Mary Franklin, 56, is shown in her Roslindale apartment, where the walls are crowded with keepsakes of her late husband Melvin and of her own work as an advocate for survivors of homicide in the city. Caleb Nelson photo

Mary Franklin has become in recent years one of Boston’s most passionate and outspoken advocates for the survivors of homicides. Her husband, Melvin Franklin, was murdered on Woodrow Avenue in 1996 as he apparently tried to intervene in a street robbery. Instead, he was robbed by at least one assailant, and then fatally shot. His killer has never been identified.

Melvin’s unresolved murder led Franklin to launch her own advocacy group ­– Melvin’s Mission – out of her one-bedroom Roslindale apartment. Three days a week, four hours at a time, women who have lost loved ones to murder gather in Franklin’s home to cope with grief, and try to find a new normal.

“When you lose someone to murder, you lose your self-esteem,” said Franklin in an interview with the Reporter. “You lose friends. You lose the routine of the way life used to be, and a lot of women, they become isolated, depressed, have a lot of anxiety, become suicidal, even homicidal. So Melvin’s Mission teaches women tools to relax, and learn how to not allow that stabbing pain to control that moment that they’re in.”

These days, her third-floor walk-up is also quickly becoming the base of operations for a mayoral challenge in 2017 – by Mary Franklin.

Despite her past focus on unsolved homicides and helping victims of trauma, the 56-year-old Franklin says she does not want to get pigeon-holed as a one-issue candidate. “I am not running as a woman who is angry that her husband’s murder isn’t solved,” she said. “My concern is the poor people and the middle-class people who are one check away from being poor. I live in a community that is poor. I live in a community that doesn’t vote, so I need to start very early like this. I am aggressively campaigning. I do door-knocking. I go to people’s homes and I speak, and I listen to them, first of all.”

Franklin’s long-shot challenge is a low-budget, self-financed affair. She serves as her own campaign chairperson, according to a statement of organization filed with the Secretary of State’s office in October. The latest statement shows a meager $200 in her account.

Inside her tidy apartment, Franklin has framed newspaper headlines and pictures of herself with various politicians, including Mayor Marty Walsh, who met with Franklin earlier this year after she spent 10 days conducting a sit-in at Boston Police Headquarters. Franklin says she “treasures” the framed memento of her meeting with the mayor and other city officials, but she doesn’t hold back on her critique of the current administration.

“I’ve met with Mayor Walsh on numerous occasions and we continue to go back and forth on the same question: addressing public safety with a comprehensive plan,” said Franklin. “The frustration in working with Walsh administration [is that] only certain people are allowed in that circle. This administration sees public safety as unsolved murders or murders. I see public safety as – sure the murders – but I also see it as trauma. I see public safety as our school system. I see public safety in jobs, in employment.”

Franklin was raised in Dorchester’s Grove Hall section and attended the Roosevelt and Garrison schools. She eventually graduated from Dorchester High in 1977 after a stint at South Boston High School during the height of the city’s busing crisis.

“We would all sit outside and say, ‘Oh my God, we’re going over to South Boston,’ and those white people, they don’t want us over there, and I want to stay at my school down the street, and we knew we couldn’t,” she said.

Mary met Melvin, her future husband, when he was a member of a singing group, The Energetics. “He was the most handsome one,” she said. “We met, started going out, had three kids, first time homebuyers, and the street that we bought our home on was the street where Mel was murdered, Woodrow Ave.”

The couple – both ordained ministers – started their own ministry from their kitchen. Mel worked for eight years as a doorman at the Westin Copley Hotel, then took on a job as a sky captain at Logan Airport. He was returning from a late shift at work on Oct. 15, 1996 when he was shot twice near his home during the robbery. Mary heard the gunshots, but did not immediately connect what she heard to a call she received from a nurse summoning her to Boston City Hospital. The nurse just told her something happened to Melvin, and hung up, she said.

“I got the kids up, small kids, packed them in the car. I drove by the crime scene, could hardly get through the street. They had the yellow tape up, so I knew someone was murdered,” she said. “I’m rushing to the hospital not thinking anything. I walk in with my children, and the lady said ‘He’s expired,’ and I know what the word means, but that for some reason I couldn’t comprehend it. So I said, ‘expired?’ thinking in my head he must have sprung his leg or something, and she escorts us into a room, and Melvin’s laying there dead, with his eyes somewhat open. There was a hole in his chest, tubes everywhere, and I realize my kids are standing here.”

After Melvin was buried, Mary Franklin felt suffocated by suspicions and doubts. She packed up with her three kids, all in grammar school, and moved the family to Georgia to live near her father, whom she had met for the first time in her early 20s.

As police investigated her husband’s death, Franklin heard often from a detective who had the case. Eventually, the calls and updates stopped coming. And as she began to dive back into the case, she became angered by what she considered a track record of shoddy record keeping in investigative files and missing data.

Several years ago, Franklin started using her husband’s murder to bring attention to issues of racial injustice in Boston – after deciding to forgive her husband’s killer. “The forgiveness was for me,” she said. “It released me to now be able to accept it proactively with this advocacy work that I’m doing.”

When she is not campaigning, Franklin keeps busy as an evangelist with the Bethel Baptist Church in Roxbury. “I’m more than a homicide survivor,” she said. “I am a person that wants to run this city, and make it fair for everybody on every level. That is really the reason why I’m running. Sure, doors were shut working for homicide stuff, but it’s not just the homicide, because I don’t see public safety as just homicide. Public safety is everywhere. It’s at your job.”

“People are hurting. People in this city have no hope. There’s no hope. It’s an everyday humdrum reality for so many people in this city, and I want to change that,” said Franklin. “I believe I can change it, if they give me the chance, if they understand. I know I don’t know everything, and I am so open to listen, to implement, to find a team, a cabinet, diverse, energetic, intelligent, and we run the city together.”