* * *
—
In court, Marcelo is beckoned to stand before the judge. He shifts from foot to foot. He pivots to get the attention of his mother, to catch her smile. His hands, which he holds behind his back, quiver as if he has palsy. He looks like he has the kinetic energy of a greyhound waiting to take off after a mechanical rabbit. His heart races. He has trouble focusing on what’s being said. The portly deputy sheriff standing behind him senses Marcelo’s unease, leans in, and whispers into his ear, The court likes you. Marcelo looks bewildered. What does that mean? he asks. Shhh, the deputy sheriff replies.
Marcelo’s therapist at Mercy, Jennifer Shully, tells the judge that Marcelo, on his own, got himself into Mercy, that “I can honestly say, Marcelo is a model resident.” She tells the judge that in its 126-year history Mercy has never posted bond before, but that it is willing to do so for Marcelo—though it can’t afford $30,000. “Mercy is an unlocked facility,” she explains. “He could walk out anytime he wanted to. He’s never done so. He’s repeatedly stated over and over again how much he wants to be there, how much he wants to change. We believe in him. We believe he made a bad decision.” It’s her hope and the hope of the others at Mercy that they can get Marcelo’s bond lowered. Three teachers at De La Salle have submitted letters of support as well. Jaclin McGuire, his American literature instructor, wrote, “I teach a majority of the students as juniors; with this said, I can confidently say Marcelo was at the top of his class…During class discussion it was evident that Marcelo was thinking beyond just the literal, which is a rarity among High School students…He is the type of student every teacher wants in his/her classroom.”
Anita Alvarez, the elected state’s attorney, had made a reputation as an unbending and sometimes overreaching prosecutor in the city’s response to the violence, and her rigidity had filtered down the ranks. The assistant state’s attorney assigned to this courtroom asks rhetorically of Marcelo’s therapist, “Is this an isolated incident? Are you aware that he was the one who got out of the vehicle and led the attack on these three separate victims with a group of thugs?” Marcelo’s public defender denies that Marcelo was the leader. The assistant state’s attorney then briefly recounts what occurred that morning, the brutality of the three robberies. “In the defense’s own words,” he tells the judge, “he’s an exceptional young man. He’s a leader. His behavior is that of a thug and thug leader. He’s not going to college. He is going to prison. We’re going to ask the court to raise his bond to $500,000.” Someone in the courtroom gasps. To his family and to those at Mercy, it felt like an act of vengeance, as if to say, “We’re going to teach you a lesson for being uppity.” Not only shouldn’t the bond be reduced, the assistant state’s attorney declares, it should be raised.
Marcelo looks around, his head swiveling like he’s a sparrow on a telephone wire. The deputy sheriff gently taps him, gesturing for him to direct his attention to the judge. The judge mentions Marcelo’s age—he had turned seventeen a few days earlier—and the fact that he’s at Mercy and clearly has support. He reduces the bond to $10,000, which means Mercy needs to come up with $1,000. “You’re not only getting the sun and the moon today, you’re getting the sun, the moon, and the stars today,” the judge tells Marcelo, whose whole body appears to be shuddering. “Now, young man, don’t let down all the people who have come here. You’re about to start the fight of your life.”
When Marcelo gets back to Mercy, he holes up in his room to study for the ACT, which he is scheduled to take the next weekend.
Chapter 5
The Tweets
JUNE 13…JUNE 14…JUNE 15…
THURSDAY, JUNE 13
9:35 p.m. Two men shot, 1700 E. 71st Place, M/23 + M/Unk age, both to Jackson Park Hospital #chicago
9:54 p.m. The night begins.
Peter Nickeas, who’s twenty-seven and the overnight reporter at the Chicago Tribune, tweets all hours of the night and early morning. One hundred and forty characters. Short, staccato bursts describing the wailing, the crying, the bleeding, the saves and near-saves. He uses shorthand for locations, borrows from the police lingo (M/Unk for male/unknown, for instance), quotes people on the police scanner, quotes people at the scene, sometimes adds a short video, six seconds in length. It’s the unadorned facts salted with keen observations, details others might miss. He’s a crime reporter on overdrive who’s developed his own personal flair. When I first met Pete, he was in the Tribune tower at his cubicle, square-jawed, his hair closely cropped. Between his clipped speech and his appearance, he could be mistaken for a police officer. He was dressed in a red T-shirt, blue jeans, and hiking boots, sitting ramrod straight at a desk piled high with reporter notebooks, three police scanners rattling in the background. Three Kevlar vests lay on the floor.
