Debbie Anzelmo saw her son being swept up by Chicago`s street gangs and tried to pull him back.
She pleaded with him and she found him a job. She even asked police for help. And often, Anzelmo said, she told him ”how much we loved him.”
Then, in desperation, Anzelmo packed her bags in September and moved her family from the city`s North Side to an apartment near Des Plaines. There, she hoped her son would find a new life away from the gangs and their violence.
But late Wednesday, on a suburban street Debbie Anzelmo thought would be safe, her 17-year-old son, John, was gunned down with a .357 Magnum allegedly fired by a rival gang member.
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The quarrel began, police say, when a group of young men drove by and exchanged words with the Anzelmo youth and three or four others standing on the corner. The two groups, police say, apparently did not even know each other.
But all of them, police say, were suburban residents and suspected gang members.
”I moved out here in hopes to get him out of the gang activity and the city,” his mother said Thursday. ”It backfired on me. He was in a gang and it`s a fact. They took his life, and I can`t do anything about it.”
Like many other parents who flee to suburbia hoping to protect their children from the deadly violence of gangs, Anzelmo discovered that the route to safety does not necessarily follow the highways leading out of Chicago.
And with the reach of gangs being extended even more by the availability of guns and the fact that just about every teenager drives, the tragedy of this family is likely to be played out again.
”There is no escaping it,” said John Anzelmo`s mother.
When the family lived in Chicago, Anzelmo said, her son never admitted to her that he was in a gang. And she tried to ignore his suspicious friends and the peculiar graffiti scrawled in his room.
But she said she could no longer deny her son`s gang affiliation when he started disappearing days at a time and when police reported to her that John was among a group of young men who robbed a boy at knifepoint and stole a motorcycle.
That`s why she, her fiance, John, and an 11-year-old son, Brandon, moved to a two-bedroom apartment in the 9100 block of Potter Road in an
unincorporated area of Maine Township.
Her son initially showed signs of change, expressing an interest in finishing school and enlisting in the Marines, Anzelmo said. But within a few months, she said, he found trouble in the suburbs, getting arrested for stealing gum and punching a clerk in the face at a Morton Grove convenience store. He also suffered a knife wound in a brawl, his mother said.
Yet those incidents never prepared her for the shock of early Thursday.
According to Capt. Allan Taylor, commander of the Cook County`s Sheriff`s Gang Crime Narcotics Unit, the incident began about 10:40 p.m. when Anzelmo and a few other youths, all alleged members of a street gang, were standing in front of an apartment building at 8830 Dee Rd., about a mile from Anzelmo`s apartment.
Two cars with members of a rival street gang drove by. The teenagers apparently had been cruising in the area for 20 minutes ”looking for trouble,” Taylor said. ”They found it.”
As the cars approached the corner, the youths inside and those on the corner exchanged words and flashed gang signs, Taylor said. Anzelmo apparently moved toward the second car, prompting a rider in the rear passenger seat to fire a .357 Magnum.
Anzelmo was hit on the left side of his neck and fell to the pavement.
Jerry Left, 29, an acquaintance of Anzelmo, said he ran out of his apartment after hearing the gunshot.
”When I came out Johnny was lying on the ground,” he said. ”I gave him CPR but he never came to.”
The wounded teenager was taken to Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, where he died at 2:30 a.m., shortly after unsuccessful surgery, according to a hospital spokeswoman.
On Thursday morning a pool of blood remained by the curb on Dee Road where Anzelmo had been shot. Four girls, who said they were Anzelmo`s friends, knelt down and dipped their fingers in the blood.
There was no apparent motive for the shooting, such as revenge or robbery, officials said. ”These people just don`t like each other,” said Cook County Sheriff Michael Sheahan.
Later in the day, police arrested and filed first-degree murder charges against four men: Dylan M. Metzel, 17, of 1166 A Boxwood Drive, Mt. Prospect, who is believed to have fired the fatal shot; car owner Antonio M. Delgado, 18, of 1012 A Boxwood Drive, Mt. Prospect; Richard W. Martinez, 21, of 1136 Valley Stream Drive, Wheeling, a passenger; and Baltazar Rodriguez, 18, of 1232 A Boxwood Drive, also of Mt. Prospect, who is believed to have been the driver.
