More Top Picks Under Sink Filter
player ready...”What`s up, man?” was all the kid in the hooded jacket said as he put a pistol to the temple of De Mon Topps.
The chubby 13-year-old never had a chance to answer.
The gun fired and De Mon fell to the pavement in front of his South Shore apartment house, where he had gathered with a handful of friends on a warm summer`s night. The gunman then turned and shot at the other boys, wounding two before he fled.
De Mon, a crossing guard at Bryn Mawr Elementary School who worked part-time with his grandfather packing bags at a meat market, died the next evening at Cook County Hospital.
There was no provocation, no gang signs flashed, nothing else said by the unknown young man who pulled the trigger on the night of Aug. 16. Police have no suspects or motive in what was the year`s 17th homicide of a child 13-years-old or younger.
When the city went to sleep Monday night, 26 such children had been slain this year. Tuesday morning, just after the 9 a.m. school bell rang at Jenner Elementary School, Dantrell Davis became the 27th. Walking with his mother from his apartment to the school, the 1st grader was murdered by a sniper shooting from a window at Cabrini-Green. The 7-year-old was buried Saturday.
Last year, 32 children under the age of 13 were killed in the city.
It is a grim roll call of wasted youth and of infants who never had a chance to sample life. Some of the children were the victims of random violence. Others were killed by the very adults on whom they depended for care.
Twelve of this year`s 27 child victims were shot; eight were assaulted;
three were stabbed; two were suffocated and two were scalded, according to Chicago police records.
Left behind are parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters, friends and relatives, and a city that, with the death of Dantrell Davis, is just now awakening to the loss.
For Roselyn Nance, the shock of her 13-year-old daughter`s murder wore off long ago, but the Waukegan mother of two says she cannot escape the anger. Sharika Nance was shot in the head at a 4th of July party in Chicago. She had lied to her mother about her plans and then traveled with older friends to the city.
She was allegedly shot by an acquaintance, 21-year-old Everette Crite of Waukegan, during a quarrel.
Sharika made derogatory remarks to Crite, who then pulled a gun, police said. When the teenager told Crite he didn`t have the nerve to shoot, Crite shot her once in the temple, police said.
”It makes you mad, really mad, because you really can`t find answers,”
Roselyn Nance said.
”It`s not the guns, it`s the people. I watch the news every day and every day it`s kids-not grownups. What`s wrong with these people? It makes you afraid to let your kids go outside.”
As she spoke, Nance solemnly prepared her 5-year-old son for school, pulling on his coat and telling him where to meet his bus. She said the boy often tells her that he would like another sister; her 15-year-old son refuses to talk about the murder.
An 8th-grade graduation photo is the only visible reminder of Sharika in the apartment. The teenager`s room was cleared out a few weeks after the murder because the family found it painful to look at Sharika`s belongings.
The room is now nearly vacant; Nance and her sons share the apartment`s other two bedrooms.
Crite was arrested July 8 in a small Arkansas town where he was hiding with relatives. He has since been charged with murder and is in jail awaiting trial.
After her daughter`s death, Nance took a leave of absence from her job. She sought professional counseling but said it did little to help.
”It`s me who has to deal with it,” Nance said. ”It doesn`t matter who you talk to. It`s me.”
A deadly trend
Sharika Nance`s death is part of a disturbing trend reported by police across America: The number of shooting deaths is growing even as homicides by other means stay the same or decline.
Nationally, the number of youngsters age 14 and under who died by homicide reached 1,075 in 1991, a five-year high, according to Justice Department officials. The percentage of those killed by guns rose
significantly.
In the 10-14 age group alone, 209 youngsters were shot to death in 1991, accounting for two-thirds of the total. Five years earlier, only 101 youngsters were shot to death, barely half of that year`s total.
This trend is reflected in Chicago: In 1988, 29 children were slain, but only three of them were shooting victims; already in 1992, a dozen youngsters have been killed by bullets.
Behind those numbers lie the stories of the children and the people who loved them.
Anthony Felton`s dreams now hang in his grandmother`s Uptown apartment-a pair of boxing gloves tied together and suspended from a nail on the living room wall.
On Anthony`s skinny hands, those 16-ounce boxing gloves looked like giant red mittens. But when he got into the ring, he was all quickness and desire, because at age 9, boxing was what Anthony liked and needed most.
