PROVIDENCE — Nancy Wilson got the call that every mother hopes never comes.

Four days before Christmas, her troubled son, Nathan, was gunned down on the street outside the old family home in the city’s Mount Hope neighborhood.

Wilson, who has had suicidal thoughts since the murder nine months ago, thought she couldn’t feel any more pain — until three weeks ago. On Aug. 13 or Aug. 14, vandals set fire to the artificial flowers, stuffed animals, palms and rosary beads placed against Nathan’s gravestone in the North Burial Ground on North Main Street. The back of the gravestone, which was donated by a family friend and imported from Africa, also was charred.

Wilson, who visits the gravesite daily and talks to her son, was hysterical. She stood beneath a row of towering maple trees in the cemetery’s narrow roadway and screamed.

“I lost it,” she said. “It just brought back everything. It opened up a whole new wound.”

The Providence police sent investigators, including officers assigned to the bureau of criminal identification, to the cemetery to search for clues. The family of Nathan Davis-Gilliard and the police suspect that young men from Chad Brown, the subsidized housing project off Douglas Avenue, may be responsible for his murder. The police are also concerned that a crew from Mount Hope may seek retaliation against the Chad Brown crew in a simmering rivalry that, for more than three decades, has repeatedly erupted in bloodshed.

The battles have led to murders and dozens of shootings. Many of the casualties, most of whom were between the ages of 16 and 25, are buried in the tranquil area near Davis-Gilliard’s grave.

Detective Capt. Hugh T. Clements Jr. said the desecration of the gravesite speaks volumes about the “viciousness of the people we are dealing with.”

Clements is one of the department’s experts on the feud. The warring factions are separated by Route 95: Chad Brown on the highway’s west side, Mount Hope on the east side. The police have sent grandfathers, fathers and sons from both sides of the highway to prison for keeping the bitter rivalry alive.

The bad blood underscores the escalating gunplay among young men across the city. Last year, 59 people were shot and there were 14 murders in the city. This year, through Tuesday, 50 people had been shot and 10 of them had died.

Many of the shootings are gang-related or part of ongoing feuds such as the Chad Brown/Mount Hope rivalry. Deputy Police Chief Paul J. Kennedy said that neither the police nor the participants even know the origins of the dispute or why it continues.

“They think it’s a game,” said Nancy Wilson. “There is so much pain. It’s unbelievable."

NANCY WILSON last spoke to her son on the morning of his murder. He was staying with his girlfriend in Pawtucket and he was planning to do some Christmas shopping. He reminisced about his childhood and talked about things that happened to him when he was eight years old. He also talked about his death.

“You really love me, right?” he said. “If I died, what would you do?”

Wilson told him that he was talking nonsense, and she tried to change the conversation. “I just feel funny,” her son said.

His mother was the only one who called him Nathan. Everyone — his brother, five sisters and countless friends — knew him as Nate. He was her favorite child, once a quiet boy who raised snakes and sold them for a few dollars in their home at 11 Knowles St., a tired neighborhood sandwiched between Camp and North Main Streets.

The family was close and worked to better their lives. Two of Nate’s sisters, Amber and Jasmine, are students at the University of Rhode Island. Another, Tara, attends Howard University in Washington, D.C.

Nate was drawn to the dark side. By the time he reached his teenage years, he had begun hanging with a tough crowd in Mount Hope. He went to Feinstein High School but had to transfer to another school under an assumed identity because he had received threats from a rival gang. Nate spent time at Ocean Tides School, a residential facility for at-risk boys, and the state Training School, a juvenile detention center. He drifted to the rough-and-tumble streets of Olney, Camp and Doyle. He peddled drugs, robbed passersby, stole cars and drank too much.

“Everybody said he was a good kid,” his mother said. “But, he was a follower.”

By 2002, Nathan Davis-Gilliard was 18 years old and frequently in the wrong place, at the wrong time and with the wrong people. Two of them were the Perry brothers, Kenton and Kevin.

He climbed on the treadmill of arrests, convictions, probation violations and months spent at the Adult Correctional Institutions. In 2005, he got his most substantial sentence after he pleaded no contest to a charge of second-degree robbery for assaulting a young man on the East Side and stealing his brown leather coat.

Davis-Gilliard was captured holding a bottle of brandy; while Kenton Perry was caught with the coat on his back, police said. They both were charged in connection with the robbery, and Davis-Gilliard was convicted of striking two of the arresting officers.

He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, 2 years to serve and 8 suspended.

