An American Summer

by Alex Kotlowitz

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  Everyone knows who killed Ramaine. I know his name. And his nickname. I’ve seen numerous photographs of him. I can describe his tattoos. I can find him on Facebook. But he will probably never be charged with Ramaine’s murder.

  Through some friends at the police department, I heard secondhand that the lead detective in this case was indignant, tired of the no-snitch code of the streets. Authorities and the press have clamped on to the notion that those living in distressed urban communities refuse to cooperate with the police because they see it as dishonorable or unprincipled. It’s not that that culture doesn’t exist, but it’s so much more than just the idea that people won’t work with law enforcement because they see it as betraying their peers. In a city like Chicago, where maybe 10 percent of the shooters are arrested, many simply take justice into their own hands. Or, as is so often the case, they’re simply afraid.

  After months of trying, I was finally able to meet with the detective. The police department asked that I not name him. We met at a restaurant in Little Italy, where he sat in a corner in white shirt and tie, middle-aged and white, sipping an iced tea. He seemed surprised that the department had asked that I not quote him by name. His hands were resting on an inch-and-a-half-thick file on Ramaine’s case. “I told them I had no problem talking to you but that I’d tell it straight,” he said.

  He began by telling me that he was never able to corroborate that Ramaine had been repeatedly threatened. It’s not that he doubted it happened, but rather that he had no evidence, no records of calls from Ramaine or his family. Nonetheless, in his report when he filled out the line for “Possible Motive” he wrote “possible retaliation.” He told me that Ramaine’s family refused to give him the name of his cousin who had witnessed his murder. He said at one point a family member told him, That’s your fuckin’ job to learn his name. Now this is where many detectives might get their backs up, where they might deride the no-snitch culture that so many speak of, but this detective saw something different. He told me in no uncertain terms that this lack of cooperation had little or nothing to do with some street code. “People who tell you that are lying,” he told me. “I don’t blame them for not coming forward. If you saw something, you’d ask yourself, ‘How am I going to protect my family?’ I can’t get mad at those people.”

  Fear runs through these communities like a steady rip current, pulling people out to sea, where they’re on their own, flailing to stay afloat. Fear is everywhere. You see it in the language. In the street signs. In acts, both small and large. At Harper High School, Crystal Smith, one of the two social workers, once asked a student how his summer was, to which he replied simply, “Safe.” A number of years ago, when Myra Sampson, the principal at Lawndale Christian Academy, walked me through her school, poking her head into classrooms, asking students how they were doing, many of the boys would answer simply, “Staying out of trouble.” As Myra told me later, this is what their parents tell them before they leave each morning: Stay alert. Keep your head up. Look around you. Be safe. In other words, maintain a stance that assumes the worst. In Chicago, neighbors often come together to form block clubs, small block-by-block organizations which host barbecues and beautify their street. I’ve been photographing block club signs on the city’s West and South Sides, because they all announce their intentions not in language that speaks to their dreams but rather in language that speaks to their fears. In bold letters, the block clubs have printed all that’s prohibited, including:

  NO DRUG DEALING

  NO GAMBLING PENNY PITCHING OR DICE

  NO LOITERING

  NO LOUD MUSIC

  NO SOLICITING

  NO BALL PLAYING

  NO ALCOHOL

  NO GANG ACTIVITY

  These are communities, to borrow a term from the world of psychology, that are hyper-vigilant. They are wary and weary, collectively looking over their shoulder, trying to fend off all that feels like a threat to their well-being. Many parents take out life insurance policies on their children, not because they’re looking to profit off a child’s death but rather so they are assured of having the funds to pay for their funeral. I’ve seen that fear even among those whose very job it is to make people feel safe. Earlier in the summer, a teenage boy, Jose, was shot in the face. Doctors put him in an induced coma for three weeks, and according to his mother, little by little he regained consciousness. One bullet had entered his mouth and exited his jaw. His right cheekbone had been blown away. He needed extensive reconstructive surgery. Jose knew his assailant, but his assailant’s friends sent him text messages offering to pay him not to testify. In court the assailant’s friends muttered loud enough for him to hear, You fuckin’ trick. When he eventually had to testify, he responded to the prosecutor’s questions with I don’t recall or I don’t remember, and was threatened with contempt. Jose’s mother, it turns out, works as a victim’s advocate in juvenile court. Her job is to offer reassurance and encouragement to victims as they wait to testify, but she couldn’t or wouldn’t insist that her son testify. In fact, she told him not to. “What guarantee would there be to protect him?” she asked rhetorically. “I love my work. The attorneys here will tell you that I can bring in anyone in the world.” She paused. “Except my son…I’m a victim advocate at my job, but not at my home.” That’s where we’re at: that someone whose job it is to help give people the courage and support to testify knows better. Not when it comes to her own family.

