Cragg Hardaway, who was convicted alongside his younger brother nearly three decades ago in the 1994 slaying of 11-year-old Robert “Yummy” Sandifer, died early Friday morning, a day before his 48th birthday, according to his family and the Cook County medical examiner’s office.
Hardaway was found at his Englewood home on the 6900 block of South Peoria Street and pronounced dead at 7:47 a.m., according to the medical examiner’s office. He was 47.
Katrice Hardaway, the eldest sister of the Hardaway brothers, confirmed Cragg Hardaway’s death in a brief statement to the Tribune Friday night. “All I can say right now is the family is devastated and we’re in mourning,” she stated in a text message. “I lost (my) brother.”
Following his autopsy Saturday, his official cause of death remained pending and wouldn’t be released for several more weeks. Hardaway’s family believes he died of natural causes, as he had suffered from heart trouble.
Thirty-two years ago, Yummy Sandifer’s story shocked the country. He’d stood at just 4-foot-6, and owed his nickname to his love of cookies and Snickers bars.
Days before his death, in late August 1994, Yummy had fired rounds from a 9 mm pistol into two groups of youths on the Far South Side. He wounded two boys and killed 14-year-old Shavon Dean, who had been seeing a friend home. Yummy’s gunplay was intended to impress his elders in the Black Disciples street gang.
With Chicago in an uproar, the pressure to get Yummy off the streets was intense.
When police found him, about 12:30 a.m. on Sept. 1, Yummy was lying on dirt and bits of broken glass in the mouth of a pedestrian underpass emblazoned with gang graffiti. He had been found in a tunnel, shot twice in the back of the head, execution style.
Cragg Hardaway and his brother, Derrick, were arrested shortly after Sandifer’s body was found.
Derrick Hardaway was convicted of murder after witnesses testified they saw him lure Yummy from the porch of a home near the tunnel. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison.
Cragg Hardaway was sentenced to 60 years in prison on first-degree murder charges in April 1997. Just 18 at the time, Hardaway stood silently with his arms folded behind his back as the Cook County Criminal Court Judge imposed the sentence.
“I didn’t kill Yummy, I can tell you that much,” Hardaway had told the judge. “I did what I had to do,” he said, referring to his gang and drug-selling activity, “but I wasn’t a murderer.”
His words, however, did not sway the judge when he sentenced the youth charged with being the alleged trigger man in Yummy’s death.
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According to subsequent trial testimony, a high-ranking member of the Black Disciples had paged the Hardaway brothers, then 16 and 14, on the afternoon of Aug. 31, 1994. Derrick Hardaway later said the senior BD, identified only as “Kenny,” told Cragg Hardaway that “he had to get rid of Yummy. He had to kill him.”
“Yummy knew too much about the gang,” Derrick told a Cook County prosecutor, “and if he would get caught by the police, he probably would have told and had all the high authority members locked up.”
In August 2019, 25 years after the slaying, Cragg Hardaway had been at Danville Correctional Center. He was in a mentoring program designed to help keep inmates from returning to criminal lives. Earlier that summer, he’d been hospitalized after suffering a heart attack.
Cragg Hardaway was released from the Illinois Department of Corrections in December 2020, according to media reports. Following his release, he went to work with UCAN Chicago, a community service organization.