Each day, when Maxzine Puckerin walks out of her front door in Footbridge Lane, Pembroke, a wall of graffiti confronts her.The words spray painted by local youths opposite her home commemorate her murdered son Perry Puckerin Jr, along with two of his slain neighbourhood friends and fellow “42 soldiers” Kenwandee (Wheels) Robinson and Kumi Harford.“It gives me great comfort that it’s there,” says Mrs Puckerin, 56. “Just to know that they thought enough about him that they wrote his name. They wrote it when they first found out he was shot. Perry was well-liked. Everybody around here got along with Perry.”Mrs Puckerin whose 34-year-old son was shot dead a year ago today says it’s the small acts of continued remembrance by friends and relatives that keep her going on her bleakest days.She wears a T-shirt emblazoned with Perry Jr’s face and gazes proudly at a large memorial board featuring a montage of photographs of him and messages of love.She smiles as she reads the tributes but breaks down when she describes her first Christmas without him.“I know he’s in a safe place but it’s so hard sometimes,” she sobs. “He was my firstborn. That’s the hardest thing to know that my firstborn is not here. I had to send my youngest boy out of the Island because I couldn’t handle anything happening to him.”The fridge in Mrs Puckerin’s kitchen is covered in laminated badges depicting Perry and other young men gunned down in their prime in recent years from the area around St. Monica’s Road, once dubbed 42nd Street.Police have linked many of the murders to an ongoing feud between the rival 42 and Parkside gangs. Detectives said Perry Jr was likely to have been deliberately targeted.Mrs Puckerin describes those fatally shot as “soldiers” and their killers as “cowards”. “They are silly boys,” the mother-of-three says of the person who shot her son outside Hamilton Parish Workman’s Club and who has yet to be caught.“They want to be a soldier but they’ll never be a soldier and that’s how I feel. I hold no animosity against the person but they shall pay. I’m not so bitter against them.“I would like to know how the parents feel knowing that they handle guns and go around shooting innocent people.”Asked to explain the term “42 soldiers”, she replies: “They were soldiers regardless. They were people we all loved. Someone else put it in that way. I don’t know why they said soldiers but I can say that’s the reason why.“My son was a soldier, Kumi was a soldier and Wheels was a soldier. Not one of them deserved to get shot down as they got shot down. I don’t understand why it happened.”Mrs Puckerin acknowledges that Perry Jr father to nine-year-old daughter Kerry and 17-year-old son Lejuan had a string of convictions from his younger days but insists he had long put all that behind him.She says a report in The Royal Gazette last year about the criminal pasts of shooting victims, including her son, hurt her deeply.“I was 100 percent sure that he was not caught up in no gang. Perry didn’t interfere with nobody really. I’m not saying he was perfect. I’ll be the first person to say he wasn’t a perfect child.“He had his times where he done things but he was a good child to me and he loved me dearly.“He tried to get his life together and live a good life, if not for us, then for his kids. He has two children that’s left here without a father and I’m trying to hold the pieces together for my grandchildren.”Her son, she reveals, told his aunt on the day he was killed that he was sick of having to stay in his house and “tired of running”.“A few times he got chased,” says Mrs Puckerin. “He felt that something was not right. He felt it was time for him to go back out. If I had had my way, he wouldn’t have gone out.”She adds: “I’m sorry that his life had to be cut short in that manner, especially in such a brutal way, to be gunned down, but I can’t change what has happened.“I just ask God to forgive me and to forgive the person who shot him. Forgive me because he was my baby and I couldn’t do nothing. I couldn’t keep him out of harm’s way. I couldn’t do anything to protect him.”Although police have said little publicly in recent months about their inquiry into Perry Jr’s murder, Mrs Puckerin says she’s not impatient for answers.“I leave it in God’s hands,” she says. “I do have one [police] lady that keeps in contact with me. She will talk to me about it now and then but she doesn’t have no leads, no more than I have leads.“It’s taking its time for it to come out but they can’t just pick up anyone. They have to make sure that they have the right person. One day it will happen. Whether it’s five years or ten years, it will happen.“Justice will be served, even if it’s on their deathbeds. They will find out who done it one day.”