For nearly nine hours, the jury kept the photographs of Lenard Clark’s badly beaten body before them.
In almost no time, they agreed that Frank Caruso Jr. had indeed beaten the 13-year-old–guilty of aggravated battery.
Just as quickly, they agreed that Caruso was motivated by the color of Lenard’s skin–guilty of hate crimes.
But for hours, as several jurors recalled in interviews Saturday, they agonized over one question as those photographs looked back at them: Was Caruso trying to kill this child?
Ultimately, amid tears, they were not convinced that he was–they found him not guilty of attempted murder.
From the day Lenard was beaten into a coma because he crossed into a white neighborhood, the case has been about the divisive borderlines that still cut across Chicago’s landscape.
Before Friday night’s verdict, it seemed all but assured that the jury’s decision would bring a sense of relief on one side of the boundary Lenard was beaten for crossing, and that on the other side it would bring anger.
But the mixed verdict, so painful in its rendering, seemed to leave some on either side feeling that justice had been compromised.
At Stateway Gardens, where Lenard was living when he was attacked, some residents could not believe Caruso, an Armour Square teenager, was not convicted of attempted murder, the most serious charge he faced.
“It makes me feel like I’m down South, having to worry about the KKK (Ku Klux Klan),” said Renee Coleman, 22, a lifelong Stateway resident.
Around Armour Square and neighboring Bridgeport, some shook their heads over the fact that Caruso, 19, had been found guilty of hate crimes and aggravated battery and was immediately locked up in Cook County Jail.
“They used different rules for this case,” said Bobby Olson, 28.
Prosecutors, however, were pleased. Battered recently by mishaps in other high-profile cases, the state lost the count with the most legal weight, but won those with the most moral weight: The hate crime convictions showed that this was a crime of bigotry and that Caruso was being held accountable for that.
The verdict gave some peace to Lenard, however, his father said.
On Saturday afternoon, Lenard stood bouncing a basketball in front of his new home, his shirt off on a sunny afternoon. He had gone to sleep Friday night before the verdict came in and was told what it was in the morning.
“He understands, but he is still a child,” said his father Lenard Clark Sr., 34, who drove from his Chatham home to visit his son. “He is glad they will face time for it. He didn’t want them to get away with it so the next child won’t have to go through the same thing he did.”
Prosecutors plan on Oct. 13 to ask the judge to send Caruso to prison for 13 years for the crimes, though he could be eligible for probation. About the same time, trials are set to begin for two of Caruso’s friends also charged in the attacks on Lenard and his 13-year-old friend Clevan Nicholson.
Last year, just three months after her son, Lenard, was beaten into a coma, Wanda McMurray rose at a prayer breakfast after Mayor Richard Daley had finished speaking.
“I know Chicago has the power to bless,” she said. “Your prayers and support gave my family the power to heal.”
On Saturday, 18 months after the beating, McMurray was not talking, though she had smiled as she was driven from the courthouse by deputies the night before. Yet it was clear more healing was needed.
By its utter brutality and its racist motivations, the beating had become a symbol for racial divisions that still fester in this country. For even in its most basic telling, the crime is a horror: A child beaten, nearly to death, because of the color of his skin.
President Clinton said the incident helped inspire him to ask the nation to begin confronting its lingering racial problems.
For the city, and especially for the Bridgeport and Armour Square neighborhoods, the beating reinforced stereotypes that many have been working for years to exorcise.
As Bridgeport resident Harry Gombrowski put it: “One punk gives the whole neighborhood a bad name.”
“This jury came back with an appropriate verdict,” Daley said Saturday. “Healing? The person will be held fully accountable for the acts he committed.”
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The jury was racially diverse, if not perfectly demographically balanced: four white women, three white men, two African-American women, a Hispanic woman, a Hispanic man and a Pakistani-American man.
They heard what was, from the prosecutors’ point of view, a difficult case:
One witness was murdered. Another disappeared. And a third, a man who told a grand jury that Caruso had beaten Lenard, took the stand and said more than 125 times that he could not recall the incident.
In interviews Saturday, several jurors described the panel that decided Clark’s fate as a model of cooperation.
“It was a terrible crime,” said the jury forewoman, a 31-year-old scientist from Evanston, who, like several other jurors, asked that her name not be published. “It was an awesome responsibility; we wanted to get it right.”
Though the case revolved around race, the jurors’ own backgrounds appeared to play no role in their discussions, the jurors said. The two most adamant in holding out for a conviction on attempted murder were white women, the forewoman said.
“Our goal wasn’t to send a message to any neighborhood,” the forewoman said.
As they had been doing for two weeks, jurors retired after Friday’s closing arguments to a small room at the Criminal Courts Building, where they sat around an oblong table.
At the start, the forewoman asked for a show of hands as to how people felt about the lesser charges.
The decisions on those charges were not instantaneous, but they occurred quickly over about 10 votes on each count.
“No one felt silenced–everyone had a chance to talk,” the forewoman said.
Then they tackled the tougher issue for more than five hours: Did Caruso commit attempted murder? A juror from Dolton said that at first, all but one or two jurors wanted to find Caruso guilty of attempted murder.
But then they began reviewing the criteria for that charge more closely and the matter became more complex. Jurors had two issues to decide, the forewoman said. The first was easy:
“We had to show someone had done something that could kill someone,” she said. They all agreed on that.
But then came the stickler: “Was there `conscious intent’ to kill?
“Some people felt the severity and intensity of the beating was enough” to justify convicting Caruso of attempted murder, the forewoman said.
“We didn’t think the evidence was there to convict him on the attempted murder charge, even though some of us believed that it did happen,” said juror Ateef Sheikh.
By 10:30 p.m. Friday, it was clear they were not going to convict, and the forewoman rang the bell to let the bailiff know they were ready, she said.
“It was a really emotional moment for all the jurors,” Sheikh said.
For some, the tears continued in the courtroom.
“I think that’s why we were so upset, and still upset today,” one juror said. “We know somebody crossed the line, where he (Clark) could have died, and then they left him to die.”
Outside the jury room, some had trouble understanding how the decision had been made.
“One or two more kicks and this would have been a murder trial,” said Mark Allen, Chicago field coordinator for the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. “He was almost dead, but nobody is convicted of attempting to and almost killing him. “
Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. said justice was only partially served by the mixed verdict.
“Reducing the charges simply shows the strength of their legal team, not the character of the crime,” said Jackson from Pittsburgh. “For some reason beyond human understanding, they tried to beat him to death.
“The repentance, the contrition, the request for forgiveness–we didn’t see that in this case.”
The mother of Lenard’s friend Clevan said she was not completely happy with the verdict either. “I think they should have given him attempted murder, too,” said Jennifer Nicholson, 44.
But her pastor, Rev. B. Herbert Martin, was asking that people not dwell on the verdict.
“I believe what is needed now is a continuation of our healing services and pulling both communities together,” said Martin, of the Progressive Community Church, 56 E. 48th St.
“Justice has been rendered,” Martin said. “It’s time for forgiveness and moving forward.”