Gas Stations, Fires & Abandos

I woke up Tuesday morning and checked the news to find that someone was shot and killed close to where my cousins live and even closer to a bar that one of them manages. A few minutes later I received a text from X saying that he just heard about the shooting and that he would be there to pick me up soon so we could go take a look. The location in the 1100 block of West Madison was not easily discernable even though the incident had happened less than 8 hours ago. There were pieces of both red and yellow tape still tied to a fence. X informed me that yellow tape is used to mark the outside perimeter of a crime scene and what keeps the regular people out. Red tape, on the other hand, is used to indicate to the police that the area it delineates is highly sensitive and may contain important evidence. We decided that we would come back later to ask some of the bar regulars if they could tell us more about what happened.

Before we continued on, we had to stop for some Dunkin’ Donuts coffee (…the cop diet continues).

First we tried to go to the site where Julio Castrumita was shot and killed on the sidewalk in the 2800 block of West Pershing Road. A teenage boy was reading the paper on the front steps of the house where the address fell. It also appeared that there was a cluster of religious candles in the corner of the porch. I am not sure that they were there as a memorial for Julio, but I assume so. I contemplated talking to the boy about what I was doing and seeing if he would mind me photographing, but he was quite young and I didn’t know his relation to the victim so I didn’t want to make him upset in case it was his brother, cousin, or a close friend.


The next site was where Frankie Zamudio was shot in the beginning of the summer. It was a site that I had already visited, but felt that I needed to go back to photograph again. The last time I was there the block was very quiet, but this time there were people all around. There was even a cart on the opposite corner with a short line where a people were waiting to buy sno-cones. It couldn’t have been later than 9:30, but it was already steamy out so I didn’t blame them for wanting something cold.

We went from there to the 3300 block of West 63rd Street where 28-year-old Terrance Cooper was shot as he left a store at about 10:30 on the evening of August 18th. The address was a check-cashing window inside a glass enclosed corner storefront. An older woman who worked in another store on the block came up to us and asked what we were doing. I told her I was photographing where Cooper was killed and X said he was a police officer. She thanked X for his efforts and showed him that she had on a CPD pin on the collar of her shirt. X pulled out his badge, which was a much bigger version of her pin. She was excited to see it. She also told us that the incident didn’t happen where I was photographing. It happened on the corner across the street. On the opposing side of the street was a car store with a huge empty gated parking lot (except for one red Jeep whose tire had been knocked off). I assumed that this must have been where Cooper was coming out of when he was shot, so I began to photograph there. Our CPD pinned friend crossed the street again and stopped to tell us that it happened right there, directly on the corner, right where I was standing. Once again proof that, as X likes to say, “The streets know more than the police.”

After finally photographing the right spot there, we headed to the 5900 block of South California Avenue where Anthony Martinez got into a dispute with the driver of another car at a gas station. The two traded gang slogans and accusations before the driver ran him over. The gas station was right on the corner of California and 59th Street so the area was very busy with traffic and pedestrians. Among all the chaos, a little old lady sat quietly all alone at the bust stop. I stood a bit down the street so that I could get a larger view of the area. A dog was barking incessantly from behind the tall wooden fence I was standing next to.

Just down the street in the 5800 block of South California Avenue, was where Jaime Sanchez-Negrete was found in a backyard. He had been assaulted and also had a gunshot wound on the side of his head. X and I found the address and pulled around through the alley to the back. Low chain link fences separated all the yards on the block. The neighbors on one side were sitting out on their back patio. We would have to come back to this location. We drove by it two more times before the end of the day to see if they were still out. They were and they noticed us each time.

The next site was in the 6100 block of S Richmond Street where Raymon Sanchez was found after firefighters removed the collapsed roof of his garage after a huge blaze. Autopsy reports indicate that he was beaten to death. We accidentally turned down the wrong alley first and were perplexed as to why there was no sign of a fire anywhere. We passed two men walking down the alley. One of them was wearing a tiny red beret that was just barely hanging onto his head. He smiled and said good morning. After realizing we were in the wrong place, we went one block south and easily found the location. The house was burned badly even on the front side. All the windows and doors had been boarded up. Around the back, in the alley, there was an empty space where the garage used to be. Its frame was still outlined on the bare ground. A fence on the south side of the lot was completely charred and many of the garbage cans in the immediate vicinity looked like they had melted. The garage directly across from the now empty space had remnants of melted plastic hanging from the garage door. A man on a small BMX bike passed us and turned the corner.



From there we went to 51st Street and Sacramento where Yusuf Yusuf was shot and killed in a drive-by. The site was on the corner between two large parking lots for the employees of a giant steel factory that sat on the north side of the street. One of the workers from the factory came out to talk to us. She knew about the shooting and was able to tell us exactly where the incident happened.

The last two sites we visited that day were in Englewood. The first was the site where Tyrone Clark was shot and killed in the 1400 block of West 58th Street. The immediate area was extremely quiet in comparison to the adjacent street where there were tons of people out on their porches trying to stay cool as the temperature rose into the 90s. There were two nice single-family homes off the corner followed by one house that was boarded up. There was a hula-hoop hanging from a tree branch just above the site where Clark was shot. We were surprised to see that there was no memorial since the incident happened less than a week before our visit.

Conversely, the next site, where Marshall Bennett was shot and killed in the 5500 block of South Union Avenue, had been transformed into a huge memorial to the 21-year-old boy. The building was a two-flat. As I stood on the street, I could see a ceiling fan rotating on the top floor, but the bottom floor appeared to be vacant. The white front door that was slowly swinging on its hinges in the wind was covered in writing. As I looked closer, it appeared that people had signed it and left notes, many said RIP. There were three large bay windows in the front. One was boarded over and the other two were covered with a white sheet. On the window closest to the door there was a black and white photocopied picture of Bennett and a girl. At the top of the front steps sat a pair of boots with a wooden cross between them. At the base of the stairs in the yard, there was a table with a wreath laying on it. While we were there, a group of teenage girls emerged from a vacant lot just south of the house and proceeded to cut across another vacant lot on the other side of the street. The yelled at me from about three houses away and asked what I was doing. When I answered that I was photographing for a project about violence in Chicago, they ignored me and continued on their way.

We decided that before calling it a day, we would go back to the bar on Madison Street and see if we could talk to some of the people there about the shooting the night before. As we headed north, I counted a block on which five of the eight existing buildings were boarded up. X refers to them as “abandos.”

1 Shot & Killed/1 Life Saved

Johnnie Dyer
38 years old
Preliminary reports said Dyer was standing outside in the 3000 block of West 5th Avenue in the East Garfield Park neighborhood shortly before midnight when someone approached and shot him several times. He was pronounced dead at 12:38 a.m. at Mount Sinai Hospital.

ONE LIFE SAVED

Malik Mentor was standing outside his apartment building in the South Chicago neighborhood Tuesday evening when four shots rang out across the street. He saw a boy try to run, then collapse to the ground. "When he fell ... the guy walked up to him and then pointed the gun in his face about to blow his brains out," Mentor said. According to Mentor, the wounded boy lay on the ground and pleaded for his life. Mentor said he screamed at the gunman, "Man, please can you give him another chance." The gunman looked up at Mentor. "I started begging," Mentor said.

In neighborhoods dominated by gangs, staying quiet is a common response to shootings. A man working on Mentor's building, who asked that his name not be used, said he heard Mentor and another man pleading with the gunman and told them it was better not to say anything.

Mentor continued. At first, neither his pleas nor those from the wounded teen appeared to change the gunman's intentions, he said. "He keep coming forward to him ... he wanted to kill the kid," said Mentor, adding he had seen the victim and gunman in the neighborhood before. Only when Mentor pulled out his cell phone and dialed 911 did the gunman leave, Mentor said.

