A roomful of Boston-area families were brought together for the 13th year to celebrate the lives of loved ones lost to violence and to build community and fellowship in the face of tragedy.

“Today is about recalling the smiles, the laughter and joy our loved ones brought into our lives. They are more than victims, as all of us know. They were our friends and our family,” Kara Hayes, the chief of the victim-witness advocate program at the Suffolk District Attorney’s office, said at the start of the 13th Annual Breakfast for Survivors of Homicide Victims at Florian Hall on Thursday.

“I’m going to quote some of the amazing survivors in this room when I say, we can’t bring our loved ones back, but we can bring them forward in everything we do,” she continued.

And they were brought forth.

Not only in the solemn recitation of the names of those lost in the past year — as well as loving submitted messages for those lost perhaps not as recently — but with their smiling faces featured in the pins worn by their family members, in stories cherished and shared with others, and in good deeds that continue to be inspired by the lives they had lived.

“People understand and desire their loved one to be remembered. This kind of says, my loved one mattered, their lives mattered,” Kim Odom told the Herald following the event. “As emotional as it can be to say their name, to hear their name, it’s still important that we acknowledge that their lives matter.”

Kim Odom and her husband Ronald Odom Sr. lost their son, Steven, to homicide on Oct. 4, 2007, when the boy was just a 13-year-old student in eighth grade at Roxbury’s James P. Timilty Middle School. The youngest of five siblings, Steven was, the Odoms said, someone who wore his passions on his sleeve and had a rosy outlook for the future.

“Steven loved family, faith and community,” Kim Odom said. She recalled a poem he had written for school, “In his poem, he declares that ‘I am basketball, I am drums. I’m a person.’ … Unfortunately, he understood the violence in the community and he was concerned about that. And he wrote a poem about that as well and said that the community needs to get together to start peace and stop being on the streets.

“We learned all of this from his eighth grade journal,” his mother said, “that these were the things that he was carrying.”

The Odoms, co-pastors at True Vine Church, have continued their son’s mission to bring peace through The SPOT for Life Foundation, honoring Steven P. Odom — from which the acronym is formed along with the word Training — for which they do outreach work.

The Odoms were two of the four people honored at the breakfast for their work in the survivor community. The other honorees were Clarissa Turner, whose son Willie Marquis was murdered in Charlestown on Nov. 29, 2011, and Frank Farrow, whose cousin Jermaine “Manny” Goffigan was murdered at 9 years old on the eve of Halloween in 1994.

Turner runs the Legacy Lives On foundation to provide, its website states, “ongoing support to families that have been affected and have lost loved ones to homicide or street violence.” Farrow serves as executive director of the Office of Black Male Advancement in the administration of Boston mayor Michelle Wu.

Their work is a sterling example of what Suffolk DA Kevin Hayden described as a what a community of “overcomers” can do.

“It is something that the Lord dropped on my spirit very early on in my appointment as the DA, because I believe that overcomers are going to change the world,” he said in a speech before presenting recognition awards. “I’ve always thought that even ‘survivor,’ that may not necessarily truly define who we are. So I coined the phrase — and it’s not nothing new, it’s straight out of the Word, but you all are more than just survivors. You’re overcomers.”

Those we lost in 2023

The names of those who were lost in Boston to homicide in the past year were read by organizers and honorees at the breakfast. Here are the names of the 35 people killed by homicide as they were read out in the remembrance ceremony:

Jymaal Cox, Tyler Lawrence, Brianna Brown, Paris Quilter, Diva Ayuso, Terrell Banks, Mario Santos, David McDonald, Jose Despeignes, Orlando Watkins, Barry Whelan Christopher Shivers, Joshua Marshall, Reneil Miller, Robert Scott, Gavyn Henry, Naythan Matos, David Mayers, Nelson Curet, Tywan Meek, Savion Ellis, Dante Webb, Shawn Lydon, Jazreanna Sheppard, Jackson Beausejour, Moises Alberto Ortiz-Santiago, Xavier Rivas, Princess Charles, Kimberly Webb, James Jones, Kalil Jackson, Jean Casseus, Marco Sosa, Margarita Morehead, Santos David Canizales, and Margaret Mbitu.