Activists call for end to domestic violence in march through city
Annabelle Higginbotham Kopko and Richard Kopko of North Franklin Township, parents of the late Tierne Ewing, and family friend Jenene Hupp, also of North Franklin, are surrounded by supporters during Saturday’s march. October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. This year’s march was in honor of Ewing, whose husband kidnapped and murdered her two years ago.
Gideon Bradshaw/Observer-Reporter
Members of the late Vinnie “Mystro” Kelley’s extended family stand together following Saturday’s march against domestic violence. The first of the annual marches was led in 2013 by Suzanne Kelley following her brother-in-law’s murder that year as he was trying to foil a bank robbery in South Strabane Township. The case remains unsolved.
Gideon Bradshaw/Observer-Reporter
Employees of Domestic Violence Services of Southwestern Pennsylvania pose together in the parking lot of the Church of the Covenant in Washington early Saturday afternoon following an anti-domestic violence march through the streets of the city. From left, they are Alexandra Brooks, Kelly Young, Andrea Foster, Allison Weakland, Cheryl McCready and Jen Soisson. An estimated 150 people attended the march.
An estimated 150 people turned out Saturday for the year’s Peace from DV Walk, a fundraiser for Southwestern Pennsylvania Domestic Violence Services.
The march started and ended outside Church of the Covenant in Washington. This year, the event honored Tierne Ewing, who was kidnapped and murdered by her husband two years ago.
Several members of her family – her parents, Annabelle Higginbotham Kopko and Richard Kopko, and her sister Tascha Kopko – were among the marchers, many of whose shirts bore her name.
Among them was Suzanne Kelley, who began organizing yearly anti-violence marches in the city following the still-unsolved fatal shooting of her brother-in-law, Vinnie “Mystro” Kelley, when her was trying to foil a bank robbery outside Giant Eagle in South Strabane Township in 2013.