A little backstory is necessary here. When Marcelo was three, his father went to prison on charges of kidnapping a young man for double-crossing him on a drug deal. Marcelo, who knows the details of the case through his dad, insists that he was innocent, that the alleged kidnapping was really a misunderstanding. Marcelo and his two brothers were raised by their mother, Blanca, who spoke little English but was determined to keep her kids on track. They lived in a garden apartment on the city’s South Side. Blanca, who emigrated from Mexico when she was eighteen, worked twelve-hour overnight shifts at a factory that made plastic utensils; she would get home in time to take the children to school. On weekends she made tamales, which she loaded into a large ice chest and fit on the back of a baby stroller, along with Omar, the youngest. Blanca would go from house to house, Elio and Marcelo ringing doorbells (and translating when needed), selling the tamales for seven dollars a dozen, extra money which she put aside for her boys’ education. Blanca pleaded with the principal at St. Gall, a local Catholic school, to enroll the boys, even though she didn’t have money for full tuition. Sister Erica Jordan, the principal, told me, “Her life was so hard and she had to be so focused on keeping a roof over their head and food on the table, she didn’t have time for friends.” Sister Erica arranged for all three boys to attend.
Since Blanca worked the night shift, Elio was often in charge. He wandered. At thirteen he joined the Latin Kings. He told me, “I wanted to be known so that they wouldn’t mess with my little brothers.” He earned a reputation as a wild kid and fearless. He once tried to burn down a garage of someone he was feuding with. At thirteen he was shot, in the back. When he was young, everyone in the neighborhood called him Little Elmo, but as he made a reputation for himself, his sobriquet changed to Terror. Trouble followed him. Marcelo can remember bricks being thrown through their front window. Heather Kelsey, Elio’s eighth-grade teacher, recalls Elio drawing gang signs on his notebooks. “He could put on that tough-guy face,” she said. “He felt like he always had something to prove.” In eighth grade, after numerous incidents, he got expelled from St. Gall. And so when Kelsey got Marcelo as a student, she was apprehensive. When he first arrived, she recalled, he was scrappy, always ready to fight. “But he was different,” she said. “He wanted to make his mom proud.” At one parent-teacher conference, Marcelo apologized to his mom for his grades, which were B’s and C’s. “He seemed so easily swayed. I worried he’d fall into Elio’s mess,” Kelsey told me. “I knew he wanted to do well, but I worried he didn’t have the self-discipline to stay on track.” She paused. “I loved Marcelo.”
Marcelo, like Elio, joined the Latin Kings, the gang that ruled his southwest-side neighborhood, a collection of small wood frame homes in this mostly Latino neighborhood. Marcelo earned the nickname Little Terror, a homage, obviously, to his brother, and a tribute to his scrappiness. Marcelo, despite his small stature, seemed unafraid. One time, when he was fifteen, he went to get a haircut in the neighborhood of a rival gang, an act that, if not foolish, was naive. But there’s a bravado about Marcelo, and for him it was a challenge. “A macho kind of thing,” he told me. “I thought, they ain’t gonna do shit.” He had gone with a friend, a girl named Ashley. As he exited the barbershop after getting a fade, he saw four boys from the rival gang across the street. They recognized each other from Facebook posts, where they would taunt each other’s gang. One of them declared to Marcelo, Whassup, bitch? King killer, and contorted his fingers to resemble an upside-down crown, a sign of disrespect. Marcelo ran into the middle of 59th Street, thinking they might not follow him with witnesses around, but they chased him, and one boy pulled a knife from his pants pocket and began jousting, trying to stab Marcelo in the stomach. Ashley pepper-sprayed him, but the assailant didn’t back down. Marcelo waved his arms around his torso to defend himself when he felt the sharp pain, and as he backed away, he noticed the blade protruding from his left biceps. As he yanked out the knife, a beer bottle slammed into his wrist. He began wildly throwing punches, none of which landed. Blood spilled down his arm. He heard sirens, and his assailants ran, his Fuck yous emptily echoing down the street, cars honking, swerving to avoid the boy with the bloody arm. He needed ten stitches.
