by Miles Harvey
You find out that, if you look into some of these reports, they give gang affiliations. They usually find out by tattoos or witnesses, things like that. You get to recognize some of the gang tattoos. I mean, the 16-year-old has tattoos, but one of them was his name and, like, praying hands. A lot of the people that we work on have tattoos, and a lot of them have gang tattoos that can easily be recognized.
If it’s the number 4, it’s the Four Corner Hustlers. If you see crossed pitchforks, it’s GD, which is the Gangster Disciples. There are so many different factions now that even some of the bigger gangs have broken up into smaller factions and fight each other. The crossed pitchforks I see a lot. But a lot of those are on people that are in their 40s and even their 50s. They’re older gang members that have survived and they’re dying from drugs or natural diseases. They’re not into the gangbanging; I guess it’s not exciting for them anymore.
This is the working hallway where they’re doing autopsies. Want to see?
It’s a gunshot victim and there’s the victim himself right there. We have digital X-rays now, so we’re able to locate the bullets and recover them. All of the bullets in the body have to be removed.
When a bullet is fired from a gun, it has kinetic energy, and kinetic energy is determined by its velocity—how fast it’s traveling—and mass. The more kinetic energy that a bullet has, the more damage it’s going to do. So if you have a low muzzle velocity handgun—a .22 or something like that—it’s not going to do as much damage as a higher velocity gun, like a .22 rifle.
As the bullet goes into the body, the small piece of lead isn’t really going to do all that much damage. If I threw a bullet at you, it wouldn’t do anything. But as the bullet is entering the body, it’s sending kinetic energy out in a circumferential manner around it. So a bullet that’s the size of a pencil eraser may create damage in the body that’s the size of a softball. What happens is it creates what’s called a temporary cavity, and that cavity pulsates and becomes smaller, smaller and smaller, until you finally just have the hole the bullet has left in the organs. That hole is surrounded by a larger area of damaged tissue.
So depending on where the bullet goes into the body and what organs it affects, it’s going to create far more damage. If it goes through the heart, it can kill you very quickly because you need your heart to pump your blood. Where you’re hit determines how quickly you may die or succumb. Now, I’ve done autopsies on victims that have been shot in the head and have run 75 yards or have driven their car for several blocks before they succumb. It all depends on what part of the brain and what the kinetic energy is. You could shoot somebody and, if it goes through the frontal lobes of the brain, they’re not going to lose consciousness until the brain swells enough from the damage to cause them to become unconscious and die. If you shoot them in the back of the head where the vital centers are, they’re going to die much faster. It’s not like on television when you get shot and you go down. In some cases it’s true, and in some cases it’s not true.
The length of an autopsy depends on how many times they’ve been shot. I’ve been doing this for 25 years, so it usually takes me about an hour, an hour and a half. We always X-ray our gunshot victims, examine the outside of the body. We do height, weight, hair color, eye color. Are your teeth natural? Are your ears pierced? Do you have any tattoos, you know, scars, identifying marks? Then we locate and measure the wounds. We look for evidence of close range fire, like soot, gunpowder or stippling.
After you do the external examination, then you do the internal examination. If you’re shot in the head, it doesn’t matter; we’re going to do a complete autopsy. We usually start with the chest and abdomen. We collect toxicology samples: blood, bile from the gall bladder, urine from the urinary bladder if there’s some there; we usually take fluid from the eye. If they’re shot and the bullet is still in the body, then we remove it and photograph it for the investigating officer.
What happens when they do IDs is they set it here under the camera. So if you stand right here and come a little forward—there you are.
The intake attendants and autopsy technicians get the body on the cart and they usually have a blue sheet over them and just the head is shown. We do identifications by close-circuit television. We don’t pull a drawer out, like you see on TV. The family’s not standing right there.
We have the family fill out an affidavit when they come in. We take them in the order that they come. We ask them who are they here to see, what their relationship is to the victim, you know, as much demographics as we can get. We make a copy of a photo ID. Then, they sign it. After they’re done with that, we ask them to sit down and we’ll call them back and take them into the viewing room.
This is the room where we bring the families to make the IDs. We ask them to sit down, ask them if they’re ready. When they tell us they’re ready, we turn the TV on and they see the face of the body. They can sit here as long as they want. They can look at it as long as they want.
We used to let anyone come in and as many times as they wanted to see the body, but we found that people were using us as their funeral home, and I don’t have enough staff. This is a very difficult part of the job that we do—helping the families. I don’t have a grief counselor or a minister or like a chaplain or anything like that for either the families or my staff.
Now this painting, this picture is very non-denominational and is usually hanging on the wall over there. But if you look at the wall you can see a ripply area. Somebody punched three holes in the wall while they were doing an identification. I don’t even think it was a homicide victim. So we’ve restricted the number of IDs that we do. We’ve cut back, especially after the damage was done to the wall. Some of my staff have been threatened. We now restrict IDs to homicide victims, as well as unidentified and those tentatively IDed. It’s made a big difference. Everyone’s stress levels have gone down quite a bit.