He heads out in one of the Tribune’s cars, carrying a portable scanner, which he had appropriated from the newspaper after it had purchased a number of them to cover the recent NATO summit and the accompanying protests.
10:57 p.m. The breeze outside work tonight was perfect. I would have liked to not come to work, and instead, just enjoy the weather.
11:02 p.m. There’s a group of people fighting, no shit, a block from the south side overtime initiative HQ (old Englewood district, 61/Racine)
Pete often cites the various tactics employed by the police, since they are trying pretty much everything. Extra overtime so they can put more police on the streets. Using data to identify hot spots where they can send more police. Using algorithms to identify the four hundred young men they believe most likely to shoot someone or get shot. Requiring ex-felons to meet with police and social workers. Periodically the police tout the numbers, but just when they’re looking good. Other times, when the homicide numbers inch up, they chastise the press for keeping count as if there were some contest at hand. Before Pete arrived, the Tribune often rewrote police statements, and would pick and choose which crime scenes to go to, sometimes a handful in one night. Pete is in some ways a throwback. He employs good old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting. He’s rarely in the office and instead drives from crime scene to crime scene, listening for the next shooting on his portable scanner. He doesn’t have the time for pronouncements from public officials. In fact, he gets angry at what he sees as the city’s cynicism. Last year the police superintendent, Garry McCarthy, released a statement celebrating a twenty-four-hour period without a shooting as if that were a great accomplishment. “This is clearly the result of the tremendous police work of the men and women of the Chicago Police Department,” McCarthy declared. Another time the mayor, Rahm Emanuel, suggested the shooters stay away from the young kids. “Take your stuff away to the alley,” he said. On the streets around many schools, the city has begun erecting signs that read SAFE PASSAGE, a suggestion that these signs act as a kind of shield for the city’s school-age children. “They’re a joke,” Pete told me, speaking of the signs. “What about the rest of the fuckin’ city? It’s not safe there? Are you ceding the rest of the city?”
11:27 p.m. Cops on two different South Side radio zones calling in gunfire now, 79th/Drexel, 1400 W. 66th.
11:29 p.m. This neighborhood is hot right now. Shots fired in the area.
When Pete began this work, in 2011, he found it gripping, heart-racing. Because he’s white, he was usually an outsider in the neighborhoods he covered. He flew from crime scene to crime scene, often with a photographer in tow. He witnessed an arson fire where a family was killed and on another occasion stood over the body of a young man who had been beaten to death with a cinder block, half his face depressed like it was made of clay. But he also saw a kind of grace. He remembers one particular murder, of a nineteen-year-old boy, on the city’s far West Side. When he arrived at the scene, the body was still on the sidewalk. A middle-aged man approached him and, realizing that Pete wasn’t a police officer, apologized: You’re not the person I need to talk to.
He found an officer and told him that he was the boy’s dad and that he wanted to see his son. The sergeant pleaded with him: You don’t want to remember your son like this. But the father waited. He seemed almost serene, while his daughter, the victim’s sister, dry-heaved in his white van, parked nearby. When the body removal service arrived (the “body snatchers,” Pete calls them), the father walked to the body before anyone could stop him. He stood over his son and looked to the heavens, offering a short prayer. The boy, it turned out, wasn’t involved in the streets. He worked at Sears and just happened to be in front of the building where the shooter’s intended target lived. In that one moment, Pete felt he witnessed something deeply personal, something deeply private. He thought to himself, I shouldn’t be here. It’s not my place.
FRIDAY, JUNE 14
1:42 a.m. Setting up the scene, 4400 N. Mulligan. Police shot a young man. #chicago. [accompanied by a short video of police putting up yellow tape]
3:00 a.m. “Be advised, we are in a backlog on the South Side.” @chicagoscanner
3:58 a.m. 7 people shot tonight, plus police shot someone up in Jefferson Park.
