For decades, Victor Saunders worked to intervene and disrupt the city’s entrenched and seemingly insolvable problem of youth violence and gang involvement.
Known to many as “Big Vic,” he was referred to as an uncle and father to the city.
Saunders died Thursday, after a battle with prostate cancer. He was 59.
“My heart is broken,” Mayor Malik Evans said in a statement, mourning the loss of “a good friend,” and one of his closest advisors.
In his most recent post, Saunders led the city’s violence prevention efforts. He helped to start Rochester’s Pathways to Peace street outreach program, worked as a consultant advising and training other youth intervention specialists, and spent years doing similar work with Center for Youth.
“Nothing stops a bullet like a job,” he was fond of saying, quoting the Rev. Greg Boyle of Los Angeles.
Saunders has been lauded for his obsessive dedication to helping the city’s youth. People like Saucobie Riley, who Saunders met more than 20 years ago at the North Street rec center. Riley is friends with Saunders' son, and describes himself back then as "a little headcase," with bad grades and a smart mouth. Saunders saw potential.
“He was like that mentor/father figure for us to whereas, you know, if you need something, reach out," Riley said. "Regardless of what it is, reach out to us. Let me know. And if I can't do it, I'll try to figure a way I can help you with that.”
Saunders, he said, was the right combination of optimism and realism. Riley would go on to graduate from Monroe Community College and Alfred University. He now works at Vertus High School as an football assistant coach and preceptor, or school-family liaison, and also with Pathways to Peace.
“And you know, if it wasn't for Vic, if it wasn't for me playing sports, I'd probably be dead or in jail right now, to be frankly honest," Riley said. "He’s one of them people that, a lot of people will say — when it takes a village, he was a part of their village.”
With every job, every achievement, Riley said his first call was to Saunders — who was the one calling Riley last month that his "sickness" had taken a turn for the worse.
Growing up off Carter Street in northeast Rochester, he had supportive parents and attended Catholic schools — graduating from Bishop Kearney High School in 1983. He attended Rochester Institute of Technology but dropped out and started hanging out on Hudson Avenue.
He told the Democrat and Chronicle in 2006, that “I got in so much trouble, I wasn’t even allowed in the house where I grew up. ... I had gotten lost in the street.” But an uncle intervened, traveled up from Houston, took him back to Texas, and helped set him on the path of trying to intervene with other young people whose lives similarly stray off track.
"A lot of the kids we help today, I used to run around in the street with their uncles and cousins,” he told the newspaper.
Years later, in 2022, he had not lost that community connection, recounting on WXXI's Connections with Evan Dawson: “The city is so small you are personally connected to a lot of these different altercations.”
Saunders described his life’s work as being about relationships — connecting with those who are at risk “just to start a conversation with these young guys and let them know it’s not just on them. They didn’t get this way alone. We dropped the ball along the way,” he told Spectrum News in 2022.
Riley described Saunders as "a big teddy bear. And, like, if you could fit his clothes, he'll give you the shirt off his back."
“Our community has lost a committed public servant who dedicated his life to the cause of peace and community uplift,” the mayor said Friday. “He lived his life modeling the words of the great hymn, ‘May the Works I've Done Speak for Me.’ Victor has done great works.”
