I drove down Gold Street looking for one of those homemade memorials people create to show respect for a victim of violence.

You know the kind. Sometimes you'll see grocery store flowers, votive candles, teddy bears, hand-written signs and heart-felt notes.

Not on Gold Street.

On Friday, I saw gutter trash and a place so jaded by street gang violence that few neighbors would talk about the shooting Jan. 15 that mortally wounded a 12-year-old boy whom Metro Homicide detectives have called an innocent victim. "I keep to myself," one neighbor said. "My house got shot up."

The boy's name was Gregory Adams, and his only crime was trying to grow up in a bone-poor street gang shooting gallery. His story was forgotten even before he died of his wounds at University Medical Center.

Compare that to the community response to the sordid discovery in a trash bin of the body of Crystal Figueroa, the 3-year-old murder victim who for five weeks was known as Jane "Cordova" Doe. Her death generated an enormous memorial, and thousands attended church services in her honor. The child's story was the focus of nightly TV news coverage, daily newspaper stories, national gnashing from Geraldo Rivera and "Dateline NBC," and a $44,000 reward for information leading to the identity of the victim and the resolution of the case.

That was a horrible tragedy, but these days there's competition for your tears.

On Gold Street, resident Lynn Jackson placed a red flower on the asphalt where Gregory Adams' body lay dying with gunshot wounds to the head and hip. The flower didn't last long.

"Not on this street," Jackson said. "It was no respect, a done deal, a dropped case."

Jackson and a young woman named Kandice remember the shooting clearly. How could they forget? They were nearly killed themselves.

"I had bullets in my yard," Jackson said, her housedress blowing in the chilly breeze as she pointed to the ground where Metro detectives placed six cones to mark the spent shell casings. "All of a sudden all we heard was like fireworks. If we would have been outside, we would have caught the bullets. We like to sit outside, but we moved the couch inside. I just thank God we didn't get shot. We were in the line of fire. We could have been hit and wake up dead."

"It was like a movie scene that would not end," Kandice said, telling me there were 56 shots fired.

In this neighborhood, the gangster movies are real and play nightly. "It's every other day on a good day," Jackson said of the gunfire.

Police knew Gregory Adams' name, but that was no help. He was said to stay at Madison Terrace in a family unit so torn apart that no one cared that he was out after midnight on the morning of Jan. 15 a few hours after the annual Martin Luther King Jr. parade and celebration. He was at an open party on Gold Street. Jackson is right when she said, "A free party? A kid's gonna jump to that."

He did, and was murdered.

Nothing befouls Dr. King's legacy like black-on-black street gang violence. As usual, the cowards with the guns shot up the street and killed an innocent child.

Maybe you think that kid must have been up to something to be out so late. Well, the death penalty for a curfew violation seems harsh to me.

"He was 12 years old, and he should have been home," Jackson said. "But he was at the wrong place at the wrong time. That baby lay out there like a damn dog. It's not the first time somebody's got shot on Gold Street."

Jackson leveled a common complaint in poor neighborhoods: The ambulance arrived late and the cops were slow to do their job that night. "It took the ambulance a good 15 minutes to get to the baby when they did get to him," she said. But she also knows Gold Street isn't Green Valley, and bullets don't care who wears a badge.

Crime Stoppers recently offered up to $2,000 for information leading to the arrest of the killer of the boy named Gregory Adams. That's not much for a young life.

It can be dangerous, but someone has to step up.

A boy was killed. He's competition for your tears.

"It's just like, 'Who cares, another gangster getting killed,'" Jackson said. "But this was just a baby."

John L. Smith's column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call 383-0295.