Pete reported that a boy, maybe fourteen or fifteen, swung a two-by-four at a police officer, and the officer shot the boy in self-defense. The boy lived. “There was a time when I was doing the job and I didn’t know what I was soaking up,” Pete told me. “You don’t know what you don’t know. And then when I knew, I thought, Oh, shit.” It took a toll. By this summer, two years into his overnight reporting, Pete has begun to grow weary of the bloodletting. He has tried taking melatonin or Nyquil to help him sleep. He lies in bed, “a perpetual half-sleep” he calls it, hearing scanners in his head. He is easy to anger, even with friends. Often when he gets off his shift in the early morning, he goes home and drinks a six-pack of Corona, or he’ll head to a bar for something stronger, something to counteract the adrenaline, to dull the agitation.
10:03 a.m. (Spotnews tweets) “They fuck up, they get beat. We fuck up, they give us pensions.”–Ellis Carver. #TheWire
10:36 a.m. @spotnews “Count be wrong, they fuck you up.” #season1
Pete has a thing for The Wire, and he and others exchange lines from the TV series. He feels it’s true to what he sees. It’s a touchstone and, with some irony, kind of evidence to others that what he’s telling them is real. There’s constant chatter on Twitter, between those at home listening to police scanners (there are more than you might expect) and Pete. He also has exchanges with a cadre of freelance videographers and photographers who sprint from one crime scene to the next, selling their footage and photos to the local news stations. They often meet at an all-night diner, Huck Finn, where they take the corner booth and set up their computers and scanners. Pete admires the video guys, but it irks him that many of them wear flak jackets and make no effort to hide them. One wears a military-grade vest which has an extension to cover his privates. Pete refuses to wear one. “It’s disrespectful,” he says, “like saying, I don’t feel safe here.”
9:21 p.m. @Spotnews @PeterNickeas 2 early for Peter & Huck Finn
9:25 p.m. Too early indeed. I’m just settling in here at the tower.
9:49 p.m. Tonight is starting to feel like the night where I throw this fucking computer from the fourth floor window of the tower
SATURDAY, JUNE 15
12:09 a.m. 5500 W. Quincy. 2 people shot. #chicago [accompanied by a short video of a man who can’t get to his home because of the police tape]
12:45 a.m. Two people shot a couple blocks from this scene we were at. Ambos not here yet.
Pete learns a lesson here. He gets to the scene before the medic and stumbles on a man bleeding from his neck, gurgling, trying to ask for help. He doesn’t know what to do. He feels useless. And he can’t get the sound out of his head, the desperation, the inability to make the simplest of requests: Help me. From then on Pete makes a point of arriving at a scene after the ambulances. There’s something to be said for being the second one on the scene.
2:36 a.m. At least 9 shot since Friday afternoon. Total does not reflect a recent shooting on Central Avenue, for which we lack details. #chicago
3:52 a.m. Guy calls 911, asking for a supervisor: “Said he was stopped by a unit, made to exit his vehicle, then he took it.” #chicagoscanner
5:02 a.m. A man walked into Stroger Hospital this morning with a gunshot wound. He wouldn’t tell police where he had been shot. #chicago
6:13 a.m. Did a guy just get shot at 76th/Ashland? I think so. #chicago
7:05 a.m. It’s glass-of-whiskey time, once I get my shit done here, which I’m struggling to do.
