by Miles Harvey
There were a bunch of co-workers standing there at the time, and I don’t know how much they saw or didn’t see of the attack. But later, one of the women who works with me was like, “We’re not surprised that it was you who ran out there.”
See, I’ve always just really felt burdened to give back and work alongside young people who may not have had the exact experience as I had, but something very similar. I started out as a statistic with all of the odds against me, so to speak. I was born to a drug addict. My mother was addicted to heroin, and just about any drug that was out there, she used. I mean, she was full-blown out there, and is still struggling today.
I have a twin brother. My maternal grandfather took us in when we were born, and we lived with him until we were about 5 or 6 years old. Then, we relocated in Southeast D.C. with my mom. She had gone through a recovery program, and we went to live in public housing with her. And after about a year or so, my mom did not make it through her recovery—she became addicted again. And to get away from investigations with the Department of Children and Family Services, we moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She ran off with us with a boyfriend there. And her addiction did not stop, so eventually my grandparents got us back, and we moved back to the Washington area. I would say that half of my life was kind of lived in instability, because I was staying with a distant family member there, or a distant family member over here, and then we moved here, and then I was back with my mom here, and so there was a lot of moving around.
Chicago was the first place I ever lived where I didn’t move around a lot. Really, to be honest, Chicago has been my first home. When I arrived in Roseland, I saw a community that was hurting. But I also saw people who were willing to do something about it, people who weren’t accepting things as they were, people who were saying, “We’ve had enough.”
So, I don’t know that I felt scared when I walked out the door to try to help Derrion Albert. I felt like I was doing what I needed to do. And I did for him what I would have done for any kid in our neighborhood. And I did for him what I feel like I would have wanted someone to do for my child if that was my child out there. So, if there was any fear, the fear was of what would happen to him, not of what would happen to me.
It was chaotic out there. I mean, it was kids running in the street; it was just people everywhere. I don’t remember seeing very much, because my focus was getting him out of there. I do remember a black SUV coming through the alley at the time, and I just kind of waved to the driver and said, “Please, get out. Help me. Help me get him.” He got out of the car. But I have no idea who he was or where he went after that—never heard anything else from him.
My focus immediately became Derrion. All I know is I went over to the crowd and I remember saying, “Get away from him,” you know, “leave him alone.” And I just wrapped my arms around his chest and picked him up and carried him into the Agape Center. He felt as light as a feather at the time. I don’t know if it was adrenaline; I believe it was the Lord that allowed me to lift him. I lifted him up off the ground. And someone—I think it was the man that got out of the black SUV—I think he had his feet, but I’m not sure. I took him inside.
We laid him on the floor of our receptionist area. I immediately got on my knee to check to see if he had a pulse, which he still did at the time. He had a lot of swelling in his face. There was blood coming from his nostrils, from his mouth. I could definitely tell that there was head trauma. He looked like he wasn’t sure about where he was. He looked to me like he felt he was still outside, still vulnerable, about to get hit again. He looked very intense.
There was so many people around me at the time and I’m pretty sure someone said his name, but he also had on a school name tag. So, I looked at his name tag and immediately called Fenger High School and told them that I had a student named Derrion Albert. I said, “He’s badly injured and we need to get in touch with his family, immediately.”
One of the other staff members at our facility had already called an ambulance. I reached back down to check his pulse again. When I called his name, he did what I thought was him trying to answer me. But he took a deep breath and nothing. And so I called his name again and he took another deep breath, but then I called his name again—and after that, no more.
We waited for the ambulance. It took them a while to get there, which I was very angry about. And when they came, they were not prepared. They came in with a stethoscope. There was no defibrillator. I didn’t see any type of equipment that would address what looked like a pretty traumatized kid, you know, in terms of injury. One ambulance guy did say, “We need to call for backup.” And the other guy said, “No, we’ll just put him up on the board.” So he came in with the board, and they put him up on the board and took him out.
Roseland’s always been kind of notorious for deaths associated with violence, but it has increased within that last five years or so, after they began to tear down the big housing projects of Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green.3 The Roseland area got an influx of families that moved from those particular projects and, while there were some really beautiful families that moved to the area and wanted a chance to make it and do okay, there were some other families that brought on a lot of conflict to our community. Gang activity increased, territorial wars began to take place, and we began to start losing a lot of our kids to gang violence. It’s because of money, to be honest. People want money from the drug trafficking and with that comes a cost, so they fight over it.
In the last five years or so, it also became more evident that our kids were coming from families that were in distress. There’s a different kind of poor taking place right now. And what do I mean by that? I’ll give an example. Though my mother put me at a high risk in terms of her lifestyle, there was still the expectation that I would do better than she did. My mom would always say, “Don’t end up like me.” And my grandmother had a sixth-grade education, but she expected me to not come home with less than a B on my report card. The expectation was that I would not back-talk to teachers; the expectation was that I would respect adults.
