About five years ago, Mary McGinty found the scrawny mutt panting in some weeds in a vacant lot. It was starving, dehydrated and would have been dead in a week, a veterinarian told her.
So McGinty, 61, took the dog home and nursed it back to health.
“It was so skinny I couldn’t tell what kind of dog it was,” she said. “I thought it was some kind of hound.”
But when the dog filled out, she saw that its breed was mostly that of the widely feared pit bull.
That didn’t bother McGinty, who said: “She is so sweet and gentle. I named her Daisy.”
The dog had to be gentle because McGinty runs a day-care center in her home in the 1400 block of Cleveland Avenue in Old Town.
All of her dogs are gentle. Until recently, she had five, all strays she took in like Daisy. Now, though, she has only four.
That’s because one recent day she let Daisy and Tipper, a black Lab, out in her back yard while she was tending to the day-care kids.
“I was changing a diaper and I looked out the window and could see Tipper but not Daisy.
“So I went out there and the latch on the back gate had been lifted and the gate was open.”
Because she couldn’t leave the children, McGinty asked a neighbor’s daughter to look for Daisy.
The girl returned and said she had run into a young man who said he knew what had happened.
The dog, she said, had been stolen by some young men who lived in Cabrini-Green, which is only a couple of blocks from McGinty’s street.
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Their names? Young men in Cabrini-Green seem to prefer street names. In this case, the dog thieves included The Twin and Little Bay.
The girl went back to ask what McGinty could do to get Daisy back.
She was told by the young men that they’d return Daisy for a $200 ransom. McGinty sent word that she could afford to pay only $50.
So they showed up behind her house–six of them. “They might have been between 13 and 16 years old,” McGinty said. “It’s hard to tell.”
McGinty was angry, which is understandable. So when she went out in her back yard, she sternly said: “Which one of you has my dog?”
The young man who appeared to be the leader of the group looked indignant and said to his associates: “Hear that? She just snapped at us. So she’s not getting her dog back.”
So McGinty moderated her voice and tried to negotiate. She was actually stalling for time because she had told one of the women who works in her day-care business to call the police.
And as they talked, she glanced up the street, hoping to see a squad car.
The leader of the group was an alert young man with obvious street smarts. He noticed McGinty’s glances and said: “Hey, she called the police. Let’s get out of here.”
They walked briskly away, and he turned and pointed at McGinty and said: “You called the police, so you’re never getting your dog back.”
McGinty is active in her community. “I’m president of the Near North Property Owners, and I used to be on the board of the D’Amico Youth Services.”
So she knows a lot of people, including some in Cabrini-Green, and she asked a few if they could keep their eyes peeled for Daisy and the thieves who took her.
In a few days, one of her contacts told her that he had seen Daisy in the elevator of the Cabrini building at 714 W. Division St.
“He told me that someone named Little Mike had her muzzled and was dragging her on a leash. They were bragging how they took her out of my yard.”
That was bad enough. But then she got even worse news.
“She had a wound on her side. They bragged that they were fighting her. Dog fights. They fight them behind the 714 building. There’s a grassy area there shaded by another building.”
Which is why they stole Daisy in the first place. Pit bulls appeal to the subhumans who stage, attend and bet on dogfights. And even a gentle mutt such as Daisy can be provoked into defending itself if treated cruelly enough.
The police are trying to help. Cmdr. Ettore DiVito of the East Chicago District, said: “We suspect there is dogfighting over there, but we haven’t been able to catch them in the act. We do have some information, and we’re trying to survey and catch them in the act. But it’s not easy. That is a high-crime area too.”
The police have more than enough to do at Cabrini. So I have a suggestion.
When a big plan was recently announced to knock down some of Cabrini-Green and put in a big mixed-price private real estate development, some of the alleged community and political leaders screamed about what an awful idea it was.
Actually, it is a fine idea, but some people just live to scream.
So if these leaders don’t have anything to scream about this week, I urge them to go in the 714 building, find Little Mike or The Twin or Little Bay and make them tell where they have stashed Daisy.
Then demonstrate your leadership skills by leading Daisy back to McGinty’s back yard.
Really, it’s a chance to make yourselves useful.