  This is what the detective in Ramaine’s case was up against. Plain and simple, people are afraid to come forward. They see what happens to those who do. Indeed, when the detective visited the woman in the Kia who witnessed Ramaine’s murder from just a few feet away, her husband came out on the stoop and told the detective, We can’t get involved. We know people from that neighborhood. The detective, who’s good at what he does, told him he would feel the same if he was in their shoes, but convinced him to let him inside. He got the man’s wife to look at a photo lineup and so spread six photos on a coffee table. He watched as she scanned the images, her sight each time involuntarily resting on the key suspect. He could tell. She knew. In the end, though, she asserted that she couldn’t decide between him and one other individual. The detective didn’t believe her, but he understood. The postal worker said he couldn’t pick the suspect out of a photo lineup either. Nor could the young man who’d been walking across the street. At one point the detective got a call from an FBI agent who said that one of his informants had heard who did it. But the FBI agent refused to let his informant talk to the police—though the detective doubts it would’ve been of much help anyway, since it was hearsay. Then there was the cousin.

  A gang officer found the cousin on social media, and after a search learned he was appearing in court on a misdemeanor drug charge. The detective went to the courthouse and in the hallway introduced himself. The detective recalls that the cousin got emotional, started crying, and then recounted everything he had seen, including identifying the man with the limp. So finally the police had reason to arrest the suspect, who was twenty-one and who had his gang name tattooed on both fists. Under law they could detain him for forty-eight hours without pressing charges, and so while they held him, the detective went back to the cousin to have him come to the station to pick the suspect out of a lineup. He also tried to reconnect with the woman in the Kia. She wouldn’t answer his calls. And he couldn’t locate the cousin, who, once he learned that the detective was looking for him, went into hiding. In those forty-eight hours the detective visited the cousin’s home over a dozen times and reached out to two uncles, who agreed to help find him. (The detective concedes that even if he had located the cousin, it might not have been enough to bring charges, since the cousin had waited so long to come forward.) As he told this story, the detective was clearly irritated, but not without sympathy for the cousin’s predicament. “It’s fear,” he told me. “I th
ink it’s justified—if you’re not a criminal yourself.” As Ramaine’s brother starkly pointed out in explaining why no one would come forward, “Look what happened to my brother.”

  I asked the detective if the case was still active. He looked sheepish. He explained to me that it had been listed as “cleared exceptionally,” a phrase of art that suggests they’d done an exceptional job. There are two ways to clear a case. The most prevalent is that there’s been an arrest and prosecution. But a case can also be considered cleared if the offender is deceased or there are no witnesses left to interview or no more evidence to be found. This second explanation is what the police department calls “cleared exceptionally.” Even though neighbors, family, friends, witnesses, and the police are certain who killed Ramaine Hill, there has not been, and may never be, an arrest or a prosecution. Nonetheless, the case is considered solved. If you look at the police department’s end-of-the-year report which lists murder cases that have been cleared, a rather important statistic in a city of over four hundred homicides, Ramaine Hill’s murder will be classified as a closed case. When this detective explained all this to me, he shook his head in resignation, an acknowledgment that it really made no sense. “It’s frustrating,” he told me, on every level, not least because Ramaine Hill, as much as, if not more than, anyone, deserved some justice. He did the right thing: he identified the boy who had shot him two years earlier. And this is what everyone in Chicago’s neighborhoods know: if you do the right thing, bad things often happen.

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  I tracked down the cousin at a two-story graystone building on the city’s far West Side. It was a rainy summer day, and so he and I talked on the small porch under an overhang, the rain coming down so hard it was at times hard to hear each other. He wore his hair in long braids, and his eyes were bloodshot, suggesting that he might be high. In the humidity he had unbuttoned his shirt, revealing a well-sculpted yet lean body. He told me he had been a Jesse White tumbler for fifteen years; they’ve performed their acrobatics at halftime of Chicago Bulls and Chicago Bears games, on the Tonight Show, and in two presidential inaugural parades. He told me that after he heard the gunshots, he sprinted across the street and kneeled by Ramaine, who lay on his side. Ramaine, he said, had a large gunshot wound in his neck, a gaping hole, really, and was laboring to breathe. You’re gonna make it. You’re gonna make it, the cousin told him over and over again, hoping that if he said it enough it’d come true.

  He told me that over the previous year he, too, had heard that Ramaine had been offered money not to testify in a possible upcoming hearing. He had urged Ramaine to accept the cash. Take the money, he had told Ramaine. You’ll sleep better. But Ramaine had responded, Cuz, why would I take their money if I didn’t do anything wrong?

  The cousin confirmed what the detective had told me, that he indeed had identified the shooter, that he had broken down and cried when recounting the shooting, and that after that first encounter he had hidden from the detective. He insisted, “I ain’t afraid,” but continued, “If I testified, they’d come after me. I’d just need to be prepared. I know I couldn’t be out here lacking. I know I’d have to have a gun on me.” He paused, and seemed to guess my next question. “I’m not picking him out of a lineup. I’m not testifying in court.”

  I asked him, “But don’t you want justice? Don’t you want him in prison?” The cousin leaned against the railing, nodding to himself, considering my question. He took his time. He brushed his braids from his face, and he extended his hand beyond the porch, letting the raindrops fall on his outstretched palm. The rainwater ran down his forearm. He turned to me, and mused, “Karma is a motherfucker.”