But with the new poor, it feels like the family is in such distress that the expectation to do well in school, to have respect for adults, has gone down tremendously. Not even grandparents are stepping up the way they did when I was growing up. We have a lot of grandparents my age—and I’m only 39—so for multi-generational households, things have really gone down in terms of people feeling responsible for the young people in our community. I’m not against public aid, but in some ways it has handicapped some of our family dynamics, because it’s taken away the ownership that poor families once had with their children. Don’t get me wrong, I support Section 8 home vouchers, for example. But the way the program is structured, it is taking away the dignity and the responsibility of those who are receiving it. So our people have been given and given and given and given to, and because of that, parents don’t have that sense of responsibility anymore. And so, the kids are kind of left to their own devices.
A lot of the time, kids I work with don’t even want to go home. And this is why they end up doing some of the things they end up doing out on the streets. It opens up the door for them to get involved in what we in our community call “traps.” A trap house is an abandoned building that has been overrun by gangs in the neighborhood—they do drugs there, they sell drugs there, a lot of times there’s sex involved there—and they do what people do on the streets. And so our kids are hanging out at the trap instead of going straight home.
Then you have a situation where some kids are actually growing up in the trap. Can I just keep it real with you? Their situation is that everybody in their family gangbangs. That’s all they know, that’s all they do, that’s what they’re about. It’s their lifestyle. It’s what is considered the norm in their home.
I knew that this was a community that was at risk when I moved here. I knew full-fledge what I was getting into. I was not going in blind. So while one event in my life, the killing of this
young man, took me aback—yeah, it did—it’s a kind of event that has long been known to happen in Roseland. Until Derrion’s death, it just wasn’t publicized.
I knew about the video even before it hit TV and the Internet. There was some police officers at the Agape Center right after Derrion was loaded onto the ambulance. They asked if they could view our video footage. We have a control room where you can play back all of the video and all that, and they asked if they could go up. And one of the staff members there said, “There’s another video. There’s a guy with a video camera.”
It was not a cell phone as the media has often reported—so let’s just correct that. It was one of those small video cameras—handheld. She said the guy doing the filming tried to enter the Agape Center to follow me in when I was bringing Derrion into the building. She shoved him out of the building and told him that he could not come in.
I turned to the police officer, and I said, “YouTube. They’re going to post it on YouTube.”
He said, “What do you mean?”
I said, “Sometimes they do that if there’s a fight or something like that. They’ll record it and then upload it to YouTube.”
And then, a few days later, one of the kids said, “We saw you on TV.” I thought that they were talking about seeing me on TV from the initial interview that I’d done with the media about the incident. But they said, “No, we saw you on the video. It’s on the Internet.”
So that’s when I discovered that Fox News had the breaking story, you know: Derrion Albert, teen boy beaten on the South Side, and this, that, whatever—and you see the whole clip of video. And at the time, I knew it would probably go viral, but I didn’t know it would go viral like that.
The publicity surrounding the case has been very hard for our community. I’ll give an example. The year that Derrion was killed, I had a group of seniors from Fenger High School that I was working with at the time—they’ve since gone on to college. It was a group of five girls, and they were sending in their college applications and trying to pull themselves together from everything that happened, being surrounded by the media. Some of my girls went to college fairs, and I remember a specific instance where one of them had given her transcript and her résumé to a particular school, and they asked her what school she was from.
And she said, “Aw, I’m from Fenger High School.”
And the person said, “We’re not accepting applications from there.”
And I had kids looking for jobs—you know, trying to make a little change to have something to contribute towards expenses your senior year. And some employers literally tore up the applications in their faces because they were from Fenger High School. Whenever they would go somewhere for a school activity or for a basketball game or volleyball game, schools would beef up their security, because Fenger students were coming. Or schools would say, “Well, can you all come here, because we’re afraid to come there.” Like all of our kids were animals.
That did something to the hope of our kids. Their whole thing was, “It’s not all of us. We didn’t do it. I wasn’t there. Why are they treating us like this?” And so I feel like our kids and our families have been boxed into this stigma. They have been portrayed negatively by the media as unpromising, as a breed of animals, as a menace.
What I would say to those outside looking in is to expect from our kids what you expect from your kids wherever you are, and to give our kids an opportunity. I want you to know that there are future doctors, there are future lawyers, there are future advocates, there are future actors, there are future environmentalists, there are future scientists, there are future mathematicians coming out of Fenger High School and coming out of Roseland. These are kids that need our support and encouragement. And the media has taken that opportunity from them.
But we have people just like myself, from Roseland, who are still pushing our kids. We tell them, “Despite the odds, despite the disadvantages, you still need to do what needs to be done, because the world is not going to be accepting excuses. They’re not going to accept that you grew up in a hard neighborhood and you had it difficult and you didn’t have the same education—they’re not going to go buy that story. They’re going to be looking to you to produce.”