A few months later, in February, as Marcelo walked back to his house with his friend Javier, they noticed a black Jeep motoring down the street; a young man in the passenger seat rolled down his tinted window and, like the assailant outside the barbershop, contorted his fingers into an upside-down crown. He wore a ski mask to conceal his identity. Marcelo and Javier, both of whom showed great loyalty to the Kings, each picked up a brick and hurled it at the car. Marcelo’s brick smashed into one of the car doors. Javier’s cracked the windshield. The passenger in the ski mask pointed a semiautomatic weapon at the two boys and began shooting. They ran. Marcelo, as he’d learned from the older boys, ran in a zigzag fashion, trying to dodge the bullets. He felt lightheaded, and then sharp pain in both legs. He collapsed by a parked car and tried to crawl toward the sidewalk to find some protection. He looked up, and the shooter stood above him, taking aim. Marcelo knew this was it. He knows it sounds clichéd, but it was as if he were watching a movie trailer about his life. First communion. Graduation from eighth grade. Omar, his younger brother, playing video games. God, please take care of my mother, he thought to himself. I’m sorry for all that I did. Out of the corner of his eye, Marcelo caught Javier hiding behind a nearby car, his eyes wide and pleading. The gun jammed. Marcelo heard police sirens in the distance. The shooter ran back to the Jeep, and it took off. Javier rushed to Marcelo, cupped his head in his hands, and implored him, Don’t pass. Don’t close your eyes. Get up. Get up. Come on. Get up. Marcelo, when he recounts this moment, allows that he was crying, afraid that this was it. He had been shot in both legs, a bullet entering and exiting his left thigh, another bullet lodging in his left calf. Blood from the thigh wound gushed onto the sidewalk until a squad car pulled up; a woman police officer took Marcelo’s sweater and tied it around his left leg to stanch the bleeding.
* * *
—
In a good year in Chicago, roughly 2,000 people get wounded by gunfire, or five people a day, give or take. Some years the number has risen to over 4,000, or roughly one person every two hours. These are the survivors, the ones still standing, more or less. Every victim has their own reckoning. For some, getting shot is an affront to their manhood. To their vigor. To their pride. And so that wound festers; the desire for vengeance and payback burns until it eventually erupts. I’ve met some who have held on to that fury for years. On the first day of spring in 2006, Jimmy Allen, who was then thirty-seven, spent the morning enjoying the sun in Veterans Memorial Park on the city’s far South Side. He was there with his mom and friends, many of whom were drinking even at this early hour. Nearby, a gaggle of men shot dice. Allen had $900 in his pocket, wrapped in a rubber band, money he had made selling marijuana. Allen saw three young men enter the park and saunter up to the dice game. Each pulled out a gun, and one yelled, Man, stick up. Another ordered, Lower it like you owe it. They seemed impatient, and Allen pulled the bundle of cash out of his pocket and held it aloft. An offering. But one of his friends who’d had too much to drink defiantly declared, Get the fuck out of here. We ain’t giving y’all shit. The three men started shooting. Allen got hit just above the heart, in the collarbone. “It felt like someone hit me with a bat,” he told me. With blood squirting from his chest, he took off running, and as he tried to hoist himself over a fence, he got shot twice more, both times in the buttocks. He flipped over the fence and fell to the other side. A friend rushed him to the hospital, where the staff stopped the bleeding before transferring him to a trauma unit so they could perform surgery. Four other people were shot along with him, including his mother, who was shot in the lower back. Everyone survived.
Allen became fixated on getting revenge. In the following weeks, he drove around the neighborhood for hours, looking for the p
erson who he heard had driven the shooters to the park. He purchased a beanbag to sit on because of the pain in his buttocks; his chest wound still leaked blood. He carried a Tec-9 and wore a bulletproof vest. “I wanted to kill everyone out there,” he told me. They’d nicked his pride, his ability to protect himself—and his mom. He considered killing the person’s grandmother, and observed her comings and goings. At one point he paid a friend $700 to confront someone he suspected of being involved in the incident, hoping the person might confess to it. He couldn’t sleep. People close to him, including his mom, goaded him for not finding the assailants. Man, you need to get him, one friend told him. You got shot. Your mom got shot. They shouldn’t even be here. Every day for nearly a decade Allen thought about vengeance. “I couldn’t stand them being here with me at the same time,” he told me. “I just wanted them off this earth.” It so consumed Allen that there were mornings he woke up crying in frustration. “I was messed up for a long time,” he said.
I sat with Allen in his small second-floor apartment on a wintry day so cold that he had the stove burners on to help boost the heat. Allen, who has a rangy build and has lost a number of teeth to diabetes, looks older than his forty-seven years. He told me that one of his brothers, who had served time in prison not long ago, “turned his life over to the Lord.” That brother convinced Allen to let it go. “Just let the Lord handle it,” his brother told him. “Keep it in his hands.” Allen was so astonished by his brother’s transformation that he felt he owed it to him to honor his pleas. “I just had to let a lot of demons go,” he told me. “It’s scary living with wanting that revenge.” I asked him what would happen if he ran into one of the people he suspected of being involved in the shooting. “It burns in me, right now today,” he conceded. He grinned, the gap in his teeth visible, and I’m unsure if that was a smile of relief or one of knowing, of knowing something I didn’t.
For others, getting shot feels like a twist of fate that’s not so much bad luck as it is a deserved exclamation point to their life up to then. Roel Villarreal, at the age of twenty-five, worked in shipping and receiving at a small company that built backdrops for photographers. Roel figured he’d invest his earnings, buying crack cocaine and on weekends selling it for a hefty profit. One Friday night he’d purchased an eight ball for $100 and cut it into twenty-one dime bags, hoping to double his investment. He drank some Coronas to loosen up, to muster the pluck to sell his wares. Around three in the morning a pickup truck pulled to the curb a few feet ahead of him, and the passenger stuck his head out to beckon Roel, who trotted over. He heard the shots before he saw the gun, and instinctively hit the ground. A friend ran toward him. You’re bleeding from the head! his friend yelled. Roel remembers his hands felt cold. He’d been shot in the neck, and in the coming days doctors determined he had lost all movement from the neck down. He was a quadriplegic.
Roel couldn’t move in with his mother, because she lived in the neighborhood of a rival gang. He tried living with his girlfriend of three years, but her son had also been shot recently and was paralyzed from the waist down, so she was spent from taking care of him. The only option for Roel was a nursing home, and once he was there, the only available room was on the third floor, in the dementia ward. Now his only visitors are his mother, his brother, and his aunt. His friends have stopped coming by. For a stretch, an elderly woman of Italian descent suffering from Alzheimer’s often came by his room and would compulsively touch objects there, including two crucifixes he had by the window, as if she were making sure they were real. Often the woman would mistake Roel for her son, and Roel so welcomed her company that he would not disabuse her of the notion that they were related. She passed away, and he now spends most of his days watching television, mostly movies and sports, sometimes switching to a Spanish-language station to work his mind. Every morning a nurse comes in to brush his teeth. Another nurse feeds him and changes his position so he doesn’t get bedsores. His mother shaves him when she visits. He usually wears a winter cap, as he gets cold easily, and he drinks Ensure to maintain his weight. At five foot ten, he’s down to 115 pounds. But he’s not bitter or regretful or the least bit melancholy. There’s a tranquility about him that belies his situation. “I take it day by day,” he told me. “I have more good days than bad days…I don’t hold a grudge. It was no one’s fault but mine. I was the one out in the streets, so who can I get mad at?” A friend of Roel’s who shared a room when they were going through rehab said of those like Roel who are confined to nursing homes, “Sometimes these guys think it’s payback for what they did, like they somehow deserve it. It’s kind of like their own purgatory.” Indeed, Roel once told his aunt, Maybe this is the only way God could stop me.
* * *
—
“I was kind of freaking out, like my life is not a game,” Marcelo once told me. “You know what I’m saying? My life could have been gone. I could have been swiped from the earth. I didn’t realize that when I was gangbanging. I started thinking, reflecting real hard. Be like, damn, what the fuck, do I really want this?”
After Marcelo got shot, he stayed inside his house, his left leg in a cast and a bullet still lodged in his calf (it was too embedded in the tissue for the doctors to remove). His school, De La Salle, thought it best that he complete the semester by taking classes online, as the administrators didn’t want trouble to follow him into the school.
