Unconscious Girl X a Symbol of Violence in Chicago

Her name is a secret, guarded as closely as the 9-year-old herself. Raped, choked, poisoned and dumped in a stairwell, Girl X has been unconscious for a month, unable to describe her attacker.

As police follow the clues--which include gang-style graffiti scrawled on her body--the child has been embraced by Chicago’s black community as a symbol of violence in its crumbling housing projects.

Hundreds have attended vigils. The Rev. Jesse Jackson has helped raise thousands of dollars for psychiatric care if the girl ever recovers, and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan has prayed at her bedside.

“It’s a horrible, horrible thing,” said the Rev. Maxine Walker, a Baptist minister. “It makes you wonder what kind of consciousness, what kind of mind, would do this.”

Her suffering began on the snowy morning of Jan. 9 when she left a playmate’s apartment and started home alone through the notorious Cabrini-Green public housing project.

When the 4-foot-8, 64-pound child was found hours later, a gasoline-like substance was in her stomach and a pitchfork emblem of the Gangster Disciples street gang was scrawled across her body, possibly with a marking pen.

Ever since, she has been in a hospital bed, armed guards at her door around the clock.

Police have shown the graffiti to a handwriting expert, but they don’t know whether they are looking for gang members or an assailant using the scrawlings as a decoy.

Dozens of men have been questioned and some given lie-detector tests. Informants within the gangs are being pressed for clues.

“We’re still progressing,” said police Cmdr. Joseph Griffin. “Some cases you reach a dead-end where you’re pretty well stuck, but this thing has been ongoing.”

Driving the concern over the case is the realization--now universal in Chicago--that Cabrini-Green and similar housing projects have become nightmare environments that leave children who survive them badly scarred.

The city is tearing down the worst buildings, but progress is slow and thousands still live amid the rats, trash, drug-pushing gangs and the dimly lighted, foul-smelling stairwells.

Still, reaction to the act was slow in coming. Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lee Bey contrasted the initially mild reaction to the Girl X case with the furor over the slaying of 6-year-old Colorado girl JonBenet Ramsey.

“The Cabrini-Green rape would be widely known had the victim been white,” he wrote. “Then it would have been news. Some legislator would have pushed for tougher laws against brutalizers of children.”

Black-oriented radio station WGCI parked its mobile studio outside Children’s Memorial Hospital and its disc jockeys spent 16 hours broadcasting appeals for donations. Station officials estimate they raised $50,000, mostly from motorists who drove up to drop off their contributions.

Beverly Reed, a community organizer who coined the name Girl X after the mother asked to have the real name kept secret, estimated that she has raised an additional $30,000, to go for psychiatric care and moving the family “so she’ll never have to see Cabrini-Green again.”

“This has stirred the soul of the community,” she said.

She said the reason the case has resonated with people is that so many women, herself included, have been victims of sexual assault.

The little girl has dominated Reed’s thoughts for days and inspired her to write a poem.

“Rest well, Girl X,” it ends. “We will hold the light for you until you return.”