So the airing of the video had its negative side, but it definitely had its benefits, too. I think a lot of people who saw what happened, it opened their eyes, not just about what’s going on in Roseland, but what was going on across the city with our youth. People who didn’t have any idea that things like this could happen—who were just kind of removed from these problems—it was a wake-up call to them, and now they’re just trying to figure out what it looks like for them to be involved. I mean, look at yourself. Would you be interested in Roseland, had not Derrion’s death gone the way it did?
I have never gone back and watched the video. Every time I saw it in court, I broke down, and probably if I saw it this moment, I would still break down. But, honestly, I didn’t really need to see a video. I saw what the video didn’t show.
I’m pretty sure that Derrion was pretty near death when I was with him. I’m convinced that I am probably the person that he had his final moments with. I really do believe—and this is why it’s taken me two years to even openly share what my experience was that day—I really do believe that God placed me there for those moments to make sure that, if the Agape Center was in fact the place where Derrion died, he died with some dignity and he had some people around him that truly cared. We tried to give him what his mom or any of his other family members would have wanted him to have—some comfort.
And that is a very sacred moment when someone is transitioning from this life to the next. I don’t want to defile the experience. So I would just ask that, whatever you take from this interview, you would honor and respect that the dignity of his family be preserved and that Derrion’s dignity be preserved. Though he died a very violent death, he had purpose, he had life, and we need to honor that. So whatever happens with this project, my expectation would be for it to be used as a vehicle for exposing young people to the idea that they can make a choice. No matter what your circumstances are, you don’t have to allow someone else to write your story. It’s not how you start; it’s how you finish.
—Interviewed by Miles Harvey
Endnotes
3 Spread out along two miles of State Street from 39th to 54th Streets, Robert Taylor Homes was once the largest public-housing project in the United States. In the early part of this century, its high-rise towers were torn down as part of a community redevelopment scheme, displacing thousands of residents. The Cabrini-Green public housing project on the Near North Side was razed around the same time, as was the Stateway Gardens project in Bronzeville.
MY LIFE WAS ONLY WORTH A FEW GUNS
JAIME MIRANDA
Jaime Miranda—not his real name—is a 17-year-old high-school student who lives on the West Side of Chicago. Because he recently quit his gang, Jaime fears for his life and wants to keep many details of his past confidential. He’s hiding from his former associates, whom he tricked into believing he was moving out of town.
During his time in the gang, Jaime witnessed, and took part in, “terrifying things that still give me nightmares.” These acts of violence have traumatized him—but he can’t confide in his parents because he’s never told them about joining the gang. Jaime is a short, intense young man with close-set eyes that tend to dart around the room. When he describes his fear, he looks down and speaks in a somewhat shaky tone.
The first time I fell in love I was on vacation with my family in Mexico. I was 11. I met this girl and, as soon as I seen her, I was like, “Man, she’s the one.” I bought her flowers the second day. I was there for about three months and every day we would be together, we would spend time together. We still stay in touch. We still have a connection from our childhood—knowing that I was her first boyfriend, she was my first girlfriend. We talk, Facebook and everything. I can’t recall anything else in my childho
od that made a good memory for me.
I have older brothers, but I never grew up with them. I have no idea where they are. I’ve never seen one of them. So to me, the members of the gang were like my brothers. I just seen these guys as my family. The first day that I joined, my friend told me, “I’m not going to look at you as my friend anymore. I’m looking at you as my brother.” If I needed something, the gang would get it for me. If I was hungry, they’d go get me something. They’d buy me clothes. They’d look out for me; I’d look out for them.
Even before I joined, they used to do a lot of things for me. One day they told me, “Hey, would you like to join with us?”
I said, “Fuck it, let’s do it. Let’s go.” And that’s how, pretty much, my life started going down as soon as I said, “Let’s go. Let’s do it.”
At first, I’m thinking it’s fun. You know, I’m enjoying myself, being with my friends on a daily basis. What I used to like about being with them was that, on the weekends we’d have cookouts. You know, all of us just drink—you know, have our own fun. Those are things that I used to like.
There was only about five of us from the gang in the school, but we would still keep our reputation up. If we see one of the other gang members throwing the gang signs up, and if we see them throwing ours down,4 then we’ll go confront them. We’ll fight them wherever it’s at. In front of the office, in front of the principal, it doesn’t matter. If we show fear, our own friends would deal with us, because that’s not what they want in a gang. They want people that are willing to do whatever it takes to protect—and just do what’s needed.
Once you’re a gangbanger, the only thing going through your head is, “Fight. Do what you’ve got to do.” The one thing that gangbangers like is that fear. Personally, I used to walk through the blocks around the school being feared. When people used to look at me, they used to hide behind cars, go back to their homes or whatever. I wouldn’t even have a knife or a gun on me. No, they were just afraid of me. ‘Cause they know if they do something to me, then everybody’s gonna be involved.