Brothers Thrive Despite Violent Tragedy

Sometimes, 4-year-old Jordan Evans tells his little brother, Elijah, about their mother.

“Our mom’s name was Debbie,” Jordan’s grandfather heard him say one day, “and she was good.”

Elijah is just 2 years old. His birth and his mother’s death happened at nearly the same instant--marauders invaded the family’s apartment in suburban Chicago, shot Debbie Evans in the head and stabbed her in the throat before ripping Elijah from her womb as she lay dying.

They stabbed his 10-year-old sister, Samantha, too; she died in the Pocahontas nightgown she wore on that November night. And they abducted his 8-year-old brother, Joshua. Stabbed and strangled, his body was found in an alley the next day.

The killers took Eli and left Jordan behind, unharmed but stained with his mother’s blood. He was just 17 months old, but if the attackers figured Jordan was too young to remember anything, they figured wrong.

Jordan “heard Eli cry for the first time. He says, ‘They took my baby brother and they made him cry,’ ” says Sam Evans, 49, Debbie’s father. As their guardian he is rearing the youngsters on a 17-acre former hog farm in rural southeastern Illinois.

Sometimes, Jordan has nightmares about the bad guys trying to get him.

“We were told he’d forget,” Evans said. “If he brings it up, we just let him talk about it.”

“Jordan says, ‘I don’t have a mom.’ I say, ‘You have a mom, it’s just that she’s with Jesus.’ Then he’ll say, ‘I don’t have a dad.’

Evans pauses.

“I agree,” he says. “He doesn’t have a dad. We just let it go at that.”

Jordan and Eli’s father is convicted woman-batterer and drug user Laverne Ward, 26. Debbie Evans, 28, had Jordan during a violent relationship with Ward, then got pregnant with Elijah during a brief reconciliation after Ward was released from prison in January 1995.

Ward, his cousin Jacqueline Annette Williams, and her boyfriend, Fedell Caffey, are charged with the killings and with taking Elijah “against his will.” Prosecutors say Williams’ desire for a baby led to the crime; the newborn was found with the suspects when they were arrested. Separate trials for the defendants, who have pleaded not guilty, are to begin in March.

Sam Evans says he decided to rear his slain daughter’s boys within minutes of learning she’d been killed.

It’s been a challenge. Evans teaches part-time at a nearby community college--sociology and trucking, as unlikely as that might seem--and with his shoulder-length, whitish-blond hair and black Vince Gill T-shirt, he doesn’t look like a storybook grandpa.

“The hardest part,” he says, is “every time I look at them I see Debbie. That has been the ongoing torture. Eli looks just like Debbie. And Jordan talks about her all the time.”

Evans’ home was destroyed by fire last year. Until he rebuilds it, he lives with the boys and his teenage son in an old pole barn he converted into a makeshift home.

At Christmas, the children helped decorate a tree. When they put the sparkling angel on top, an enchanted Jordan gushed, “Oh, Grandpa, do you think my mom’s got wings like that?”

For the most part, the boys live the happy, rambunctious lives of young brothers, attending part-time day care and Sunday school, romping in the fields outside their home.

“They take care of each other. They beat up on each other,” Evans says. “They’re just brothers, I guess.”

Celebrating Eli’s birthday, Nov. 16, “is very, very hard. It’s good to celebrate his life, his birth, but it’s a constant reminder that that was when his mother was killed,” Evans said.

On the first birthday and anniversary, the family held a joint party and memorial. Last year, they had the party a few days later.

Elijah is too young to know about the circumstances of his birth, obviously. But Evans knows that someday he’ll have to be told.

Eli “has the possibility of blaming himself--’I lived and Mom died,’ ” Evans says. “I don’t think there will be a way to make it less awful.”

Evans intends to attend the trials, though he figures doing so will force him to leave his job.

Sometimes, he finds he is angry at his daughter, “because she’s not here to raise her kids.” Not because he doesn’t feel up to the job, but because he knows every child needs a mother’s love.

Debbie, he said, “mentioned one time right after Joshua was born, ‘I just want him to be happy. I don’t want him to be uncomfortable with anybody. I just want him to be himself.’

“I don’t guess I want anything else for these two. I just want them to be happy.”