Despite his descent, his mother said that he remained a good son. He regularly called collect from prison and had friends deliver her flowers for Mother’s Day or on her birthday.

THE NIGHT OF Dec. 21, 2007, Davis-Gilliard, 25, was in Mount Hope with Kevin Perry. Nancy Wilson said they were headed to the home of Nate’s older brother, Michael Davis, who lived at 15 Knowles St.

The police are tight-lipped about the events leading to the murder. Word on the street is that a carload of young men from Chad Brown were cruising the Mount Hope neighborhood looking to exact a price for the murder of Dennis Hayes almost exactly two years earlier.

On Dec. 23, 2005, Hayes, 16, was fatally shot as he walked up the front steps to his girlfriend’s house in the city’s Wanskuck neighborhood, just a few blocks from his home in Chad Brown. No one has been charged with the murder, but the police believe the killer hails from Mount Hope.

On Dec. 21, 2007, the police say Kevin Perry, Davis-Gilliard and Eugene Lowell, 22, were walking near the corner of Jenkins and Knowles Streets when a carload of young men from Chad Brown stopped to confront them. One of the Chad Brown boys, Terrell Bliss, hopped out of the back seat of the car with a .25-caliber handgun and pointed it at Perry, the police said.

Moments later, several shots were fired and Davis-Gilliard’s bullet-ridden body was found outside 10 Knowles St., near the utility pole with the milk crate where he used to shoot hoops with his friends. His mother said she believes he was shot several times in the chest. The police won’t say how many times for fear it could jeopardize the investigation.

He was pronounced dead at 9:46 p.m.

Bliss, 19, has not been charged with the murder, but in February, the Providence police arrested him for threatening Perry with a handgun in the moments before the murder. He was charged with felony assault with a dangerous weapon, using a firearm during the commission of a crime of violence, and carrying a firearm without a permit. He was released on $50,000 surety bail.

He missed his arraignment last week, and a warrant was issued for his arrest.

Trouble trails Bliss, whom the police describe as a rising player in the rivalry between Chad Brown and Mount Hope. On July 5, he and a second man, Marcus Brown, 24, were shot at 5 a.m. as they sat on a wooden railing near Chad Brown. Bliss was hit in the hip; Brown in the arm.

Two days later, gunmen opened fire on Bliss’s apartment. He escaped unharmed and no one else was hit in the barrage of gunfire.

On March 4, a month after Bliss’s arrest, Dennis Hayes’s aunt went to the North Burial Ground to visit the gravesite of her nephew, who would have celebrated his 18th birthday that day.

About 30 yards away, three young men from Mount Hope were at Davis-Gilliard’s gravesite. They pulled up to Hayes’s aunt and one of them told her that he was responsible for the teenager’s murder. “I did that, I took that … out,” he told her. The aunt drove to the heart of Mount Hope — Camp and Cypress Streets — and spotted the young man who had confronted her in the cemetery.

She told the police that he stepped toward her car and motioned with his finger as though he was firing a gun.

Police suspect that encounter may have led to the desecration of Davis-Gilliard’s gravestone.

THE PAST NINE months have been excruciating for Nancy Wilson. She is on medication and she is grateful for the comfort she has received from her victim support team at the Institute for the Study & Practice of Nonviolence in the city’s South Side. She also speaks highly of Detective Angelo A’Vant, the lead investigator into her son’s murder. She describes him as a compassionate man who checks on her each week. She’s confident that A’Vant and the other detectives are doing their best to bring the killer, or killers, to justice.

She looks forward to seeing them in court. When that day comes, she will forgive them for taking Nathan’s life. “I don’t have animosity for them,” she said. “I have animosity for what they’ve done.”

Last Saturday, Nancy Wilson and about 35 members of her family and friends gathered around Nathan’s gravestone for what would have been his 26th birthday. Many of them wore T-shirts with an image of Nathan on the front with “RIP Nate.” On the back was a photo of his friends from the neighborhood and the message: “East Side Missing You.”

Shortly before 1 p.m., Nancy Wilson handed out 26 helium balloons to family members and his closest friends. His 5-year-old daughter, Nahriyah, darted around the gravestones with a purple Hannah Montana umbrella. After singing “Happy Birthday,” everyone released the balloons. Nahriyah was the last to let go of a bright yellow balloon with a smiling face. She lifted her head to the sky and watched her balloon float toward the clouds, a tribute to the father she will never know.

bmalinow@projo.com