Rodriguez and Delgado turned themselves in to police early Thursday. Metzel and Martinez were arrested later in the morning at Randhurst Shopping Center in Mt. Prospect.
The gun used in the shooting has not been recovered. Based on interviews with the suspects, officials believe it was dumped in a nearby pond.
That Debbie Anzelmo was unable to escape the dangers which ultimately led to her son`s death saddens but does not surprise those who have tracked the rise of gang activity in the suburbs.
”The gang lifestyle may be so ingrained in the child . . . that just the move is not enough to pull the child from that environment,” said Park Forest police Cpl. Tom Fleming, who advises Cook County State`s Atty. Jack O`Malley on suburban gang issues.
”You can`t run away from things,” said Capt. Bob Sturlini of the Des Plaines police, who helped found the Multijurisdictional Gang Task Force in the northwest suburbs. ”Whatever attracted the kid to the gang in the first place, if that`s not replaced with something else, he`s not going to break away.”
Most youths, whether in the city or in the suburbs, join gangs to get attention, to feel acceptance, to fill ”legitimate needs in illegitimate ways,” as Fleming puts it.
Those needs may only become intensified when a youth is uprooted from his city neighborhood. The prevalence of violence and of gang activity will likely be much less in the suburb, but the youth`s hunger to belong will not be diminished.
”Sometimes gang ties become even more important after a move,” Sturlini said. ”You`re 15 or 16, you`ve left your friends behind, your neighborhood, and you`re feeling alone.
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”If it`s not too far, you keep contact with your gang, or you start your own.”
Fleming points out that in an age of violent movies and MTV, where gang culture is often portrayed as hip, a young person might find acceptance in a new place by flaunting his gang membership.
”Suburban schools have a lot of kids who are on the periphery, kids not getting what they want,” Fleming said. ”A new kid who says he`s in a gang might draw attention from these kids. And they get something out of it, too.” The gang problem in most suburbs is relatively small compared with Chicago`s, officials say, but that offers little solace to suburban parents and residents who have witnessed a frightening rise in youth crime in recent years.
Suburban street gangs have mushroomed in the last few years for several reasons, experts say.
City gangs have sought to expand into new areas to sell drugs and recruit members, and some suburban gangs have been spearheaded by former city dwellers.
But there are other factors at work as well, factors that have nothing to do with Chicago. The breakdown in societal institutions, such as the family, have left many teenagers longing for a sense of identity, experts say.
”You have some gang members that are coming out from the city with gang ties and allegiances . . . but you also have kids out here who are susceptible to that type of lifestyle,” Sturlini said. ”You can`t blame it all on the city.”
And, as the Anzelmo family tragically learned Wednesday night, you can`t leave it all behind in the city.
”Moving to the suburbs does not mean that it`s over,” said Frances Sandoval, director of Mothers Against Gangs in Chicago. ”The reason an individual joins a gang is a desperate need to identify, and he has chosen the gang as a family.
”As cold as it may sound, for them it`s a family.”
At Senn Academy in Chicago`s Edgewater neighborhood, where Anzelmo was enrolled before transferring last fall to Maine East High School in Park Ridge, teachers and students on Thursday mourned the teen`s death and remembered him as a fun-loving kid.
”He was a real good friend,” said Armando Galeano, 17, who participated with Anzelmo on the football and wrestling teams.
”I was trying to help out,” Galeano said. ”You know, getting (him) out of the gangbanging.”
”Now he`s gone. A lot of people will miss him. He knew everybody. Believe me, people will know he`s gone. It`ll hurt a lot of people,” Galeano said.
Herman Blade, the high school wrestling and football coach, said Anzelmo seemed like a typical high school kid.
”He would pull little pranks and joke around, but nothing really serious, just your average high school joker,” said Blade. ”But the guys he hung around with were into some more serious stuff and I guess he just couldn`t get away from it.”