(1)

Jovanni Gudino
24 years old
Chicago police and paramedics responded about 10 p.m. Tuesday night to the 6700 block of South Tripp Avenue where Gudino was shot in the head in a vehicle outside his home in the West Lawn neighborhood. The victim was a passenger inside a vehicle when two male assailants approached and at least one shot him. He was pronounced dead at 3:12 p.m. this afternoon at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn.

The Cop Diet

I just realized that I have been on a cop diet. To me the quintessential cop diet consists of coffee, donuts, and hot dogs. That just about covers what I have been eating lately since I have spent most of my days driving around with police officers. X picked me up at 8 on Monday morning. It’s no surprise that we stopped at McDonald’s for coffee and breakfast.

We headed back to the Dunkin’ Donuts/Carwash/gas station on Pulaski where Cesar Rosales was shot and killed hoping to get there before it was too busy. We were still trying to figure out what exactly the circumstance of the incident there was. We know he was an employee of the car wash, but don’t know exactly where he was shot. We went inside the DD and asked the woman at the counter if she knew what happened. She seemed pretty reluctant to talk about it, but told us that it happened at the car wash and pointed in the opposite direction to the sidewalk in north side of the complex. We decided it was too busy to photograph there anyway, so we would come back at another time, ask some more people, and get to the bottom of it.

From there we headed south to the 3100 block of West Washington where Alan Penny’s girlfriend allegedly doused him in gasoline and lit him on fire. Penny’s house was a red brick two-flat with huge porches stretching out the front on both floors. It sat next door to a brand new construction four-unit condo building. At least one of the units was still for sale. Next to that was another new construction condo building with the Cubs white and blue “W” flag hanging from the 3rd floor Juliet balcony. While Penny’s house looked a bit run down being juxtaposed with the new construction, there was no sign of the fire. Directly in front of the house was a car with a bullet hole in the body right above the front passenger side tire. Across the street was a vacant lot that looked onto a series of other vacant lots all the way through to the green line.

The next site we visited was the residence of Jonathan Jackson, the 5-year-old boy that was accidentally shot by his twin brother. The building is the only one on the west side of the 700 block of South California. Three of the four corners of the intersection approaching the building were vacant lots. It was a nice brick two-flat with steel porches off the back. As we drove up on it, we saw a huge mural had been painted onto the north side of the building. It read, “RIP LIL JOHN.” There was a beautiful portrait of the boy beneath the lettering. No one was out except a few people sitting on plastic buckets in the vacant lot on one corner and a meter maid that was making her way down the street.

We proceeded to the 1200 block of South Pulaski where Parnell Shumate was shot and killed behind a Taquería in a small park that is smooched between the alley and the CAA Academy. There was a small memorial comprised of a pink teddy bear, a candle, and an empty bottle of 1800 tequila for him around the base of a tree, a bright yellow poster board that had been signed taped around the trunk. There were also a few deflated balloons hung on trees and fences surrounding the area. On the wall of the Academy just beyond the memorial was a mural of influential African Americans throughout history. Above their portraits it said, “I am from the great role models that I will one day be.”

We continued south to the 4500 block of South Western Avenue where an unidentified woman was killed. I still have to do research into the circumstances of her death. This part of Western Avenue is boulevard style with a huge grassy median. On the west side at the address was an empty lot that was fenced off with a huge billboard sticking up that said the land was for lease. Right across the street was a small corner bar that had a $3 martini Fridays. I will update here when I find out more about this incident.

We went from there to the 3300 block of South Ashland where Allen Olivia, 19, was walking when he was approached from behind, struck over the head with a bat and stabbed several times. The exact location was in front of a store that X couldn’t quite figure out. On the sign it had a line of Asian writing under which it said Sigma & Associates, but it appeared that they were selling cell phones, it was kind of unclear. Just north of the address was one of X’s favorite fast food joints, The Patio Drive-Thru.

The next site was in the 700 block of East Pershing Road where 18-year-old Jamonie Richards was shot and killed. This block of Pershing has a huge park with baseball fields, tennis courts, and a nicely landscaped sitting area on the south side of the street. On the north side there is a set of new brick row houses. The address appeared to be on the street in front of a large vacant lot surrounded by a fence just east of the houses. A group of men were playing chess on a board propped up on a garbage can across the street in front of one of the park entrances. Woman and men in business clothes past me as I photographed. As X and I pulled out of the alley we were parked in, I saw a memorial in the median a little ways east of where I was photographing. X said the address estimation was pretty bad and that the streets always know more than the cops. We re-parked and I photographed the new, correct location.


We left there and got onto the expressway, got off at Belmont and headed to the 4900 block of West School Street where Miguel Vasquez was shot and killed while sitting on his front porch. The block looked like much of the north side of Chicago, a mix of three flats interspersed with single-family homes on sunny tree lined streets. The only house that stuck out as different was Vasquez’s. It appeared to be empty. The front window was broken and boarded over (maybe from a bullet or from his fall), there was a note on the front door (No trespassing by order of the bank. Violators will be prosecuted.), and the bottom of the door on the second floor leading out to a small porch was disintegrating. X thought maybe it was abandoned before the incident, but Vasquez’s name was on one of the mailboxes next to the front door. The only sign of life was a ceiling fan rotating on the second floor. X and I went up on the porch after I was done photographing to take a look. There was something red splattered on the floor there. At first we thought it might have been blood, but with a closer look we saw that it was melted candy.

From there we went to the 4100 block of North Albany where Alexander Mercado, 16, was shot and killed while sitting in a car in a no parking zone in front of a fire hydrant. There was a bed of perennials planted around the light post next to the hydrant. Just down the street, workmen were carrying large sheets of glass across the street. Other than them, no one was around. As I photographed, a little girl peaked her head out of the windows of one of the houses. Her father came and peaked his head out over hers and told her to come back inside.

Our last location for the day was in the 2300 block of North Keeler Avenue where Angel Rebolledo was shot and killed while standing out on the street with some friends. A young boy was riding a razor scooter up and down the sidewalk in front of a line of single-family homes. I began to photograph the site and people began to come out of their houses on to their front porches. The boy went into the house next door to the exact location and came out with his mother. A young girl came out onto the porch of the house on the opposite side. When I turned around I saw people standing on three of the porches of houses behind me. No one really seemed to be paying attention to me, but it was obvious that they came out to see what I was doing. No one asked me any questions. As we loaded back into the car, people started retreating back into their houses and the young boy went back to riding his scooter up and down the block.

72nd Street to 38th Street + Elotes

I have been photographing so much lately that I am not keeping up with my reports. I have made it to over 40 spots in the past week and a half, which means that I am finally starting to make some headway.

I went out to photograph with A & H again on Friday. I picked about 15 locations between 72nd Street and 38th Street. The first location was in the 7200 block of South Marshfield Ave where Darryl Dunn, 44, was shot and killed. The block was pretty busy. There were a few older women sitting on porches on the west side of the street. Across the street from the site there were three lots that were under construction. H got out to talk to one of the men working on the lots. It turned out that he had purchased them for $13,500 and was going to build a nice house for his family. He said his brother and cousin all bought lots on the same block. As I photographed a young man walked by A keeping a steady eye on her. She made a comment to him about saying hello if he was going to stare. His eyes lit up, he smiled, and said he was sorry but he did say hello, she must not have heard him. As we rounded the corner to leave you could see the extensive work that would need to be done on the existing house and property the man bought. I wish him the best of luck.

The next location was just a few blocks away in the 7000 block of South Hermitage Ave. where 70-year-old James Evans was found stabbed to death inside his residence. Two white houses that came right out to the sidewalk flanked the blue house that was set back almost a whole lot from the street. The house was hidden behind two large trees and the fence that ran separated the property from the street was covered with overgrowth. The white house on the north side had a plastic carousel horse sitting out front. I saw movement in the house through my lens and moments later a woman came out and began walking towards me. She yelled out from her yard to me, “What is it that you think you’re doing?” I responded that I was photographing for a project addressing youth violence. She said, “Very good” and retreated back into the house. I found out later that Shaudee Nance, 18, was killed on the sidewalk next door to this house less than a month prior to Evans’ stabbing.


