CABRINI HOLDS ITS BREATH AS GUNFIRE TAKES 2 LIVES

Before Friday, the last homicide in Cabrini-Green remained vivid not because it was so recent, but because it had been so influential.

When 7-year-old Dantrell Davis was killed by a sniper’s bullet in October, a city took notice. Gang members in the public housing development stopped shooting at each other and started talking peace. Residents united to make things better. The city and the Chicago Housing Authority poured money into improvements, including better security and lighting.

It took another eight months for someone to be killed in Cabrini. Early Friday, two teenagers were fatally shot. One was 14, the 27th child younger than age 15 to be slain in the Chicago area this year. The 28th victim, a 2-year-old girl identified as Alicia Essex, was killed Friday night on the West Side by a stray shot from a gang shootout.

And while it is unclear whether the shootings at Cabrini will spell the end to the calm there, they already have introduced a familiar plague: fear.

Fear that a gang truce had been shattered; terror that the Cabrini of old would return.

“Before the truce, it was pure hell living here,” said Latrice McElroy, 22, a resident who credits the gangs for forging a peace. “During the truce, this was a nice, peaceful place.”

Now she and others wonder how much longer the respite can last.

“Before, they were shooting all day,” said another woman resident, who spoke from behind the screen door of a rowhouse in the complex. “But things have been good here for a while. There’s been no shooting or nothing, no ducking and dodging bullets in your own house. The only thing I can do is hope things don’t get back like they were.”

What caused the argument that broke the quiet at Cabrini still was being investigated Friday night. Several witnesses told police that it began with a fight over a girl, and that was the predominant working theory among police. But police also were looking into the possibility that gang tensions may have sparked the fatal dispute.

Detectives were seeking an 18-year-old gang member who they said fired the shots that killed another 18-year-old, Derrick Russell, a member of a rival gang, and 14-year-old Shawn Knowles, who police say was an innocent bystander. All three teenagers lived in Cabrini.

Russell tried to use Shawn as a human shield, witnesses told police. It didn’t work.

The two were shot about 3:20 a.m. outside the building at 502 W. Oak St., not far from the spot where Dantrell was killed by a man whom police identified as a gang sniper.

The teens were dead on arrival at 4 a.m. at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

The peace at Cabrini, however, need not die because of one deadly outburst of gunfire, community activists said as they tried to soothe tensions.

“The possibility for this being explosive is great,” said Marion Stamps, president of the Tranquility Marksman Memorial Organization, a community group that has worked for peace in Cabrini. “We need to embrace the brothers and make sure the talk about retaliation is just talk.”

She and other activists said the word at Cabrini was that the killing was sparked by a romantic-not gang-rivalry. That, they said, could make a return to peace easier.

“The peace existed in Cabrini because of the people in Cabrini,” Stamps said. “This was not about a gang war. We’re going to maintain the peace in this community no matter what it costs, because if any of this stuff gets out of hand, a lot of people are going to get hurt.”

Police shared the same concerns as Stamps and Cabrini residents.

“To be perfectly honest, we don’t want to start the gang war out there either,” said Detective Cmdr. Ernest Hernandez of the Belmont Area.

He stressed that only one witness had indicated the shooting was triggered by gang affiliations. The dispute, the witness said, began when Russell chased his 16-year-old girlfriend into a building run by a rival gang.

But several other witnesses have said the fight really was over the girl. Cmdr. Robert Guthrie of the Chicago police public housing section said he and other officers were emphasizing to residents the personal nature of the shooting.

“This is just a dispute between a girl and two guys that erupted into a double murder,” he said. “We don’t want to see this erupt into anything more than it was.”

Community group leaders and police spent the day trying to keep tempers from flaring and provocative rumors from flying. They shuttled between large groups of young people hanging out in the parking lot where the shooting occurred and on a nearby corner.

Guthrie said extra police officers would patrol Cabrini Green, but he did not plan on maintaining a “massive” presence.

Police spokesman Billy Davis credited Cabrini residents with working for peace in the last eight months. He said continued quiet also hinges on those citizens.

“I think what occurred today is basically irrelevant to any of the positive things that had happened here recently,” he said. “This community has become less tolerant of crime.”

More Top Picks Best Sunglasses With Uva And Uvb Protection

Leaders of the city’s major black street gangs also are no longer tolerating violence, said Wallace Bradley, who is close to the leadership of the Gangster Disciples and is spokesman for the United in Peace truce effort in Chicago.

He dismissed the possibility of a gang motive to the killings.

“It was over a woman,” Bradley said. “It ain’t no gang thing. We’re not interfering in no police investigation. We’re going to help.”

Hernandez said there has been no stonewalling among residents at Cabrini as investigators do their work. “Everybody seems to be cooperating,” he said. “That leads us to believe it wasn’t precipitated strictly because of gang activity; otherwise, you’re not going to get cooperation.”

The various witness accounts of the shooting coincide on several points: the two 18-year-olds first fought with their fists; the suspect then grabbed a 9 mm. pistol from another person in a nearby car and began to shoot; and after Russell was shot once, he used Shawn as a shield.

The Cook County medical examiner’s office said both victims suffered multiple gunshot wounds.

Stevan Lynn, who works at the Community Youth Creative Learning Experience center in Cabrini-Green, said Shawn was another child who “was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“It shouldn’t be that way,” he said. “You can’t even hang out in front of your own building.”

Shawn, who was nicknamed “Frog,” was splitting time between his sister’s apartment at 502 W. Oak and his mother’s Cabrini apartment a block away.

Shawn’s aunt, Edna Knowles, said the boy wanted to be closer to friends at the 502 W. Oak building.

“I’m going to miss him,” she said. “I’m hurt way down inside.”

This was the second time Shawn’s mother, Patricia Ann Hemphill, has lost a son to street violence, she said. A 20-year-old son was shot to death last year in a gang-related incident on the West Side.

Even though her son spent a lot of time on the street and had quit going to school, she thought his good-natured disposition would keep him from harm.

“I would never have believed that something like this would happen to him because he was never causing anybody trouble,” Hemphill said. “He’d never fight. He’d never even argue with somebody. He’d just walk away.”