”He was one of the best little boxers you could find,” said Mary Robinson, a supervisor at the Seward Park field house, where Anthony trained after school.
”He had a real good left jab. You had to see it to believe it,” said his coach, Tony Seals. ”His stance was great. He was good with combinations. . . . He only lost one fight.”
On the afternoon of March 8, a time that he was planning to spend sweating in the gym, Anthony was killed by a .22-caliber bullet that entered his back and blew out his chest.
It was fired by a 13-year-old gang member seeking revenge for an earlier shooting, police said. Anthony, who was not a gang member, was hit as the assailant sprayed gunfire at a crowd of children on the grounds of Cabrini-Green, where he lived.
”He fell and said, `Hold me,` ” recalled a 14-year-old friend, Casey Purtis.
The youth who shot Felton got the gun from two 17-year-old gang members, police allege. All three teens have been charged with murder.
”It seems like you can`t get by,” said Mike Davis, 14, a neighbor.
”When they start shooting, you can`t run nowhere.”
Tacked to Anthony`s boxing gloves on his grandmother`s wall are notes from his friends:
”Love is Special, but boxing is light. Love Always, Lil Valerie.”
”Be the best you can be in heaven. Love, Anthony L.”
Anthony was one of five children.
”He was a kid with great potential,” said his grandmother, Mary Felton, who raised her nine children in Cabrini when the project was ”pretty and green, flowers, grass and everything.”
But her Cabrini wasn`t his Cabrini.
More Top Picks Best Cupping Therapy Sets For Home Use
”I knew it was bad here,” she said, looking out the window toward the broken pavement of a playlot below. ”But I had no idea this would come one day in my life.”
Numbers, outrage mount
As trauma coordinator at Children`s Memorial Medical Center, Martha Barthel was on the team of doctors and nurses who treated Dantrell Davis on Tuesday morning. She has seen many of Cabrini`s broken bodies. Five children this year have died from gunshot wounds in her emergency room.
”These are kids who are 7 years old, who should be playing with cars,”
she said. ”These are kids that shouldn`t be locked up in their houses after school because they are scared someone is going to snipe at them.”
Barthel said she is glad more people are becoming concerned about the violence against children, but she worries that the anger will not be sustained.
”Unfortunately, I`m afraid the outrage won`t last long enough to solve the problem.”
Children`s has treated 29 children for gunshot wounds this year, Barthel said. In 1980, four children were treated for shootings.
”The numbers just keep mounting,” said Margaret O`Flynn, the hospital`s chief of staff.
Beyond the physical injuries, the shootings bring emotional trauma, O`Flynn said.
”Children may have a fatalistic expectation that . . . they might die,” O`Flynn said. ”It makes people think they have to join gangs or have guns to protect themselves.”
Can it be stopped?
”I think it will take a great plan,” O`Flynn said.
Caught in a war
The rise in fatal shootings is due in part to soaring gang violence. While many youths shot on the streets of Chicago are themselves gang members, the youngest victims, those age 13 and under, are more often innocents caught in the cross-fire.
Sidney ”Lil Man” Gammons, 13, and Neil Maddox, 11, were two such victims.
Maybe if his sore right foot had healed, Lil Man would have been able to run fast enough to gain cover from the gunman who took his life Aug. 1 at the South Side`s Dearborn Homes housing development.
But Lil Man was nursing a gunshot wound sustained two weeks earlier, when he got caught in a shootout between warring gangs.
Like his friends who were tossing basketballs with him about 7:45 p.m. the day he would die, Lil Man raced for shelter upon spotting a sniper nearby. But he never made it home.
The sound of gunfire is a common one in the Dearborn development, so when Lil Man`s mother, Phyllis, heard it the night of her son`s death, she didn`t react at first. But when frantic neighbors reported that ”Lil Man`s been shot,” Gammons raced downstairs.
In the entranceway to her building, she found her son lying in a pool of blood, his head split open by a bullet.
Jason Anderson, 18, of 2710 S. State St., has been charged with first-degree murder. A juvenile who allegedly handed a semi-automatic weapon to Anderson also was charged with murder. Both are in custody.
Police and family members said there was no indication that Lil Man was involved with a gang.
