As Chicago tried to come to grips with allegations that an 11-year-old boy committed murder, then was executed by teenage members of his own gang, a new case Saturday only deepened the shock: yet another 11-year-old is accused of murder.
Police charged an 11-year-old Southwest Side boy in a brutal attack last October on an 84-year-old neighbor, an invalid. The woman, Anna Gilvis, was beaten with her cane, tied up in her bathroom and slashed across the throat with a knife from her kitchen, according to police.
The boy was 10 years old at the time.
Police arrested the boy Friday and charged him as a juvenile after they said his story about seeing a neighbor near the woman’s apartment about the time of her death fell apart and the boy confessed.
This newest case of youthful violence came after a week in which news was dominated by the story of 11-year-old Robert Sandifer. Police said an errant bullet fired by the boy in an apparent gang dispute killed a 14-year-old girl.
After four days of searching for Robert, police found his body in a South Side viaduct early Thursday. Friday, they charged two brothers, ages 14 and 16 and alleged members of Robert’s gang, with murder.
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Police believe the brothers executed Robert to protect older gang members who may have ordered the first shooting.
The new case disclosed Saturday shocked neighbors and other observers, who still are trying to absorb the Robert Sandifer affair. They said it underlined what Robert’s death already seemed to make clear: Youthful violence is out of control.
“This is crime out of hand. Nobody ever envisioned this,” said Joe Kulys, who lives in the neighborhood where Gilvis was killed. “How can an 11-year-old kid who walks the street with you . . . how can he murder a senior citizen? It’s not imaginable. You don’t know who you’re walking down the street with anymore.”
The two incidents weren’t the only examples of children engaging in deadly behavior. Friday, a 3-year-old boy died after his 5-year-old brother accidently shot him in the head while playing with a handgun in a West Side apartment.
And Chicago police report that children younger than 14 committed 11 murders with firearms in 1993, compared with seven in 1992, six in 1991 and none in the three years before that.
More than one-fifth of boys at 10 inner-city high schools say they own guns, and 12 percent report carrying them routinely, according to a 1993 U.S. Justice Department survey.
“There certainly is a big problem out there, bigger than any one child or parent,” said Dr. Bennett Leventhal, chairman of the University of Chicago’s psychiatry department.
Rampant youth violence, Leventhal said, is “a very sad consequence of events in the whole inner-city community: lack of social structure, poor health care, the deterioration of education. What hope do you have? What’s the future that you have? The best future you have is to join a gang.”
But the news left others outraged.
“We are not at all interested in witnessing a week’s worth of sociological babble, liberal mumbo jumbo or apologetic hand-wringing,” read a statement by the Marquette Park Lithuanian Homeowners Association, to which Gilvis had belonged. “The cold, hard reality is that the 10-year-old offender acted not like a boy but like a monster.”
For nearly a year, Gilvis’ brutal slaying in her first-floor apartment in a two-flat in the 7200 block of South California Avenue remained unsolved. A friend discovered her body Oct. 5.
Shortly afterward, police interviewed the neighborhood boy, who said he had seen a man near Gilvis’ home. He was not a suspect at the time, police said Saturday.
“Usually you don’t consider your prime suspect to be 11 years old,” said Deputy Chief of Detectives James Maurer. “Maybe we’re going to have to change the way we think in this city.”
During the course of the investigation, the boy’s family moved to a different residence, said Wentworth Area Detective James Cassidy. Police finally found him Thursday and questioned him further about the incident, Cassidy said.
This time, the boy specifically implicated a 36-year-old man as the killer. The man had lived in the basement of the same two-flat where the boy had lived, which was next door to Gilvis. The boy’s story was sufficiently believable for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office to issue an arrest warrant for the man, Maurer said.
But when detectives brought the man in for questioning, he insisted that he was innocent. Police reinterviewed the boy, and inconsistencies in his story began to develop, Maurer said.
After further questioning Friday, the boy confessed to the crime several times, including in front of prosecutors and his mother, Maurer said. The boy apparently told no one about his alleged involvement in the crime since the killing occurred 11 months ago, Maurer said.
Police said the boy slipped into Gilvis’ apartment through the back screen door after school one day. Gilvis, who walked with a cane, began hitting him with the cane when she discovered him in her kitchen, Maurer said.
The boy then grabbed the cane and began hitting Gilvis, Maurer said. She hobbled into the bathroom and tried to hide from him.
He got rope from a hanging planter, forced his way into the bathroom and tied Gilvis up, Maurer said. The boy held her head over the toilet and slit her throat with a kitchen knife, Maurer said.
The boy told police that he killed Gilvis because she had made racial slurs to him, Cassidy said.
The boy has no prior criminal record and is not a suspect in any other crimes, Maurer said. Although police believe he stole some things from the house and ransacked the bedroom, the boy insists he stole nothing from her, Maurer said.
The boy was being held at the Audy Home and was expected to appear before a Juvenile Court judge Tuesday, Cassidy said.
Maurer called it “unusual” to have two 11-year-old murder suspects in one week.
But as an example of the growth in juvenile violence, Maurer said police recently were warned to approach bicyclists with caution in the wake of a string of shootings committed on bikes.
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The 11-year-old boy’s mother was visibly shaken by her son’s arrest.
“I don’t want to talk,” the woman said, standing in a hallway of her home in the 8400 block of South Throop Street. “I don’t have anything to say. All I know is that he didn’t do it.”
The boy’s 19-year-old cousin said, “She’s in shock. He was always straight. He never did nothing.”
The cousin described the boy as a young basketball enthusiast who was trying to escape the pull of the street by going to church. Neighbors said local gang members had been trying to recruit the boy.
Gilvis’ neighbors described her as a nice woman who tended her flower garden every evening and sometimes snapped at children who ran through her yard.
Gilvis, who had lived in her apartment for more than two decades, had seen her neighborhood change dramatically. As recently as 10 years ago, the neighborhood was primarily an ethnic Lithuanian enclave, said Sal Oceguera, who owns two buildings on the street. But since then, he said, more families with children have moved in, and older residents have moved out, creating far greater ethnic diversity.