  Chapter 19

  The Tightrope, part four

  SEPTEMBER 6…SEPTEMBER 7…SEPTEMBER 8…

  Late one evening Marcelo went to the bathroom to wash up and brush his teeth before bed. As he leaned over the sink, he noticed hair circling the drain. He knew right away the hair belonged to a boy down the hall, and so Marcelo went to the boy’s room and cursed at him, completely out of proportion with the offense. He later apologized. Another time a staff person told Marcelo he had to move away from another boy working on a computer. He yelled at the staff that it was a stupid rule and then turned, retreated to his room, and headed to the shower, where for nearly an hour he let the hot water soothe him. “I struggle with my identity,” he told me. “I’m just scared.”

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  During the summer, on Sundays, I would come by to visit Marcelo at Mercy, since he couldn’t go anywhere because of the electronic monitoring. We had a routine. Marcelo, like I said, doesn’t like surprises, anything that pulls him away from what he knows. At a nearby Italian deli, I’d pick up a sandwich—turkey, lettuce, and tomato and easy on the mayo—along with chips, a pickle, and a Coke and go by in the early afternoon. We’d sit at a table in his suite, eat lunch, and then sit in plush chairs by the television to play chess. Marcelo usually won. And we talked.

  Marcelo is reasonably private, and so it wasn’t until we had spent a number of Sundays before he spoke about the morning he and his friends went on a string of street robberies. “Where’s the real Marcelo?” he asked rhetorically. “I don’t really know yet, to be honest. I mean, I do know, but my mind goes in different directions during different situations.” He’s been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, a result of being shot. He takes melatonin to get to sleep at night. He asks questions three or four times, not trusting each answer, sometimes not remembering. He has what he calls “reruns” of the night he got shot, sometimes retreating into a trancelike state, clearly somewhere other than in the present. He angers easily. The sound of running water soothes him. When it rains, he’ll sit by an open window, especially during thunderstorms, the steady patter comforting him. Sometimes he’ll sit by a running sink just to hear the flow of water. He’ll take long showers. He doesn’t know what it is about running water, but it’s the one thing that calms him down. It makes his body tingle, he told me. It makes him feel good.

  Mercy, which is housed in a three-story building near the city’s downtown, has a contemporary feel. Bright lights and large windows give the place a sense of openness. Each child is assigned to a “home” or suite, and this summer Marcelo lived in Mahoney, which housed nine other boys. Marcelo didn’t like me coming into his room because he felt it was too messy (“Remember, I’m a teenager,” he’d say), but a few times he let me into the narrow space. On the wall he’s hung a Chicago Bulls 1996 championship banner, a gift from his first-grade teacher. On his desk, next to a Chicago White Sox helmet, he has a photo of his older brother, Elio, when he was at Mercy. He’s close to both brothers but feels responsible for Omar, who’s two years younger and also is now at Mercy. Omar, like Marcelo, is a good student, but is more withdrawn. Marcelo worries about him, that if he goes back into the neighborhood people will mistake Omar for him. His old gang, Marcelo tells me, has put an SOS order out: shoot on sight. So he has told Omar to stay at Mercy, where he’s secure.

  On this particular Sunday, rather than sit in the TV room, Marcelo suggests we talk in a small alcove in the rear of his suite, which is considerably more private. We sit by a floor-to-ceiling window which gives the illusion of being outside, something he welcomed, given that he was still on house arrest. Marcelo’s small frame is swallowed up in an oversized red Jordan hoodie and gray sweatpants. He plays with a rubber band he wears on his wrist and picks at a pimple on his nose. He bites his fingernails, leaning back in a cushioned chair, his legs extended. On the couch, reclining on his side, is Tom Gilardi, a Mercy vice president, who has become especially close to Marcelo. Dressed in a plaid button-up shirt and jeans, Tom, who’s forty-six, is a beefy man, tall and broad-shouldered, who played nose tackle for the football team at the College of the Holy Cross. He has a young son and a young daughter and lives next door to the facility. With a booming voice, he�
�s a straight shooter and buoyant, which Marcelo appreciates. A few weeks earlier, Tom had told me he still wasn’t sure they had done the right thing. Mercy had never bailed someone out of jail. Ordinarily, if you get in trouble with the law, you’re out. But there was something about Marcelo that felt different. As a sixteen-year-old, Marcelo had persisted in convincing Mercy to let him in. On his own. And once in, he became a mentor to other kids, and studied such long hours he made the A Honor Roll at De La Salle, earning a 4.1 average his junior year.

  “Over the years I’ve been worn down by working with kids who I see potential in and then I see that same child do something that’s wicked bad,” Tom told me. “I’ve just learned over time that those two worlds are not that far apart…Even with Marcelo struggling, I literally want to wring his neck. Like, wake up! And then part of me is like, he’s seventeen. He’s a knucklehead and he’s hurting. I waffle. I go back and forth.”

  Tom and Marcelo clearly enjoy each other’s company, and Marcelo seems especially relaxed with Tom, who is taking good-natured jabs at Marcelo’s effort to grow a goatee.

  “That Fu Manchu thing you got going there…” Tom joshes.