About 1,500 people attended the funeral yesterday of Damion Blocker, 14, who was shot to death last week inside a District school in the Naylor Gardens neighborhood of Southeast Washington. Mayor Marion Barry told the mourners, many of them classmates and neighbors of Blocker's, at Allen African Methodist Episcopal Church in Southeast: "Young people, nothing is wrong with talking it out. It may save your life."D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and Chief Superior Court Judge Eugene N. Hamilton also attended the service....
Blocker was remembered as a young man who loved sports, community activities, and his 1-year-old daughter, Diamond.
An Inclusive Litany
3/1/96
The Washington Post, January 26, 1996: