An American Summer

by Alex Kotlowitz

  A few months after her visit to the cemetery, Dana had a headstone made. She kept it simple. It reads:

  CALVIN (JACK) CROSS

  IN LOVING MEMORIES

  WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN MAY 26, 1992–MAY 31, 2011

  * * *

  —

  Six years after the police killed Calvin Cross, I was driving with Thomas, the boy who had attended Harper High School, on our way to get lunch, and as we motored down 124th Street, we noticed a makeshift memorial at the exact spot where Calvin and Ryan had been stopped by the police. The memorial was small: a vase holding plastic flowers, along with three empty liquor bottles—tequila, Rémy Martin, and Hennessy Cognac—and four candles, all of which were extinguished because of the rain. I, of course, assumed this memorial was for Calvin, though it didn’t fully make sense, since the anniversary of his killing wasn’t for another few weeks, and as far as I knew he hadn’t been much of a drinker. Driving away, I noticed two gentlemen who looked to be in their forties sitting on lawn chairs in their open garage, out of the afternoon rain. I rolled down my window and told them I was writing about the shooting by the police of a young man here. I told them I had seen the memorial. They nodded, and one of them said, “Yeah, I guess he was trying to rob someone and that someone turned out to be an off-duty cop. Shot him. Died right there, I hear.” I was perplexed. I told him that the young man in question had actually died across the street, in the lot by the church. Six years ago, I said. Now the man looked puzzled. Six years? No, this just happened a few months ago, he insisted. There was some more back-and-forth, some more confusion, but it became clear—confirmed by police reports I read later—that six months earlier, twenty-year-old Joshua Jones had allegedly tried to rob a police officer from a nearby suburb who was serving papers on someone in the neighborhood. When we realized that two young men had been killed by the police at the same exact spot six years apart, we all just shook our heads. “That’s some crazy shit,” one of the men commented before Thomas and I drove on.

  Chapter 17

  The Disco Tour

  AUGUST 29…AUGUST 30…AUGUST 31…

  On a sultry summer afternoon I found myself on a small party minibus, a spinning disco light overhead, four flat-screen televisions hanging from the roof, black drapes on the windows, and a stripper’s pole in the center. I was there with a congressman, Bobby Rush, and a U.S. senator, Mark Kirk. Both seemed amused by their mode of transportation. When we got on the bus, laser lights of varying colors bounced off the walls and off those of us on board. Senator Kirk, who was in a wheelchair because of a recent stroke, turned to his deputy chief of staff. “It looks like you have sequins on,” he said, laughing. Okay, let me back up.

  Earlier this year Mark Kirk, the junior senator from Illinois, spent some time with the city’s police superintendent, Garry McCarthy, who had previously been the police chief in Newark, New Jersey. McCarthy is a numbers guy. He believes in data. Every week he brings together the department’s top commanders and detectives and runs through the stats from the previous week, sometimes praising, other times upbraiding commanders, depending on what their stats look like. The most important question he asks: Are violent crimes up or down? The department uses the numbers to figure out where to deploy officers. McCarthy was so proud of these gatherings—called CompStat, derived from the term computer statistics—that he opened them up to visitors, from politicians to academics to journalists. His refrain among his officers was, “This isn’t your father’s police department.” I attended a number of CompStat gatherings, and there were often well over two hundred in attendance, including visitors from other cities and other countries. It felt at times like performative art, a commander at a podium talking about data from the last week or the last month, facing a seated line of top officers, including McCarthy, who posed questions and passed judgment. During this summer CNN was filming what would be an eight-part series on Chicago’s violence, which featured McCarthy as one of the city’s heroes, and so the TV crew was there, often with two cameras focused on McCarthy, who at times seemed to be addressing not his officers but rather those observing and recording. “We’re having a pretty good year,” he boasted at one CompStat gathering. Homicides and shootings, indeed, were down. “None of this is by accident,” he continued. “This drill works. It’s not easy, but holy crap, it works.” McCarthy and other top police brass seemed obsessed with the gangs and at times spoke with the bravado of military officers at war. In responding to a series of cell-phone street robberies, McCarthy lectured one of his commanders, “The way we prevent robberies is find patterns—and when we have multiple offenders we don’t just lock up one. We get them all. Basically, target them, destroy them. The object here is to swat and destroy that gang.”

  McCarthy’s approach impressed Kirk, who as a naval officer had worked in counter-narcotics in Afghanistan and employed what’s called “human terrain mapping,” essentially mapping people’s connections, using informants and cell-phone data. At one point McCarthy invited Kirk on a ride-along, and while they were out one night, they got a call that someone had been shot. Because of his stroke, Kirk was susceptible to motion sickness and so threw up in the backseat as they sped to the scene. There a young man lay in his front yard, apparently shot three times in the buttocks. Kirk remembers McCarthy telling him, The shooting of someone is expenditure of ammunition and effort and risk. And the reason to do that is part of a battle. Like ninety percent of the shootings, it’s gang-related. So Kirk asked himself, Why not simply get rid of the gangs?

  In January, Kirk, like so many others, had been deeply unsettled by the murder of a fifteen-year-old girl, Hadiya Pendleton. Hadiya had been a drum majorette at her high school, and just a week earlier had performed with her school’s marching band at President Obama’s second inauguration. On the afternoon of Tuesday, January 29, earlier this year, Hadiya, after taking final semester exams, headed to nearby Harsh Park with some friends. It was raining, so the thirteen of them took shelter beneath a metal canopy, huddled together, talking, unwinding, when a boy just a few years older than Hadiya hopped a nearby fence and, mistaking them for a rival gang, opened fire with a black handgun, shooting six times. Two of the bullets wounded two of the students. A third bullet entered Hadiya’s back. She died at the hospital. (A few hours after the shooting, the police department released a statement which they later had to retract: “Preliminary information indicates that most of the members of the group were gang members.”) Her killing became national and international news. A bevy of dignitaries attended her funeral, including Michelle Obama; the city’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel; the secretary of education, Arne Duncan; and the state’s governor, Pat Quinn. Michelle Obama famously said afterward, “Hadiya Pendleton was me, and I was her.”

  For reasons no one can explain, Chicago has been the epicenter for murders by and of young people. They’ve served as markers for the city. On October 13, 1994, two boys, aged ten and eleven, dangled Eric Morse, who was five, out of a fourteenth-floor window at a public housing complex. Eric had refused to steal candy for them, and so they dropped him to his death. Eric’s eight-year-old brother raced down the fourteen flights hoping, thinking, praying that he might be able to catch his younger brother before he hit the ground. That same year, eleven-year-old Yummy Sandifer made the cover of Time magazine when his bloody body was found under a viaduct. Sandifer, who was nicknamed Yummy because of his love for junk food, had shot and paralyzed a rival gang member and mistakenly killed a young girl while aiming for someone else. His own gang members were afraid he might snitch, so they executed him. In 1998 two boys, aged seven and eight, were arrested and charged with the sexual assault and murder of eleven-year-old Ryan Harris. Again it made national news. It turns out that the real assailant was a man in his twenties, not these two boys—but virtually everyone in the city had become so accustomed to children killing children that they assumed their guilt. In the afternoon of September 24,
2009, fellow students beat to death sixteen-year-old Derrion Albert with pieces of a railroad tie; the incident was caught on a cell-phone video which went viral. In the wake of Albert’s death, President Obama sent Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to Chicago. Each of these deaths rattled an already shaken city. Each time politicians vowed it wouldn’t happen again. Each time, to borrow from Yogi Berra, it felt like déjà vu all over again. So many children were killed that for many years the local press kept a running tally of public school students killed, a kind of measuring stick for the health of the city. So many that some feel that there’s something nefarious at work. Earlier this summer Monique Davis, a state representative who represents a part of the South Side, offered her conspiracy theory to a radio host: “I’m going to tell you what some suspicions have been and what people have whispered to me. They’re not sure that black people are shooting all of these children. There’s some suspicion, and I don’t want to spread this, but I’m just going to tell you what I’ve been hearing: they suspect maybe the police are killing some of these kids…It’s time to make it known. It’s time to stop being quiet.”

  Disturbed by Hadiya’s murder and encouraged by his time with Police Superintendent McCarthy, Kirk, early in the summer, floated a proposal, one that was probably more contentious than he intended. He told a television reporter, “My top priority is to arrest the Gangster Disciple gang, which is eighteen thousand people. I would like to do a mass pickup of them and put them all in the Thomson Correctional Facility. I will be proposing this to the assembled federal law enforcement: ATF, DEA, and FBI.” Soon after, he explained, “I’m pretty focused on crushing the Gangster Disciples. It’s payback for Hadiya Pendleton’s death. In my case, personally, I want to take out the GDs because they killed Hadiya.”

  * * *

  —

  Bobby Rush, whose congressional district covers a wide swath of the city’s South Side, is best known for two moments in his past: in the 1960s he was the minister of defense for the Black Panther Party in Illinois, and in 2000 he defeated an upstart challenger for his seat, Barack Obama. It was the only election Obama would lose. (Rush also received a good deal of publicity when he was removed from the floor of Congress after donning a hoodie to honor Trayvon Martin.) But what isn’t talked about as much are two deeply personal moments that have come to shape him. In October of 1999, during the campaign against Obama, his twenty-nine-year-old son, Huey Rich, who bore his mother’s surname and was named after Huey Newton, was killed in a robbery. Two men approached Huey as he carried groceries into his home, and one of them pulled out a badge identifying himself as a police officer. Huey, according to Rush, must have sensed that they weren’t in fact police and took off running; one of the men shot him in the leg, rupturing his femoral artery. Rush told me that when he got word of his son’s shooting, he sped to the hospital, where he found his son unconscious after losing a lot of blood. After ten hours of surgery and massive blood transfusions, Rush said, the doctors seemed hopeful and believed Huey’s condition had stabilized, so Rush flew to D.C., as he was in the midst of negotiating the Telecommunications Act. The evening he arrived in D.C. the doctors called to tell him his son had taken a turn for the worse. It was too late to catch a flight, so Rush had to spend the night in D.C., and a staff member and two of her friends stayed up with him, keeping him in conversation and praying with him. When he arrived in Chicago the next morning, his son was bloated, twice his normal size, Rush recalls, breathing with the help of machines. He died that day. Rush’s daughter fell to the cold, polished hospital floor and yelled, Daddy, Daddy, do something! “I never felt so powerless,” Rush told me. And then he remembers his daughter’s and Huey’s mother’s piercing cries of torment, coming from somewhere deep and remote, a place that felt primal. “I can’t get that scream out of my head to this day,” Rush told me.

  Then, in 2002, Rush’s nephew, Dennis Rush, who was seventeen, killed a drug dealer while trying to rob him. Dennis was convicted of murder and sentenced to twenty-two years. “It was devastating,” Rush told me. “He was kind of wild-eyed and thought that the world owed him something. He wasn’t hostile, not a lot of rage. He just got caught up in the streets and thought that would get him status and stature.”

  Rush isn’t the only high-profile Chicagoan to be personally touched by the city’s violence. Jennifer Hudson’s mother and brother were murdered, as was the son of alderman Robert Shaw. NBA star Dwayne Wade’s nephew was shot and injured (in the coming years his cousin would be killed). Local activist Hal Baskin’s younger brother and his nephew were shot and killed. So was Derrick Rose’s childhood friend. Last summer the up-and-coming rapper Lil JoJo was gunned down riding a bicycle; another rap artist lost his brother. I could go on.

  “The violence, it’s like a virus,” Rush said. “It’s part of this rage and anger, and the need to express power. It’s about absolutely nothing except for seeking a sense of validation.”