At the end of that block there was a small memorial of stuffed animals propped up by the curb on the street. It looked weathered and dirty, like it had been there for quite a long time. The house on the corner that it sat in front of was a small bungalow style home that was all boarded up. I photographed the memorial before we made our way to the next site.

We went to the 7000 block of South Justine where Krystal Rodney was shot and killed outside her grandmother’s house in what is believed to have been a domestic argument. As we drove up I could see an older woman on the porch, presumably her grandmother, and a few children playing around her. I told A & H not to stop. I would come back to this location. The remainder of the short block was thriving with young men and women in their yards and on their front porches.

The following location was where 2-year-old Aniya Crockett died from multiple blunt force traumas resulting from child abuse. The house was on a similarly busy block. A teenage boy was on the front porch reading at the site. As we drove up, a young boy rode into the front yard on his bicycle and glared at us. This is another location I will have to return to. I noticed as we drove away that there was a CeaseFire sticker in the front window that read, “Don’t Shoot. I want to grow up.”

The next location was in the 1600 block of West 64th Street where Andrew Hartrick was shot and killed while he and another man were sitting in a car on the corner beside a vacant lot in a no parking zone marked with yellow pillars. The site was where Paulina hits 64th Street, but there was no thru traffic because of a median sitting at the end of Paulina covered in manicured bushes and several tall trees. On that same corner just south of the vacant lot was a boarded up building. I photographed from across the busy street. One man laughed and yelled out to me as he passed, “Don’t click yet!”


The next site was just two blocks north on the corner of 62nd Street and Paulina where Schirron Hoskins, 18, was killed in a drive-by shooting. The site was in front of a church and across the street from a huge vacant lot. The tree on the corner of the intersection had stuffed animals and balloons around the base and signed poster board encircling the trunk with photographs of him and his friends attached. The area was really quiet when I started photographing. The only people around were a father and his son going to the park on the northeast corner of Paulina. The longer I photographed, the more people started to walk in the direction of the site. Four young men stood on the opposite corner from me and kept their distance. When I was finished and walking towards the car, they walked up to the memorial and circled around it talking and pointing at pictures and some of the writing. They appeared to be close to his age. I wondered whether they were friends of his.

From there we went to the home of 17-year-old Darterius Madison where he was shot and killed outside his home in what appeared to be a gang related incident. Knowing that the victim had gang affiliations made me very nervous about photographing the site of his death. Since he died outside his home, I would have to point my camera at the house that his family still resides in. When we approached the house, which was in the 6300 block of South Hamilton Avenue, I saw that the front door was open. The house that had tan siding with brown trim was two-stories high. There was a nice big newly built porch with a single green plastic chair on it. Each of the posts had a bouquet of flowers hanging from them in conical holders. The houses on the block were all very nice. Most had small yards in the front with flowers and plants adorning them. They looked out onto train tracks that were raised up a small hill across the street. I took a few images with out my tripod so I was not such a spectacle and got back in the car.

Next we tried to photograph the site on the 6200 block of South Laflin Street where Jerry Seals was found with a gunshot wound to the head. We passed when we saw that a large group of young men were hanging out in the front yard of the address. The front of the house had a wheelchair elevator instead of stairs to get on to the porch. One of the young men was holding on to it, arms outstretched, watching us as we passed. As we continued I noticed that the location was only one block from the area police precinct.

At 59th Street and Ashland Avenue, we parked in the M&M Liquor Store parking lot so that I could photograph the intersection where Deandre Murphy’s car came to a stop after he was shot while in a moving vehicle. The intersection was extremely busy with cars and pedestrians. I photographed with my back to the liquor store lot where a large group of people was leaned up against its shaded outside wall. An older man leaned against his car directly behind me and watched as I took my pictures. As we left, a woman came to the window of the car and asked H if he wanted a “square.” H responded, “No honey, we don’t smoke.” We pulled out to venture to the next site.

