Only 14, Silbina Villa lived disparate lives.
One was in a suburban Lake County trailer community, where she worked a part-time job just to pay for the family dog’s surgery so it wouldn’t be put to sleep.
“You’d like to find a girl like her one day,” a neighborhood woman often told her young grandson as she nodded Silbina’s way.
The other was in some of the most dangerous streets of Chicago, the gang-plagued Little Village neighborhood on the city’s Near Southwest Side. There she was the girlfriend of a felon and former gang member who said she liked the excitement of the city.
“It is totally boring up there,” her boyfriend, Fernan-do, who spoke on the condition that his last name not be used, recalled her saying about her life in suburbia.
Moments after dawn Sunday, the balancing act between those two lives came to a fatal end. Silbina died when a bullet apparently fired in a gang shootout tore through her chest.
But things were veering off-balance before the bullet was fired.
Silbina was still out on the city’s streets at 5:50 a.m., though her curfew was midnight. The gunfire began when she and her friends came to a stop at West 25th Street and South Trumbull Avenue, the same corner that was the site of a drive-by shooting last week.
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Isabel Rodriguez, her grieving mother, said through tears Monday outside her Park City home that she had always feared her children would fall victim to the city’s gang violence. That’s exactly why she had moved from Little Village a decade ago.
“They took my little girl from me for no reason, no reason at all,” she said.
“She was my daughter and my friend, my baby, my baby,” said Rodriguez, breaking into sobs as she clutched pictures of her daughter.
Silbina was the 18th child under the age of 15 killed in the Chicago area this year. Later Sunday, a 3-month-old baby became the 19th victim.
Officials at Warren Township High School in Gurnee, where Silbina was a freshman, said it was the first time in memory a student at the school had been murdered.
Chicago police say they are investigating the murder.
People who know the Little Village neighborhood say it would be easy for a visitor to be caught up in its gang violence.
“There is a real fortress mentality (in Little Village),” said Roberto Caldero, a staff member at the University of Chicago’s Gang Violence Reduction Project. “They’re real suspicious about strangers or strange cars. People are shooting at kind of like the drop of a hat. People are just jumping on the trigger.”
Far from Little Village, in suburban Park City just west of Waukegan, Silbina was the loving daughter who liked to leave lipstick imprints of her kisses on her mother’s cheek or forehead. “Girlfriend,” she would sometimes say to her mother, “let’s jam.”
There she was the loving sister, too. She worked at the Dairy Queen to pay the veterinary bill for her sister’s dog, a small mutt named Bart. The dog, still limping around the family’s trailer with a back leg in a splint, belonged to her younger sister, family members said.
When the dog was hit by a car a few weeks ago, Silbina said she would pay the vet’s bill so the dog wouldn’t be put to sleep.
She was also the cheery, inquisitive freshman at Warren Township High School. She was a good student who talked of dreams, dreams that changed often. Sometimes she thought she wanted to become a computer programmer, sometimes a mechanic and at other times a dancer.
Bound in blue and purple construction paper, an 11-page class assignment Silbina wrote for her English class last fall suggests how she felt about her life at home.
“Being a middle child is nice because I’ll always have someone there for me,” Silbina, the fifth of seven children, wrote. “I always had someone to play with when I was younger.”
The assignment also revealed a bit of what her life at home was like. Her 10-item list of “Rules of My Household” says that telephone calls and television were prohibited after 10 p.m. She wasn’t allowed to go out or have friends over if the homework wasn’t done. She was expected to keep her room clean and wash the dishes after dinner.
“She was so beautiful,” family members said repeatedly as they showed pictures of Silbina.
But in Sunday’s violence, suggestions of her other life emerged.
In that life, she was taken with a 23-year-old former gang member named Fernando who had spent 2 1/2 years in prison for attempted armed robbery, aggravated battery and unlawful use of a weapon by a felon.
They met last Halloween, introduced by one of her sisters about a month after Fernando was released from prison. He went back again this spring for a parole violation, and was released May 4-five days before Silbina’s murder.
“Her mother knew she was going out with me and her mother would tell her that I was responsible for her,” Fernando said.
But the girl’s mother said she had met Silbina’s boyfriend only once. She did not know about his former gang affiliation, his prison record, nor his age.
Silbina told her sisters that she loved Fernando. But the two seemed to have little in common.
Fernando said he took her once to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. He didn’t like it, but she did.
Sometimes they’d go for walks in the park with Bart. “She liked to walk her dog in the park,” he said. “I didn’t like her dog, though.”
And she didn’t like gang members, either. “She always used to tell me that she didn’t want to go out with a gangbanger, but I treated her with respect and she got over it,” Fernando said.
On Saturday night, the two got together in the city. Rodriguez seldom let her daughter go there, but after an early Mother’s Day celebration, Rodriguez allowed it.
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Silbina went to the city with her sister, 16-year-old Elitania Villa, and her best friend, 18-year-old Michelle Lesch. They didn’t want to go, Lesch recalled Monday, but Silbina talked them into it. She really wanted to see her boyfriend.
The three left about 7 p.m., in Lesch’s father’s car, a 1990 Chevy Cavalier. They had dinner with the sisters’ boyfriends.
They were supposed to be back home by midnight. But it was already 1 a.m. when they dropped off Elitania at her boyfriend’s house with a promise to pick her up later.
They were on their way back there when Lesch first realized she was in the midst of gunfire.
Lesch felt the heat of a bullet rush by the back of her neck. Her best friend suddenly cried out, “Oh my God! Oh my God! I’m shot! Take me to the hospital!”
With her best friend dying in the front seat, Lesch raced her father’s car to Mt. Sinai Hospital, only six blocks away.
It was too late.