A 33-year-old man with a record of weapons offenses was charged Wednesday with the sniper slaying of a Cabrini-Green child whose death has sparked calls for National Guard intervention and refocused attention on Chicago`s blighted public housing.
Anthony Garrett, an alleged gang leader, was charged with murder for the shooting of Dantrell Davis, 7, who died from a single gunshot wound to the face outside 502 W. Oak St. as he began a 100-foot walk to school Tuesday morning, police said.
The boy was the latest casualty of an ongoing turf war for control of the high-rise buildings at the Cabrini-Green public housing complex, according to police.
Police arrested Garrett about noon Wednesday after learning his nickname from residents in the housing complex. Although he first denied shooting the boy, Garrett confessed to the crime saying ”his conscience was bothering him,” said Belmont Area Cmdr. William Callaghan.
Garrett, who has a criminal record dating from 1976 and was out on bond at the time of the shooting, told police that he shot an AR-15 assault-style weapon from the 10th floor of 1157-59 N. Cleveland Ave., taking aim at a group of teenagers in a ”revenge shooting,” Callaghan said.
He allegedly fired two or three shots until he saw someone fall, but did not learn until later that he had hit a child, Callaghan said.
Davis was the third pupil from the nearby Jenner Elementary School to be fatally shot in the cross-fire of gangs in the last eight months.
”There`s nothing in our power we can do to make it safer,” said Robert Whitfield, chief operating officer of the Chicago Housing Authority.
”As long as they`ve got high-powered weapons, there`s nothing we can do to stop the shooting. You could put a thousand police there and there`s nothing you could do.”
On Wednesday, speaking by telephone from Louisville, CHA Chairman Vince Lane said that he planned to ask Gov. Jim Edgar and Mayor Richard Daley to request the National Guard to help the CHA gain control of Cabrini-Green and other public housing developments overrun by gangs and violence.
”What this calls for is drastic measures,” Lane said. ”If this had occurred in Winnetka, the National Guard and the Marines would be there.”
Lane said he wants to use the Guard to supplement the regular city and CHA police forces so that it would be possible to sweep and secure an entire development.
Lane agreed that the CHA doesn`t have control of many of its buildings, but he said, ”It was never the place of the housing authority to replace the police department.”
The idea of using troops, he said, would be spending three to six months to make a development safe, before moving on to another troubled development. But Lane acknowledged that he wasn`t optimistic his proposal would be adopted. ”I`m not optimistic because it would indicate that the local government doesn`t have control,” Lane said.
In fact, some insiders in the Daley administration considered the proposal a public slap in the face to the mayor. They viewed the request for troops as a suggestion that Daley cannot control his own city, and that he has failed to deploy police to areas hardest hit by the homicide epidemic sweeping Chicago.
Lane`s request put Daley in a political box. Supporting Lane would be admitting he could not manage his city, while rejecting Lane would be a public statement that the CHA does not need the help as gang cross-fire pushes the body count ever higher.
A Daley spokesman said the mayor would be speaking to Lane personally on Thursday.
Mike Lawrence, Edgar`s press secretary, said Wednesday that the governor hadn`t received a formal request for troops.
Asked about the boy`s murder, Daley responded by saying voters should support his choice for president, Gov. Bill Clinton.
”Again it shows you the proliferation of guns in our society and drugs in our society,” Daley said. ”That`s why Bill Clinton`s going to be focusing on the drug problem, the first president to really focus on the drug problem, to put 100,000 new police officers back in the streets of the cities, and that`s what you have to do.”
Since the city`s homicide rate began making headlines last year, the mayor has tried to distance himself from questions about how his
administration should handle the problem. Instead of talking about Chicago, Daley has consistently blamed the federal goverment for the increase in gang crimes and narcotics traffic.
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Public housing in Chicago is usually low on the priority list of politicians and voters, and it was clear Wednesday that Lane was trying to use the sudden attention focused on the CHA by Davis` slaying to win whatever public support he could.
In addition to the request for troops, the CHA is considering closing sparsely occupied high-rise buildings in Cabrini-Green, beginning with 1157-59 N. Cleveland Ave., Lane said. No more than 15 of the building`s 66 units are occupied, and the building is one of several at Cabrini-Green that has not been swept and secured, said Whitfield.
”As Americans, we react when there is a crisis,” Lane said. ”Until that sense of outrage is there, I don`t think anything will happen.”
Lane`s most recent proposals were supported by Artensa Randolph, the president of the Central Advisory Council, the official organization of CHA tenants.
”We`re crying for help,” said Randolph, whose 16-year-old grandson, Roosevelt Bohannon, was fatally shot on Aug. 16 while returning to his home in a public housing development.
”If the National Guard can go where there`re tornadoes and make a difference, they can help us finish the sweeps.”
Sweeps consist of CHA police going door-to-door and evicting people who do not appear on the lease. Tenants then get identification cards which they must show to security guards to enter the building.
Most residents in CHA housing developments ”plead for sweeps,”
Whitfield said, but the CHA has been strapped for money to fund round-the-clock security and so the agency has swept selectively. Rockwell Gardens and the Stateway Gardens developments are the only two developments in which all of the buildings are secured.
Whitfield said the CHA is spending about $15 million this year on security in attempts to protect residents.
Garrett has spent almost half a lifetime committing crimes in Cabrini-Green, according to law enforcement officials.
In 1981, Garrett was charged with the fatal shooting of a rival street gang member inside the same building from which Davis was shot.
Garrett was tried for the murder but was found not guilty by Cook County Criminal Court Judge Eugene Pincham, law enforcement officials said.
Pincham, now retired, said in a brief telephone interview Wednesday night that he does not remember any details of the 10-year-old case.
At the time of his arrest, Garrett was on bond for a 1991 weapons charge that a judge had quashed, police said. The case is pending in the Illinois Appellate Court.
The building at 1157 N. Cleveland Ave. is the center of a power struggle between the two most powerful gangs in Cabrini-Green, said Sgt. Derrick Nelson, of the Chicago Police Department`s Cabrini-Green tactical unit.
”That`s a building where there`s a great deal of drug activity,” Nelson said.
Lane wants to move families from such buildings into unoccupied apartments in more populated buildings. This would make it possible for him to ”mothball” an entire unoccupied building, he said.
But the effort is complicated by the realities of life at Cabrini. If you move residents out of one building, Lane said, gang problems usually follow them to their new address.