Harvey residents gathered in a public park Saturday and mourned children and adults lost to gun violence.
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“Full of life and joy they were,” Nevaeh Carter, 16, spoke as she recited a poem she wrote. “But it’s been robbed, their light snuffed out. How unfair.”
As I listened to a child read a poem about grief, I wondered whether dead children were being exploited for political gain.
Harvey voters will decide Tuesday whether to elect Mayor Christopher Clark to a second term. Clark faces challenges from 2nd Ward Ald. Marshun Tolbert and Anthony McCaskill, a business owner and former president of the Harvey Park Board.
McCaskill spoke to media covering Saturday’s event and participated in a panel discussion about gun violence.
“Public safety is missing out of our community,” he said. “My heart goes out to those who have lost a loved one.”
The pain and grief expressed by mourners was real. People remembered Kentayvia Blackful, 12, who was sitting at a computer planning a party when a stray bullet pierced the walls of her home and struck her head on Sept. 24, 2019. She died the next day, her 12th birthday, after family members sang “Happy Birthday” to her in a hospital.
Mourners spoke about Ezra Hill Jr. A bullet fired during a drive-by shooting struck the 10-year-old boy in the head March 23, 2019, as he sat in a white sedan with his father outside his grandmother’s home in the 14600 block of Des Plaines Street. He died two days later.
Organizers of Saturday’s event said 90 people have been killed in Harvey over the past four years. Clark disputed the count during an interview Monday, saying his opponents are including some homicides that occurred before 2019. I chronicled 30 homicides in Harvey in 2021.
“The children of Harvey have become so immune to hearing gunshots nightly that they jokingly have renamed Harvey ‘The Ukraine,’ meaning that they hear as much gunfire at night as the children are currently hearing in the midst of war in Ukraine,” organizers wrote in press materials promoting Saturday’s event.
Most of Harvey’s murders remain unsolved, organizers said. Public safety is a top issue in Harvey’s mayoral race. Whether Clark’s administration has done enough to address crime is subject to debate and political spin.
Harvey has had six different police chiefs during Clark’s first four-year term as mayor, critics point out. Saturday’s panel discussion featured Olivia Cobbins, who resigned as an internal affairs investigator for Harvey police.
“If you want to move forward, you need excellent leadership, ” she said. “It starts at the top. McCaskill will be an excellent leader. He can implement change by changing the Police Department.”
Clark told me in 2021 that Harvey needed more resources to fight violent crime. We spoke again Monday night in his Harvey City Hall office following a Harvey City Council meeting. I asked his reaction to Saturday’s event.
“I do believe it was political,” Clark said. “I believe they used the grief of grieving parents and family members over their loved ones as a way of pushing their own political agenda.”
Clark’s reelection campaign has centered on messaging that homicides in Harvey declined 55% last year, reports of gunfire were down 38% and police took 161 illegal guns off the street during 2022.
“We had to build a Police Department that was decimated in 2018 by the previous administration,” Clark told me. “More than half the Police Department was gone. It has taken us some time to build up that department and to put in those good policing strategies, but we believe we’ve cracked the code.”
There have been no homicides in Harvey over the past four months, Clark said. That means zero so far in 2023, and the first quarter is nearly over. That feels significant in a community that has consistently tallied more murders every year than any other suburb or community in Illinois outside Chicago.
McCaskill has hammered away at a campaign message that Harvey remains unsafe after dark.
“When nighttime comes in the city of Harvey, and anybody who lives in Harvey can bear witness to this, it’s as long as can be,” he said Saturday.
Tolbert, the other candidate in the mayoral race, agreed with Clark’s view that Saturday’s event was more political rally than community vigil. The event took place at Gloria Taylor Hall, which is a south suburban Cook County early voting polling place.
The Harvey Park District manages the facility. McCaskill’s wife, Kisha McCaskill, is executive director of the Park District. Their son, Aaron Q. McCaskill, is board vice president. I asked Tolbert whether the event exploited murdered children for political gain.
“You should definitely be concerned,” he replied. “Anytime they’re politicized, that’s an issue.”
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Kisha McCaskill moderated Saturday’s panel discussion on public safety. She noted the presence of Kentnilla Blackful, mother of Kentayvia, the girl who died on her 12th birthday.
“We have people here like Miss Blackful,” Kisha McCaskill said. “That felt very senseless. This child is at the computer, putting together her birthday invitations, and to be killed in her own home, the day before her birthday, tragic.”
Anthony McCaskill said Tuesday the citizen group Residents for a Safer Harvey organized Saturday’s event.
“They’re been doing it for the past three years,” he said. “They invited me and I showed up. They invited everyone. (Clark and Tolbert) chose not to come.”
McCaskill said his participation was not motivated by politics.
“I was moved,” he said. “When you have kids, 10, 11, 12 years old getting murdered, and the city doesn’t do anything to solve them, that’s just not right.”
Harvey’s mayoral race is marked by typical allegations of political shenanigans. Clark’s critics accuse him of shaking down business owners who do not support him. Clark supporters allege there have been attempts to buy votes of people at the McCaskill-controlled Park District early voting polling place.
All is fair in love and politics, right? Our nation routinely tolerates the violent deaths of children because of a stupid political fight over gun rights. Nothing incites a base more than fear that the other side is trying to take away your freedom.
Republicans resist gun control legislation because gun ownership is a key element of social identity for their supporters. The GOP might accuse Democrats of using children killed Monday at a school in Nashville as pawns to advance a political agenda.
In some respects Harvey is like the Southland’s canary in the coal mine. Is Harvey rebounding and on the path to success, or is it sliding deeper down a spiral of corruption and blight? Time will tell. There is real pain and loss in Harvey, which Nevaeh Carter, the young poet, beautifully expressed in her words about grief.
“The loss of a loved one tramples you and catches you by surprise. It consumes you,” she spoke. “Remember that death is not the end. Remember this when you grieve, remember they are not lost or gone, just in different form.”
Ted Slowik is a columnist for the Daily Southtown.