He was a curious boy, teachers recalled, a hard-working student who used his average academic ability to excel in science at Williams School. ”He was a smiling person, a happy person,” said principal Charles Nelson.
In the aftermath of Lil Man`s death and the woundings of eight other pupils from his school, Nelson instituted drills to train the youngsters how to react to gunfire. The drills teach them to take cover when they hear gunfire, much like children in the 1950s were taught to ”duck and cover” in the event of nuclear attack.
”That was just something for me to lose my only son, my baby,” said Phyllis Gammons, a 22-year resident of Dearborn who has four daughters. ”He just didn`t shoot my son-he shot my family.”
Sixty blocks to the south and a month or so after Lil Man`s death, Neil Maddox became a victim of the same kind of gang warfare.
Neil was on his way to visit his grandfather on Sept. 9, traveling along Aberdeen Street on the South Side.
”He and two other friends were walking down the street when someone in a car started shooting,” said Neil`s mother, Jacqueline. ”Then another group started shooting back, and he was caught in the cross-fire.”
Neil took a bullet in the chest, a bullet meant for someone else. Now, his mother tries to deal with the loss of a son who was just like a lot of 11- year-olds, a Boy Scout who liked to play basketball and Nintendo, who went to Salem Baptist Church on Sunday and Bible study on Wednesdays.
”We lost somebody. We miss him,” said Jacqueline Maddox, 28. ”It`s never going to be the same.”
As she spoke about Neil, Maddox watched her 2-year-old daughter, Kimesha Augusta.
”She wants to know where her brother is,” Maddox said. ”She wants to know why she can`t go to heaven with him.”
Because she had Neil when she was 17 years old, Maddox said she felt she had lost more than a son, she had lost a companion.
”I was young when I had him, so we learned things together,” she said.
Police have arrested a juvenile suspect in Neil`s slaying. The case is pending before the courts.
Abuse turns fatal
Of the 27 children slain so far this year in Chicago, almost half were killed by people who knew them, often people entrusted with caring for them, according to police.
Sometimes a child`s death comes at the end of a string of abusive incidents by a parent or a boyfriend or a relative. Other times, it occurs in a single moment.
Carolyn Evans doesn`t even have a photograph by which to remember her 2-month-old son, Ramon Roberts, a victim of a fatal beating by the boy`s father, according to police.
The hospital photographer sent Evans a postcard explaining that her son`s picture did not appear on the film with the other infants. A friend also took pictures of the baby, but the drugstore developers told her they lost the film.
Evans has found ways to keep Ramon alive in her heart, however. In the larger bedroom of her tiny basement apartment, Evans still has Ramon`s crib, though seven months have passed since his death. And in her top two dresser drawers are rows of baby clothes folded neatly.
”I know he was just a little baby,” Evans said. ”But, you know, he was happy.”
Evans, 28, said she learned that Ramon had died after returning home on the afternoon of Feb. 24 and discovering police cars outside her home in the 6500 block of South St. Lawrence Avenue.
According to the Cook County state`s attorney, Michael Roberts, 22, the father of Ramon and Evans` other son, Manuel, 4, was arrested in the incident and charged with murder. He is in Cook County Jail awaiting trial.
Evans described Roberts, a part-time security guard, as a loving father and said she was surprised to learn he was suspected in the baby`s murder.
More Top Picks Lattafa Perfumes Khamrah For Unisex
”I came home and (the police) were trying to tell me that the father was playing too rough with the boy,” said Evans, seated at her kitchen table with a few hospital documents about Ramon. ”I can`t really say what happened because I wasn`t there.”
A call for help
Last week, Sandra Topps combed the South Side neighborhood where her 13-year-old son, De Mon, was shot to death in August. She posted stacks of pleading yellow fliers-”WE NEED YOUR HELP TO CATCH THE KILLERS OF DE MON TOPPS.” She posted fliers that urged action against the growing violence in her neighborhood.
”Are you tired of these senseless shootings and murders?” one flier asks. ”Do you want to send a message to the criminals in our community! Then HELP US!
”SEND A MESSAGE THAT THESE SENSELESS SHOOTINGS WILL NOT BE TOLERATED IN OUR COMMUNITY!!
”PLEASE GET INVOLVED. HELP US.”
Atop the flier is a photo of De Mon, beaming in his 8th-grade graduation cap and gown.