In this job, we see the best and the worst of human beings. We really do. I’ve had mothers truly devastated by the loss of a child, of course. But others—well, we just recently had a young homicide victim, and the mother came in and she was making loud, wailing noises and dramatically falling to the floor and things like that. But when you looked at her closely, there wasn’t a single tear in her eye. You know, they give an over-dramatic performance out of guilt. Some of our victims are 10-year-olds or in their early teens who were out on a school night at 11 or 12 o’clock at night. What were they doing out on a school night at midnight? Why aren’t the parents enforcing curfew? Why aren’t they in bed sleeping? I think that’s part of the guilt. The parents realize that they weren’t there for them when their child was young and needed them.
My parents lived through the Depression and World War II, so it was the nuclear family, the whole thing. When I was a kid, you were held accountable and learned to become self-sufficient. I grew up around the time where the drug culture and free love and personal freedom started coming in. Those parents raised their children differently, with maybe a little too much free rein, as opposed to what we had when we were kids. It has progressed to where society believes you should really allow your child to express themselves and you really shouldn’t discipline your child.
I think the problem today is that parents are trying to be their children’s friend and not the parent. And you have to be a parent; you have to set limits. Bribery doesn’t work with kids, because they’re just going to want more and more. You have to be a parent.
Everybody is like, “The police need to do more. The schools need to do more. Society needs to do more to prevent youth violence.” But very rarely do you hear that the parents should be doing more. Ultimately, the parents are responsible for what their children are doing.
I know that there’s a lot out there about joining gangs. Why does somebody join a gang? Well, because it’s their family. The gang means much more to them and provides them with more than their parents did, than their family did. If you have a tight, cohesive famil
y who are cared for and everything, then there’s no reason to join a gang.
But I’ve had mothers where their sons have been nothing but trouble from the day they were old enough to leave home on their own. I’ve actually had a mother say, “I’m glad he’s gone. He’s been nothing but trouble his whole life.” I understand that you can do everything in your power to try to raise a child correctly and make them socially responsible and everything, and it doesn’t make any difference. There are evil people and, unfortunately, for this lady, her son just was evil.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am a human being with feelings and emotions, just like everyone else. There are times where, for whatever reason, particularly if the victim is an innocent bystander and the family did everything to protect the child and raise them properly and they still end up dead, it just breaks my heart. Even if we don’t talk to the parents or meet them at all, it still touches you.
Every day is a struggle for us to focus on our job and not focus on the social and human aspects of the job, because, if you focus too much on that, you lose sight of what it is that you’re doing and you’re not going to do your job properly.
Don’t think I’m a coldhearted person, but I know how to separate the person I am from the work I do. When you’re doing an autopsy, it’s not a person. You’re working on a case number. You’re working on a case.
Even with gang members, I try not to think about them because that’s personalizing them, making them more than a case number. In order to survive, in order to be able to sleep at night, in order to come to work day after day after day and do what I do, I choose to not humanize victims by not knowing their stories. Yes, even the gang member has family out there that cared about him, but I can’t perform to the degree that is required to do a good job if I allow myself to get involved emotionally with what I do. As the examining pathologist, I don’t want to know about his life, because my job is to focus on his death. I’m very comfortable with death; I’m very uncomfortable with dying.
I really love what I do. It’s fascinating seeing how the human body was put together and to see how little it takes to cause it to cease to function. I can’t cure what happened to this person; I can’t bring them back to life. But what I can do is help the family.
When I was an assistant medical examiner, I thought of the morgue as a place where the work I was doing was bringing peace to family members and bringing justice for the victims of crime—to be the voice of victims and to tell their families and their friends what happened to them and what brought about their death.
I still think of it as that.
—Interviewed by Jacob Sabolo
BOTH FEET OUT
BENNY ESTRADA
Benjamin “Benny” Estrada believes he is doing God’s work. A former gang member in the Mexican-American neighborhood of Little Village on the Southwest Side, Estrada uses his own experience to help at-risk youth. He spoke with us in 2011 at the YMCA’s Street Intervention Program in Pilsen, where he worked69 as a program coordinator with Jorge Roque, whose narrative also appears in this book. The program, which operates in neighborhoods throughout Chicago, attempts to keep young people away from street violence through services such as recreational activities and in-school visits.
Estrada—who, prior to joining the YMCA, worked for the anti-violence group CeaseFire—is a small man with swift gestures. He has a casual air, but when he becomes passionate about a topic he is prone to smacking tables and using his hands to emphasize his points.
Little Village is divided by two major gangs, right: the Latin Kings and the Two-Sixes. And where I grew up, which is like the east side of Little Village, there was a real lack of resources, a real lack of after-school programming, a lack of green spaces, parks in general. If we wanted to go to the park and stay in the Latino community, you can either go to Pilsen, which is out of your way, or you can go to Piotrowski Park, which is based in Little Village. But there being two major gangs, if you’re not from the community where Piotrowski Park is at, there’s guys that know that.