The shooting shook him. He burned with revenge, so much so he couldn’t sleep. In his head, he concocted a plan. He knew where the shooter lived and decided that he would have a friend drive him, with another friend following in a second car. He’d get out, yell the name of the shooter, wait for him to come to the front door, and fire. He’d then toss the gun into the first car and hop into the second. Once home, he’d urinate on his hands, which he’d been told would eliminate gunpowder residue. (It doesn’t work.) His older brother, Elio, convinced him to let it sit for a few months; Elio warned him that if anything happened to the suspected shooter, the police would quickly know it was him.
Marcelo knew he couldn’t stay in the neighborhood. It would happen again—or he’d get charged up and go after the guy who shot him, despite Elio’s warnings. A few years back, his mother had placed Elio at Mercy Home for Boys & Girls. Mercy’s history has a Dickensian aura about it, a place where wayward children were sent to be whipped into shape. Mercy was founded 126 years ago by two Irish-American priests as a place to house and guide children who, for one reason or another, were living in the streets without a parent in their life. The two priests housed the boys in a dormitory setting, fed them, and gave them vocational training, sometimes employing corporal punishment to keep them in line. But over the years Mercy has changed considerably. Where it used to be that counselors at Mercy would ask, What the hell is wrong with you? it’s now more, What the hell has happened to you? Each child there is provided with therapeutic care, and their parents are often a part of that treatment. In 2009, Mercy renovated a giant warehouse, turning it into the main housing; it purposefully feels open, with 15-foot-high ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows. It’s like a college dorm, with the one hundred boys sharing double rooms (the forty girls are at another site). Though not a part of the archdiocese, Mercy is headed by a priest and is privately funded through donations from individuals, foundations, and corporations. One of the keys to Mercy is that each child must want to be there.
Marcelo, on his own, approached Mercy and asked if it would take him in. It was, he thought, his only chance. He needed to put some physical distance between himself and his neighborhood, especially if he was to concentrate on school. At Mercy, almost all children are referred by a parent or by a school, so Marcelo was unusual, since he came on his own. Impressed by his moxie, Mercy invited Marcelo to shadow another boy for an evening, and instructed him, as it did all applicants, not to mention gang involvement or affiliation. Nonetheless, Marcelo, who can be headstrong, arrived in a baby-blue jogging sui
t, his gang color. He appeared cocky, at one point slouching in a chair with his feet propped on a coffee table. At another point he boasted to the boy hosting him that he was a Latin King. That, coupled with the fact that he’d just been shot—he was still on crutches—raised red flags. The staff found him personable but brash. At their meeting to consider his application, many asked, What violence is this kid going to bring with him? Most simply didn’t want him. But after some heated discussion, they invited him back for one last shot. Claire Conway, a program manager, told me, “When Marcelo came through the admissions process, I did not want to work with him. I did not believe him when he said he wanted to get out of the gang. I fought him coming for months.” Marcelo apologized. He pleaded. He cajoled. He pleaded some more. Clearly he knew what he needed and what he wanted. She’d never seen a kid so determined to get into Mercy. “I had a moment of clarity,” Claire told me. “Why are you fighting this kid?” Marcelo won over Claire and the others, and Mercy invited him to move in. Marcelo told his mom to tell others in the neighborhood that he had gone to Mexico.
Mercy helped get him back into De La Salle. The staff got him into therapy. They got him to a psychiatrist, who prescribed the Wellbutrin for his persistent and at times debilitating anxiety. His hands shook. He had racing thoughts, especially when he lay down to go to sleep, reliving the shooting in what he calls “reruns.” One time, while he was working in the cafeteria, others found Marcelo staring at the wall as if he were in a trance. A staff person waved her hand in front of his face to get him back. His left leg continued to ache, especially in the winter, but he begrudgingly appreciated carrying around the bullet. He didn’t want to forget. He found his footing. His grades soared. He became a mentor to younger boys at Mercy, and the Mercy staff thought so much of him that they had him address potential donors. “I’ve just never seen a kid work so hard,” his advocate at Mercy, Britney Kummer, told me. “We felt like jerks for not wanting him.” He got a tattoo across his chest: Success is the best revenge. Then he went home one weekend, as he often did, and with his friends went on the robbery spree.
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