James Taylor was stabbed to death in the 1700 block of West 51st Street on the sidewalk adjacent to a vacant lot. A & H got out here so that they could keep an eye on me because it was a busy block. I photographed from across the street from the location. Just a few houses down from me a two men sitting on the front steps listening to a small AM/FM radio quickly turned into a larger group. A & H were clearly a hit with them. One young lady walked up to H and asked if he had handcuffs. He replied that he did not, but that he had a gun. The young lady suggested that he give it to the man she had approached the group with. She continued to hit on him and he politely declined her advances. She told him that she had 18 babies and each one was a different nationality. I don’t know if that was true, but wow! When I was done, I pulled A & H away from their new friends and we got back into the car.

Just down the street along a bright yellow fence was a little cart run by a Hispanic man and woman. We stopped there to get lunch, Elotes and mango slices with lemon juice and salt. H spoke to them in Spanish while A and I tried to translate.

We headed west across 51st Street to May and made a right onto a cul-de-sac. The afternoon was absolutely beautiful and everyone on this block was taking advantage of the nice weather. There was a man selling sno-cones from a folding table in front of his building, a few groups of people on porches, some teenage girls walking down the street, and a man walking his dog. The man who was walking his dog walked up the stairs to the address next to the site of Terrance Dishman’s death. A asked the man something about his dog and they continued to converse for the duration of my photographing while H tried to make conversation with the men on the porch behind me. The building next door to them was boarded up. H asked them if it ever gave them any problems. They responded that every time they board up the door someone comes and kicks it in again. As we were driving off the block a man parked in his car on the side of the road stuck his head out of the car and asked us if we were there to photograph the foreclosures. H said, “No, we’re the police.” The man nodded and we continued on our way. After we left, A said she asked the man with the dog about the homicide. He told her he didn’t want to talk about it.

The next site was where 21-month-old Jaymeon Wyatt was killed from blunt head trauma resulting from abuse. The address, in the 100 block of East 49th Street, was in a large yellow brick apartment building. The building, which took up about half a block, sat across from an equally large paved, gated off empty lot. There were two men sitting on the stoop of one of the building’s entrances. They seemed to be interested in what I was doing, but didn’t ask any questions. There was a “For Rent” sign on the first floor window.

Our last location for the day was in the 4300 block of South Federal where 39-year-old Bennie Madison was shot and killed. The site was just east of the under-pass for the expressway at the mouth of a newly paved street on the backside of a large complex of condos that look like they are still under construction. Across the street was a baseball field. While 43rd Street was busy with traffic, the mouth of Federal was closed off with large construction barriers. The lack of thru traffic made it a quiet and serene place and that is where our day ended, eerily peaceful amongst all the ghosts of violence.

Liquor Store Shooting (1)

Marcus Marshall
19 years old
Marshall was killed and a 21-year-old man was critically wounded when two men entered a South Side liquor store and began firing. Marshall was shot in the head and chest about 12:40 a.m. at the store in the 5700 block of South State Street. The other victim was taken in critical condition to Northwestern Memorial Hospital with a gunshot wound to his head.

2 Police Officers Wounded & Another Fired On

Two plainclothes Chicago police officers attempting to serve a search warrant for weapons "on a known gang member" were shot and wounded early this morning in a South Side home. A 41-year old tactical officer, who has been on the force seven years, was shot in the arm. A 38-year-old officer, a six-year veteran, was wounded in the arm and leg. Weis said the officers entered the rear of the single-family home after identifying themselves as police officers and were shot at from behind a closed door. Other officers were stationed outside the front door. The incident happened about 12:20 a.m. Two male suspects at the home in the 7700 block of South Hoyne Avenue in the Gresham neighborhood were arrested. Police fired no shots. Police recovered an assault rifle and several handguns. No one was killed in this incident and both police officers are expected to fully recover.

A few hours later a Chicago police officer driving her own car to work was shot at by someone in a passing vehicle. Bullets hit the officer's car but she was uninjured. The shooting took place about 4:25 a.m. in the 3200 block of West Belmont Avenue, approximately a mile from the Belmont District headquarters where she was headed.