So what happened was I tried going to Piotrowski Park. I played Little League baseball over there. At this time, I wasn’t involved in gangs. I was just a kid that loved sports. I was a pitcher. I think it was at the age of 11 that I got put on the Pittsburgh Pirates team. And the Pittsburgh Pirates team uniforms are the colors of the gang in my part of Little Village. It wasn’t even the gang colors, but it was something that was very similar to the gang colors.70
So I went to the other part of Little Village to play a game. I pitched a real good game and I’m walking home. I get to the boundaries of both gangs, where this is this side and this is this side. And the gang from the other neighborhood approached me. And I’m like, “Aw, man.” I had a friend, and he was a chubby kid and he just took off running. So that already invoked suspicion on them. They’re like, “Well, why’s this guy running? He must be a gangbanger.” And I didn’t run, you know, ‘cause I didn’t feel like I had to run.
And the ringleader asked me, “What you be about? What gang are
you in?”
I’m like, “Man, I don’t gangbang.”
They’re like, “Yeah, yeah, but what’s up with them colors, man?” I was 11 years old and this 16-year-old goes and slaps me and he takes my hat. He’s like, “Yeah, yeah, you’re in a gang, punk, with those colors on.” He took my baseball jersey too from me. I’m like, “Aw, man.”
And that was like my first taste of what it was to be affected by gangs. And it invoked hatred in me for the other side of the neighborhood. I came home and threw my glove away, like threw it in the garbage, and my mom’s like, “What’s wrong with you? Why you throwing your glove away?” I just stopped playing baseball altogether. I’m like “Man, ‘ef’ baseball.” I mean that’s how much that day affected me. It just—it planted a negative seed in me, is what it did, and that seed upon time, you know, it grew and it grew and it grew.
From that point on, I didn’t go to the west side of Little Village. I didn’t go back over there. At all. For nothing. And that’s where the park was at.
I really wasn’t gang involved up until I hit my freshman year at Farragut High School, but my stepfather was one of the major players in the community. He was already involved at a young age in gangs; I think about 14 or 15 years old he was already involved. Everything that he did, I pretty much did; I wanted to emulate him.
And when I hit high school, it was like a culture shock. You got the Gangster Disciples, you got the Vice Lords, you got the Travelers, all African-American gangs. And the guys that were already involved in the Latino gang from my neighborhood in Little Village, they pretty much just cuffed me and took me under their wing. There was this one guy in particular, he seen me in the lunchroom like my second day. He’s like, “You’re gonna be cool; you’re with us. Don’t worry about it.” He was like this big muscular dude; it was probably like his fifth year in high school, and he probably had like sophomore credits, and he just took me under his wing. From that point on, it was like, “All right, well, I guess I’m gonna be involved.” I didn’t really have a choice.
He was one of those guys that, you know, if there was a fight, he’s right in the middle of it. If there’s an argument, he’s coming, he’s showing up. That’s just who he was—the guy that always managed to have his hands on anything that happened in the school in terms of guys getting into gang fights. Nobody would mess with him. And ‘cause nobody would mess with him, nobody would mess with me.
I was with him once when a well-known rapper came to the school to perform a concert. So I sit down and the concert starts and some back-and-forth banter starts going on in the stands. The blacks and Latinos be gangbanging to each other. Signs here, signs there. All it took was one swing and it was over. Everybody started fighting.
And that was my first experience, man. I hit a couple people. Our assistant principal got hit with a chair; it busted his head right open. I got a black eye; I got a fat lip. It really started to i
nvoke that hate, and that seed was already planted from the Latino gangs, but now it was planted from the African-American gangs. That really took me off course. It put a bad taste in my mouth.
It was tough, man, because I played basketball and all the African-American students, they would see me in the gym. And I had a real good friend that was a black student—a real good friend. I mean, we used to hang out after school by the gym and we would play ball. Saturday mornings, me and him would be the first ones there. And in my junior year, there was a big fight and everybody’s running around the school. They were taking students and locking them up. I’m walking in the hallway and he’s coming up the stairs. He’s got a big old bandage on his head, and he’s just bleeding profusely. He’s like, “Why the ‘ef’ your boys got to do that, bro?”
I just looked at him, and that’s when I knew: I just lost a friend. And it wasn’t even something I did. It was something the guys did, but I didn’t try to repair that relationship. I left it alone. That’s just the way it was.
I didn’t have a father growing up. I was about five months old when he passed away. And my uncle through marriage was a positive person in my life. He’s like one of the biggest influences in terms of why I do this work, because he was a social worker, too.
He loved working with the kids and he took a real liking to me, even though I was heavily involved in the gang in the neighborhood. Basketball was always something that attracted my attention—and my uncle, he fueled that passion, man. He would come to the block in his little Honda. He’d double-park in the middle of the street and jump out in front of my house, which at the time was like the epicenter for all the guys. But he had no fear.