  When Rush heard Kirk’s proposal to arrest 18,000 gang members, he became infuriated. He knew that the police kept a database of all those they suspected of gang involvement. It numbered over 100,000, and for many in the African-American community it felt like an arbitrary manner of labeling black and Latino youth. The police didn’t inform you if you were listed on the database, nor would they tell you how you got on it. The list, as many would learn, was often wrong, and if a person was murdered, the police often issued press releases linking the deceased posthumously to a gang, as if that somehow made the person’s death inevitable or warranted. Of Kirk’s proposal, Rush told a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, “It’s a sensational, headline-grabbing, empty, simplistic, unworkable approach. I am really very upset with Mark.” Rush then let loose, adding that Kirk’s approach was an “upper-middle-class, elitist, white boy solution to a problem he knows nothing about.”

  This public feud played out in the press (including one charged headline that read “Bobby Rush Plays the Race Card”), and though no one said as much, it hit a nerve because it got to the crux of the debate: Kirk believed that the violence was a police problem; Rush believed it was a problem growing from the economic distress and physical isolation of his community, which is why Rush, in the wake of their dispute, invited Kirk on a tour of his district, to see what his constituents, especially young men, were up against.

  * * *

  —

  They began at noon at Ryan Harris Park, a place purposefully chosen by Rush to underscore the upside-down nature of the violence. Rush and Kirk knew each other mainly from time spent traveling together between Chicago and D.C. They were in many ways remarkably different, from remarkably different backgrounds. One liberal, the other conservative. One from Chicago’s West Side, the other from Kenilworth, one of the country’s wealthiest communities. But they have both struggled with health problems, Kirk’s recent stroke and Rush’s cancer of the salivary glands. For both, illness affected their speech. Kirk seemed to hesitate when he spoke, as if he were searching for the right word. Rush sounded like he was talking with cotton in his cheeks, his words garbled and pebbly like he was speaking from deep within his throat. After Rush had calmed down, he had invited Kirk to spend a day with him in his district which encompassed much of Englewood. Kirk took him up on the offer. “There was no upside to starting a public spat with Bobby on this,” Kirk told me. “That’s part of the rules of the game, that the assumption is that the congressman is the greatest expert on his own district, and so for me I wanted to go knowing what I don’t know.”

  So they met early this morning at this small park alongside raised railroad tracks. It was named after eleven-year-old Ryan Harris. In 1998, Harris, who lived in a suburb, was spending the summer with her godmother in Englewood, babysitting and attending a local swimming program. On a Monday afternoon she left on her bike for the corner store and disappeared. The next day neighbors organized a search, distributing 250 Xeroxes o
f Harris’s school portrait. Shortly before three in the afternoon, a teenage boy found Harris’s body lying among a thick grove of trees and high weeds that ran along the rear of a vacant lot and behind a two-story red-brick home just on the other side of the railroad tracks from the park. Her face and head were badly swollen and beaten, and her flowered panties, which had been ripped off her body, had been stuffed in her mouth. Her red-striped short-sleeved shirt had been pulled up, partially exposing her breasts, and her lime-green shorts lay in a curled mess around her right ankle. She still wore her white Nike sneakers, the only articles of clothing which were undisturbed.

  Twelve days later the police announced they had arrested Harris’s killers. They were two boys, whom I’ll call Ricky and Isaac, who were eight and seven years old. The police said that the boys had wanted Harris’s blue Road Warrior bicycle, so the seven-year-old threw a rock and knocked her off the bike. Then, the police suggested, the boys beat her before suffocating her. The police said they confessed to the killing.

  When the boys were brought into court and charged with first-degree murder, people fixed on some detail that unnerved them, mostly having to do with their diminutive size. (One weighed fifty-six pounds, the other sixty-two pounds.) A local reporter remembered the two boys being escorted into the courtroom, the small hands swallowed up in the long fingers of adults. A television sketch artist remembered she had to lean over the raised bench where she sat to make out more than just the boys’ scalps. A public defender who represented one of the young boys described the doodles he made on her yellow legal pad; on one sheet he drew a house with heart-shaped balloons overhead, on another he simply wrote his name and his father’s all over the page. Another attorney, the mother of young children, took one look at the boys and began to cry. But there’s one shared memory everyone mentions: when the boys entered the courtroom, there was silence followed by an audible gasp, as if to collectively say, “Oh my God, what has society wrought?”