If any child was most likely to be killed, it was Lavercheray Johnson.
Lavercheray was born into some of the worst conditions the United States offers. The infant was a resident of “The Hole,” the most violent section of the Chicago Housing Authority’s most violent project, the Robert Taylor Homes.
Her mother became pregnant at age 15, then had five kids in five years. Neither her father nor mother was employed. They were not married.
On the fifth day of 1993, the 25th day of her life, Lavercheray was killed. Police allege that her father, Dewayne Mitchell, beat her to death.
Given how much she had in common with other children in a Tribune study of the 29 Chicago-area children slain in the first six months of the year, Lavercheray comes close to being a typical victim, though the phrase reduces inhumanity to statistics.
Like Lavercheray, five more of the 29 slain children lived in CHA apartments, and two others were shot to death while visiting CHA residents.
There were other similarities: 22 of the other victims were black, 16 lived in a household where no adult earned a paycheck, and 14 died from abuse or maltreatment. And, again like Lavercheray, 16 others were age 4 or younger.
The Tribune study is based on interviews with families and friends of the children, and on police, court and medical reports. It is part of a yearlong reporting project documenting the murders of all children under age 15 in the six-county Chicago area.
The relatively small number of children in this midyear study makes it dangerous to draw broad conclusions, but the continued appearance of certain risk factors-teenage pregnancy and household instability most prominent among them-suggests which children are most in danger and which social problems must be addressed to slow the killing.
There are similarities among the victims that stretch across political and cultural borders.
In Lavercheray’s case, the newborn was killed because she wouldn’t stop crying, her father allegedly told police. That’s the same complaint that Thomas and Susan Eken, a white, married couple from suburban Midlothian, repeated to police before being charged in the beating death of their 3-month-old son, Tommy.
While the killing of children is concentrated in certain communities, few areas are immune. Latoya Watson was gunned down in her family’s comfortable middle-class home in Zion, Samantha Jo Haight beaten in her family’s Aurora apartment. Duy Dang was from the Northwest Side of Chicago, and Joseph Wallace the West Side.
Twenty-one of the dead children lived in the city and eight in the suburbs, although 23 of the fatal assaults took place in Chicago.
Those numbers mean that so far this year, a child under age 15 living in the city was roughly four times more likely to be slain than a child living in the suburbs. A child living in the CHA was almost seven times more likely to be slain than one living elsewhere in the city.
In the suburbs, one in roughly 123,000 children was killed; in CHA, one in about 5,800.
In 1992, when 60 children were killed, 23 had died as of June 30. Though the suburbs are demonstrably safer, they account for the difference in homicide numbers between this year and last: Between January and June 1992, only one suburban child was killed.
Despite a reputed gang truce, deadly violence involving the CHA is at the same level as last year: eight cases of child homicide, four of them abuse, four street violence.
Some parents and children in the study fled traditionally violent areas for safer venues. In the end, that was not enough.
Silbina Villa’s mother, Isabel Rodriguez, moved to Lake County from Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood 10 years ago because the city streets were too seductive and dangerous. But on May 9, her 14-year-old daughter returned to the old neighborhood with friends for a night out and was shot to death in what was likely a gang-related attack.
Michael Lowery bought a two-flat in Calumet City last year partly because he wanted a better environment for his 12-year-old son, Michael Jr. But Michael, who spent weekdays in Calumet City and weekends with his mother on the South Side of Chicago, was shot to death by a stray bullet as he celebrated with friends following the Chicago Bulls’ championship game on June 21.
Frederick Alston, 14, went as far as Mississippi to find relief from the gangs and crime of his South Side neighborhood and start fresh with relatives. But, unable to enroll in school there, he returned to Chicago and to running the streets. On April 23, while out with his fellow gang members, Frederick was fatally shot in the back.
Among the most startling discoveries of the study is that of the eight children who lived with their mother and her boyfriend (who wasn’t their father), five allegedly died at the hands of the boyfriend.
Among them was 2-year-old Myowsha Holeman, who was left on May 25 with Ernest Lane, an unemployed 22-year-old who had moved into Myowsha’s home last winter.
Lane told authorities he was frustrated at having to baby-sit, and that he punched the child hard in the stomach, police said. Three days later Myowsha died of internal injuries.
Boyfriends are statistically more likely to kill children in their care than are natural fathers, experts say, because they have little stake in the child and can become jealous of the child’s demands on the mother’s attention. Nationally, experts believe the boyfriend of the mother is responsible for about 15 to 20 percent of all child abuse.
For these children and many of the other victims, domestic turmoil began early.
All but four of the 29 victims-86 percent-were born to mothers who apparently became pregnant with their first child as a teenager.
Anne Cohn Donnelly, executive director of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse, said the prevalence of child victims whose mothers started having kids as teenagers is “probably the most common characteristic that crops up.”