He and the photographer who’s ridden shotgun all night go to the Billy Goat Tavern, a watering hole for generations of reporters, from Mike Royko to Studs Terkel. There he orders a Jameson, straight up. This was an unusually difficult shift, and though he doesn’t know it yet, it will change him. In the early-morning hours he had heard a call over the scanner about someone shot, and when he arrived at the scene, he began shooting a video on his phone. A young shirtless man approached him, clearly high and drunk, a blunt tucked behind one ear, wanting to know if his friend was alive or dead. Pete makes it a point not to engage with people who are inebriated, and so he tried to avoid him, which only further irritated the man. Go back to your neighborhood! he bellowed. You’re not from around here! He started jogging back to his house, yelling at his girlfriend, who stood on the front porch, Get my gun. The young man entered his house and emerged with his hand behind his back. Pete told the photographer, Junior, we need to get the fuck out of here. They jumped into their separate cars. The man ran in front of Pete’s car, his hands nearly touching the hood. Pete veered around him and peeled off, running a red light. He didn’t look back to see if the guy had a gun. He just floored it, realizing that was one close call. After stopping for the whiskey, he heads home via Lake Shore Drive and has this inexplicable urge to drive fast, real fast. At home, his wife, Erin, greets him. He looks shaken, wide-eyed. Erin hugs him. “Do you think this is safe? Do you think this is smart?” Pete asks her. Three weeks later he starts wearing a Kevlar vest. “The city became real that weekend,” he tells me weeks later.
5:23 p.m. Sun’s out, guns out, as they say. 3 shot, two critically, in Marquette Park.
9:22 p.m. So this shooting out on Artesian tonight—mutual combatants. Working on updating the story now. #chicago
10:50 p.m. 2 people shot here, 77th/homan. #chicago [accompanied by a short video that shows Dooley Park, and a sign that reads PARK CLOSES 11 P.M.]
11:50 p.m. Homicide. 26/Ridgeway. #chicago [accompanied by a short video of a police officer photographing the pool of blood on the sidewalk]
SUNDAY, JUNE 16
1:15 a.m. Police shot, killed a man here. 1600 S. Springfield in the alley.
1:25 a.m. Crime scene cat, where police shot a man. [accompanied by a short video of a blond cat prancing along the alleyway]
Pete would take videos of cats at crime scenes and post them as short videos. He thought it was different, that it felt whimsical, but he eventually stopped because it felt like it diminished what was going on.
1:35 a.m. 1600 S. Springfield. Tense scene. #chicago [accompanied by a video of a man yelling at the police, “Yo. What don’t you understand, man? Fuck that! He’s dead, bitch!”]
@PeterNickeas Why is that guy yelling?
@bennyblades22 Cops shot his brother.
@PeterNickeas Ah makes sense. Thanks for all you do, love the info.
3:50 a.m. 2 people shot here. 31/Pulaski, In this car [accompanied by a short video of the car, the doors open, a passenger window with two large bullet holes]
4:12 a.m. Second time tonight hearing gunfire at a scene.
6:09 a.m. That was a bad night.
8:03 a.m. It didn’t stop all night, we visited seven scene
s between me and the photog. Gone from 10-6a.
9:53 a.m. 5 dead, 18 wounded overnight. Shootings from North Avenue south to 94th Street. #Chicago
Reading Pete Nickeas’s tweets, you absorb the relentlessness of the city’s violence. It doesn’t seem to let up. Over time Pete did more than just take in the moment. He began to talk with people, and began to realize that “the violence isn’t in a vacuum. Gang members aren’t helicoptered in. They’re part of the neighborhood.” He soon feels a need to do more than just record the aftermath and spends time talking with family and friends of victims. He befriends two outreach workers who are former gang members and writes a moving profile of them and their work. “I don’t think I’m biased by saying Benny and Jorge [the two outreach workers] are doing good work,” he tells me. “They’re the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in the city.”
There’s a no-nonsense quality to Pete, and people seem to appreciate that. I was with him once after a shooting, and people milled about on the street, sitting on stoops, leaning against a cyclone fence. Virtually everyone talked to Pete, even giving him their phone numbers. One middle-aged man thanked him for being there, for bearing witness. “I’m just doing my job,” Pete told him. He also has a good rapport with the police. Many of them are fans. Once, as the police investigated a shooting at a low-rise housing project, a plainclothes officer came up to Pete. “I enjoy reading your work,” he told Pete. “It makes me feel like I’m there.” Pete’s seen the police curse at gawkers and at him, but he understands the quick temper: “The violence damages cops just like it damages anyone else who has to watch it day in, day out.” He comes to see how the violence has dented everyone it touches.
An American Summer Page 7