Duck the Bullet: How Children Survive Chicagoâs Cabrini-Green : Poverty: Gunfire is not the only danger in this high-rise housing project. Kids must also try to dodge drugs, gangs and despair.
Al Carter believes there is a code of survival that all young people must learn at Cabrini-Green. He sums it up in three simple words: Duck the bullet.
It means more than hitting the ground when guns start crackling and snipers start shooting. It means avoiding gangs, drugs and the other demons that destroy so many lives and cause so many deaths at the housing project.
âItâs the negative surroundings that might be able to grab a young person up, swallow him whole, spit him out and make him run wild until heâs hit by a bullet,â Carter says. âItâs difficult to duck a bullet at Cabrini.â
Dantrell Davis didnât even have a chance.
The 7-year-old was murdered Oct. 13 by a sniper aiming an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle with a scope from a 10th-floor window. The little boy was walking with his mother from their home to school--a 100-foot, one-minute journey that proved too perilous, even with the police parked nearby.
He was the third pupil from Jenner School to be murdered in seven months.
It was Dantrellâs death, though, that shocked the city, that grabbed the headlines, that spurred the mayor, police and public housing officials to say the killing must stop, this must never happen again, something must be done.
But Carter, who was brought up in Cabrini and now runs an athletic foundation for kids there, wonders when--and if--it will end.
âWe continue to talk about the deaths, we rant and we rave, we get news coverage, yet the murders go on,â he says. âItâs heartbreaking.â
Carter has given eulogies at five funerals of Cabrini children since 1985. The first was Laketa Crosby, a bubbly 9-year-old killed in gang cross-fire while jumping rope double-dutch. The most recent was Anthony Felton, a budding 9-year-old boxer, shot in March, on the day he was supposed to collect a trophy.
âYou remember what they did,â Carter says. âYou can remember the laughter. When it happens, it just tears you in half.â
This time, Carter knew the accused, Anthony Garrett, 33, an Army veteran and expert marksman with a criminal record, and had hired him to umpire baseball games at Cabrini as part of a gang intervention program.
âI still canât believe it,â Carter says. âI was the guy who encouraged him to go to the Army to get off the streets.â
At 51, Carter is a mentor to some kids, a surrogate parent to others, giving pep talks, picking up report cards, hoping his athletic programs--including 27 baseball teams named after African tribes--will build self-esteem and pride.
But he knows he can do only so much.
âEverybody wants to jump up and down on the police. Theyâre not the ones committing the crimes. The parents, the aunties, the uncles, are the ones that need to be involved, instead of pulling their shades down until it happens to them.â
At Cabrini, mothers teach their children more than manners, respect and the importance of sharing. Other lessons seem far more urgent:
How to steer clear of windows in case of shootings.
How to avoid the clutch of gangs.
How to stay alive.
Just ask Bernetta Winston, a stocky mother of two boys, 12 and 14.
âYou sit them down and say: âGangs will get you nothing but trouble; theyâll get you in jail or 6 feet under,â â she declares in her donât-mess-with-me tone. â âGo to school. Get an education and get out of here. Make a choice.â Theyâd better make the right one.â
More than half of Cabriniâs 7,000 residents are younger than 20. Many are raised by single mothers in surroundings where hope sometimes is as scarce as work. Only 9% of residents have paying jobs.
To succeed here, it sometimes takes special steps.
Valerie Woolridge sent her 21-year-old son away when gangs started pressuring him and shot and burned his car.
Woolridge is a stylish woman, with dangling earrings and a dash of fuchsia-tinted hair. She has lived here all of her 39 years, but says itâs nothing like her childhood days when kids played outside freely.
âItâs the way you raise kids that matter. Give them support . . . donât beat on them, donât curse them out.â
She knows that some parents here canât control their children. And some parents canât control themselves, trading food stamps for crack or getting high in front of their babies.
But Woolridge, who helps run a Chicago Urban League after-school program for children, emphasizes that many, many more people here are law-abiding, struggling to make it.
âThereâs a lot of good over here. Some of the people just need a chance. They never have a chance.â
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In 13 years as a cop at Cabrini-Green, Dennis Davis has seen folks come and go, violence flare up and die down. But there has been one constant: gangs.
Driving through Cabriniâs 70 acres, a mile from the cityâs elegant Gold Coast, Davis points to graffiti-scarred high-rises and identifies which gang controls which building--the Disciples, Vice Lords or Cobra Stones.
Gangs here have power, selling drugs, protecting turf. Sometimes it seems easier to live by their rules.
âYou either join the gangs or get beat up,â says Davis, a soft-spoken 21-year police veteran. âWhat choice do you have? You canât be beat up every day.â
Davis knows one young man who canât find work and holes up in his apartment every day except Sunday, to go to church, because he doesnât want to get involved.
When he first began working here, Davis says, the complex--23 high-rises and about 60 row houses--was mostly occupied. Now the vacancy rate is 31%.
Some buildings were sealed and vacated recently in a new security crackdown announced by Mayor Richard M. Daley that also included police sweeps of high-rises for drugs and weapons.
âA lot of people donât like it,â says Davis, a neighborhood relations officer. âThey feel like theyâre in a prison.â
This isnât Cabriniâs first 15 minutes of fame. In 1981, then-Mayor Jane M. Byrne moved here for three weeks to dramatize crime conditions.
Eleven years later, the killing goes on.
Asked if the stepped-up security will work, Davis says quietly: âWeâll just have to wait and see. Itâs better than nothing. . . . Itâs sad it took a 7-year-old kid to bring about this.â
For the children, Dantrellâs death was sad and scary, but it wasnât shocking. And it raised a terrible question: Will I be next?
Those who attend an Urban League after-school program in the building where Dantrell lived expressed their fears and feelings on paper.
âToo many people (are) getting killed over here in Cabrini and I am tired of it,â wrote 12-year-old Erica Morris. âBecause I may be the next one, but I am not going to say that. I want to move away from the projects.â
Erica, with her delicate features and whisper-shy voice, dreams of becoming a veterinarian. For now, she offers a suggestion for the random shooting.
âThey should do it some other time,â she says evenly. âNot while kids go to school.â
Her sister, Angel, 8, also worries.
âI never got shot before, but I think I will or someone in my family will or someone in a lot of families will too,â the third-grader wrote.
Some childrenâs letters were pleas for help.
âSometimes I am afraid to go to school,â Orion wrote in his 7-year-oldâs scrawl. âWe little people need some protection from all gang violence and drug sellers.â
But others were more fatalistic.
âWhen a boy gotten shot I . . . tell God to help him, to let him be in your hands, let him be with you,â wrote 9-year-old Rennard. âJust like they say--the odds be with you and you be with the odds.â
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