On the ninth day since her daughters vanished, Tracey Bradley still held out hope as well-wishers swarmed her South Side home and authorities readied to pounce on desperately needed tips generated by a television show.
“I’m just holding on,” Bradley said Saturday afternoon inside her three-bedroom apartment, where the voices of her two daughters, Tionda, 10, and Diamond, 3, have been only echoes since July 6.
“Everybody has been real encouraging,” she said. “I just hope we get my daughters back home soon.”
Authorities continued to call the case their top priority as they pored over remnants of leads generated in recent days, each of which has evaporated, one after the other, usually within hours. “It’s been a dead end,” one investigator said of Saturday’s effort.
But Chicago police and FBI agents were in Washington for Saturday night’s airing of Fox network television’s “America’s Most Wanted,” which dedicated part of its broadcast to the case. A team of investigators waited in Chicago, standing by to move on any solid tip.
Just before the segment aired, Bradley thanked a small crowd gathered in front of her building.
“I think about you guys just like I think about my kids,” she said. “Keep searching and keep looking for my kids.”
The program had produced seven phone calls to the network by late Saturday evening, but none of the calls contained new or promising information, the FBI said.
“We are still monitoring the phones here and in Washington, D.C., in hopes of obtaining positive information from someone. However at this time, nothing has come in yet that would point us toward any new individuals or locations,” said Frank Bochte, an FBI spokesman in Chicago.
Throughout her ordeal, Bradley has found encouragement from a constant flow of supporters at her apartment. It was no different Saturday afternoon, when Rev. Earthel Fleming of Christ Outreach Ministries brought turkey, fixings, fruit and soda.
Fleming arrived amid an optimistic buzz, as family members teased each other to pass time and ease tension, a telephone never seemed to stop ringing and people constantly moved in and out of the apartment.
At night, family and friends have crowded onto beds, couches and the floor, helping elevate Bradley’s spirits in recent days.
One woman who has been a source of strength for the family, Shelia Smith, Bradley’s aunt, said she’s been sleeping in the small bedroom shared by the two missing girls. “It helps me feel close to the children,” said Smith, who came from Minnesota to be with her niece.
Sometimes, when she needs encouragement, she goes to a window in the apartment, leans out and shouts for the girls to come home, Smith said.
On the South Side, the Bradleys’ apartment complex is the kind of place that represents hope. It is a place where people with low incomes and big dreams stop on their way up.
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Lake Grove Village, a privately owned development in the 3500 block of South Lake Park Avenue, is just blocks from some of the city’s worst public housing, where some of its residents used to live. But Lake Grove is a different world. It is full of trees, neatly kept lawns and children racing past on scooters.
For more than a week, it also has been full of FBI agents, police officers and a growing sense of dread as the search continues.
“It’s like a UFO came down and just snatched them up,” a resident said. “It’s scary as hell.”
But something else besides fear is growing in Lake Grove, something the residents want to hold on to long after the mystery is solved.
That something is a sense of community. There have been nightly prayer vigils and marches through the complex and the surrounding neighborhood of upper-income developments like Lake Meadows and crumbling housing projects like Ida B. Wells.
“Something good usually comes out of something bad,” said Theresa Foy, one of the vigil organizers. “And you can’t get any worse than two missing babies.”
The apartment complex includes eight light-gray buildings at 35th Street and Lake Park Avenue. The lobby of the three-story building where Tionda and Diamond live has been turned into a shrine.
People have left teddy bears, yellow ribbons and flowers, fading with each passing day.
Anthony Abdullah-Nabawi, a sergeant with the Cook County sheriff’s office, lives in the nearby Lake Meadows community. The other day, his wife gave him a stuffed pink dog and a stuffed red rabbit to drop off.
“I’ve got a granddaughter,” he said. “She could be abducted, too.”
The sisters’ pictures and yellow ribbons hang from every tree in Lake Grove. The ribbons stretch down the street, out of the complex and along 35th.
The missing Bradley sisters have struck a nerve across the city and beyond. Allan Lumpkin lives several miles south in Woodlawn. On Friday, he spent his day off from his job as a maintenance man at the development “to support the family.”
“We need to pull together without a big crime being committed,” he said. “I just hope and pray that those children are OK.”
Sheila Adams, like so many of her neighbors at Lake Grove, used to stay to herself. She minded her business, worried about her family.
Then the girls disappeared, and now she is spending every night outside, praying and meeting some of her neighbors for the first time.
“They are innocent children,” she said. “This whole ordeal has really brought us closer together as a community. We never even used to talk to each other before.”
Adams never met Tracey Bradley. But she knew the children. They played tag and hide-and-seek with her children.
“As mothers, we know how we would feel in her shoes,” Adams said. “I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m not going to stop coming out until those babies are back.”
Tracey Bradley and her children moved into Lake Grove four years ago. She had spent most of her life in the Robert Taylor Homes, a few blocks away. She wanted better for her family, said Smith.
The other night, Smith joined more than 100 men, women and children holding a prayer vigil in front of the family’s home.
As she went inside, Smith said, “My God promised me the children will be all right.”
Across the street from Lake Grove is the 96-foot monument that houses the tomb of Stephen A. Douglas.
The grounds of the monument are decorated with beds of marigolds and petunias. The other day, a worker was putting in more flowers. Someone saw him digging and called the authorities, apparently thinking the children’s bodies were being buried. Police and FBI agents spent a few hours searching the grounds.
“The rumors are driving people crazy,” said Freddie Leto, who has lived in Lake Grove for 27 years. “I don’t know how much more of this we can take.”
In red crayon, a little girl at the development left a simple message for Tionda and Diamond in front of their building.
“Please come home.”