks about him in the silence of every night. She thinks it might be better if she moved from her apartment, where her son was shot, but she knows better.

"I feel for the mom because you can't replace a child, and it's one thing when you know why a person died, another when you don't know," she said. "I'm just now able to go to the grave site."

Wray said she saw Tate's mother outside yesterday after her son's death, and she was devastated.

"She was just angry. She feels like everything happens at 8 Whelan Rd. It always happens in this area."

Wray said that doctors and lawyers have come out of the development. "I know there are good things out of here," she said.

"But by the same token, we're losing people in the crossfire."