PAWTUCKET — When 19-year-old Helder Tomar was shot and killed in Jenks Park in Central Falls a week ago, it didn’t just cut short the life of a young man who loved to play football and perform rap music.

It set off a cycle of violence that threatens to sweep up teenagers in Pawtucket and Central Falls.

So, as hundreds of Tomar’s friends and family members gathered at his funeral yesterday, lay preacher Marco De Barros used the occasion to call for an end to the bloodshed.

“Death is part of life, but it’s supposed to be natural, not by violence, not by strife,” said De Barros, a 1996 graduate of Shea High School, where Tomar had been a student.

“My question, young people, is ‘What now? What are you going to do with this experience? I believe we are at a crossroads. We have a choice to make.”

“If we keep living this way –– an eye for an eye –– all of us will be blind,” De Barros told the crowd that packed the funeral home.

“Our schools should be safer. Our communities should be safer.

“We need transformation. We need healing. We need restoration. We need to look at each other and say we can do better,” De Barros said.

Tomar was shot to death in a fight with 19-year-old Anthony Strobert of Pawtucket, who has been charged with his murder. The police say that Tomar pulled out a gun and shot Strobert, but that Strobert managed to wrest the gun away and shot and killed him. The day after the shooting, in a second, unsolved slaying, 16-year Edelmiro Roman of Central Falls was shot down on Dexter Street and killed.

The Roman family has been in seclusion, but friends said that Edelmiro Roman was to be cremated and his ashes taken to Puerto Rico to be buried along with his mother, who died last year.

The police say they believe that after Tomar was killed, Roman was shot in revenge.

Tomar’s funeral was an emotional event that drew hundreds of people, many of them as young as he was.

The crowd filled two rooms at Merrick R. Williams Funeral Home on Smithfield Avenue, where Tomar’s body lay in an open casket and his mother, father, aunt, uncle, sisters, brothers and cousins sat disconsolately in a row of chairs along the wall.

“My son is leaving me. My good son is leaving me,” Helder’s mother, 55-year-old Virginia Tomar, said over and over again in Creole as mourners went up to the coffin to bid farewell to him.

“You’re leaving everybody behind and you have a lot of friends and family around you today,” Mrs. Tomar said.

A tall, distinguished-looking woman whose hair is streaked with gray, Mrs. Tomar and her husband, Paulo, came to this country from Cape Verde in 1990 to work in factories and make a better life for themselves and their children.

(The Tomars had seven children; Helder is survived by three sisters and three brothers, one of whom was born after the family came to the United States.)

Mrs. Tomar kept her composure through most of the 45-minute funeral service. But when the time came to close the coffin and take her dead son to the Mount St. Mary Cemetery for burial, she and others in the room crowded the casket and wailed.

Helder G. Tomar didn’t strike people as a troublemaker. “He was actually a quiet kid in school. He walked around minding his own business,” Dino Campopiano, his football coach at Shea, said on Thursday.

The day that he was shot, there was no sign of trouble, his family said. On his way out of his family’s apartment on Harvey Street, he kissed his mother and indulged his habit of affectionately scratching her on the head.

“She keeps saying, ‘Helder, I didn’t know the kiss I got from you on Saturday was going to be the last kiss,’ ” said a cousin, who translated as Mrs. Tomar sat on her living room sofa Thursday speaking Creole and sipping canja — chicken soup made with rice, broth, and carrots.

Canja is a kind of Cape Verdean comfort food. “Right now,” the cousin said, “that’s basically the only thing she’s able to eat.”

Helder dropped out of Shea during his senior year, a year and a half ago, according to Christopher Lord, the high school principal.

But he was planning to enroll at Community College of Rhode Island, his family said, and in the meantime, he was performing rap music.

He worked as a kitchen aide at Oak Hill Nursing Home, one of his sisters said, until he injured his hand.

“Helder was a good brother, a good son, a good uncle and a good cousin,” said his 36-year-old sister, Odilia Cruz, of Brockton, Mass.

Cruz broke down and cried when the coffin containing her brother’s body was carried out of the funeral home yesterday.

On Thursday, as she and other family members gathered in the Tomars’ living room, her memories were happy ones.

She recalled how Helder helped her name the files of coladeira and funana music she had downloaded onto her computer from a Cape Verdean Web site. Another sister, 31-year-old Tereza Tomar, recalled how Helder would horse around with her children, ages 3, 7 and 12, making them laugh.

The family — which is well known and well-liked in Pawtucket — said they had no idea what provoked the fight that ended Tomar’s life last Saturday. “We just saw the thing on TV. That was all,” Cruz said.

But they had a message much like the one De Barros delivered in his sermon yesterday. “We want peace,” Tereza Tomar insisted. “We want all this violence to stop.”

—With reports from staff writer Tatiana Pina

jcastell@projo.com