“It’s not necessarily the age of the mother at the time of the child’s death that matters. It’s that these are people who started their lives in pretty challenging ways,” Donnelly said. “They never had the opportunity to get off to a good start as parents and never knew what being a good parent was because they were still children.”
Many of the households of the dead children lacked the stability that could help a young mom overcome the stress of raising a child.
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At least nine of the children had four or more siblings. Only four of the children were living with their married biological parents (two lived with their unmarried parents; and three lived with a parent and stepparent). Ten lived alone with their mothers, one with a sister, one with an uncle.
Of the 14 children old enough to attend school, at least seven were frequent truants or had other, fairly severe problems at school.
Most of the victims lived in poor areas. Only one child lived in an area where the per-capita income was higher than the metropolitan average. In the city, the average per-capita income in victims’ immediate neighborhoods was about half that of the citywide average, $7,631 vs. $12,899. In the suburbs, it was about two-thirds of the suburban rate, $13,142 vs. $19,024.
Per-capita income where Lavercheray Johnson lived and died was $1,657.
An adult earned a paycheck in only 12 of the 29 households, and only four of the victims lived in a home that the family owned rather than rented.
For several of the victims’ families, violence and abuse have been unsettling themes.
– Fourteen-year-old Charles Coleman, who was shot to death March 7 after a birthday party at a South Side CHA high-rise, was living with his sister Frederica because his drug addict mother repeatedly abused and neglected her children, according to reports from social service agencies.
In 1991, the reports said, Charles’ 14-year-old brother fatally hanged himself in the boys’ bedroom closet as Charles slept. That same year Frederica was shot in the chest and seriously wounded. Her husband was killed two years before, allegedly by one of Charles’ older brothers.
– Jacqueline Milner, a nurse who allegedly drowned her 4-year-old daughter, Danielle Daniels, on March 29, lost her first child to violence in 1989 when 20-year-old Linnie Milner was shot to death on a West Side street.
– When Patricia Ann Hemphill’s 14-year-old son, Shawn Knowles, was killed June 25 at Cabrini-Green, she was still mourning the loss of her first boy, 20-year-old Jermaine, slain last year in a gang shooting on the West Side.
– The father of Tatiana Redmond, the 14-year-old who was the first victim of 1993, was killed in a shootout with police stemming from a drug bust, the girl’s mother said.
– Nine-year-old Terry Holloway was visiting relatives at Henry Horner Homes when he was shot to death on June 12. His uncle was in the next room of the apartment, recovering from five gunshot wounds.
Even more prevalent, the study found, was the number of times that members of the victim’s family or household had been in trouble with the law.
Three of the children, for example, lived with men who were confined to the house by electronic monitoring. Parents of at least two others-Shawn Knowles and 6-month-old Sarafina Johnson-were incarcerated when their children died.
Two of Charles Coleman’s brothers are behind bars, as are uncles of Terry Holloway and Shawn Knowles. Infants Tatyana Wardell and Deon King were being cared for by ex-convicts when they were abused to death; both men have been charged.
There were also minor criminal charges against other mothers, fathers and siblings. One mother had a list of shoplifting arrests, for example. A father carried a string of drug counts.
“It doesn’t sound unusual at all to find a very high number of cases in families in which some kind of disruption has occurred,” Donnelly said.
“You think about what the implications are of being in a household where no one works, where there are meager resources and the levels of autonomy, self-esteem and the ability to care for oneself are all very low. Those situations can be explosive for kids.”
Who kills children? In some cases, other children.
Charges have been brought in 24 of the 29 deaths. Twelve of the 28 suspects (in three cases there were multiple arrests) were age 19 or younger, and four were age 14 or younger.
“We’ve seen recently an increasing number of young people as both victims and offenders in homicide cases,” Cook County State’s Atty. Jack O’Malley said. “You need society or government or someone to socialize children, because some families are not doing it.”
To that end, O’Malley lobbied for legislation that has cleared the Illinois General Assembly and is awaiting the governor’s signature. The bill would introduce conflict-resolution programs in the schools as a way to teach youngsters how to deal with problems without resorting to violence.
Gang members are killing children. Police and acquaintances have identified at least 11 of the 28 suspects as gang members.
The saddest truth is that in 22 of the 24 cases where police have brought charges, the suspects knew the victims.
Fourteen of the children lived with the person accused of killing them, and 15 were allegedly assaulted by someone who was taking care of them at the time-a parent or parents in seven of those deaths.
Ironically, it is in this grim statistic that abuse expert Donnelly sees a faint glimmer of opportunity for reversing the killing pace.
“In most of these cases they’re not victims of random violence. The majority of these cases . . . people have put themselves” in risky circumstances, Donnelly said. “The hopeful part is that there may be some things that we can do about that, as a society or as a government or as concerned institutions.”