An American Summer

by Alex Kotlowitz

  One afternoon, while he was sitting on the porch of a friend on another block in the neighborhood, someone walked up and started shooting at him and his two friends. The young woman with him was shot in the face. She survived. Thomas had a bullet enter his back and another graze his side, along his right hip. He called Anita from the porch, even before the ambulance arrived, but she didn’t pick up. When she learned what had happened, she rushed to the hospital and embraced Thomas as he lay in his hospital bed, still wearing a bloodied white T-shirt. Thomas told Anita that the police were convinced that he had shot himself because of the trajectory of the bullet, from back to front, along the hip. That’s stupid, Thomas told Anita. Miss Stewart, I kept trying to tell them, I didn’t shoot myself. Anita bent down and gave him another hug. I’m just glad you’re okay.

  When I was writing this story, I went back through the notes which I had accumulated over the course of four years. I feel sheepish admitting this, but I wasn’t fully paying attention to all that Thomas was telling me. I started to make a list. Shakaki’s cousin, Kywante Shumake, shot two times on Thomas’s block. Thomas’s friend Tim, who held two jobs, invited Thomas to come by to celebrate his birthday; Thomas went to the corner liquor store to buy Tim a bottle of Hennessy, and when he returned found Tim lying beside his house in a pool of blood, a fatal bullet wound in the back of his head. While Thomas was in jail on the contempt charge, Antonio Clark, a friend and fellow Harper High graduate, died, an apparent victim of the accidental discharge of a pistol. His friend who’s a rap artist and goes by the moniker Skully TV was shot six times, including in both eyes; he lost his sight. Thomas’s friend’s older brother, Vido: killed. Thomas’s friend Nukey: shot and killed by a fourteen-year-old boy. Thomas had indeed mentioned each of these incidents to me, but the casualness of his remarks belied what he was telling me. The shootings, the killings, accrue like so many teardrops. Nobody’s keeping count. Not even Thomas. He just tells me he’s tired, that he’s stopped going to funerals.

  “You can’t cry about it,” he tells Anita and me one day over lunch at Ms. Biscuit, a soul-food restaurant a few miles east of Thomas’s home. “I’ve seen people go crazy because of all the violence they seen. People lose their mind. They don’t care ’bout nothing. But I’m stronger than that. I ain’t gonna let it break me down. I don’t let that stuff get to me. I think about it, but I don’t let it get to me.” He pauses. “I be thinking about a lot of crazy stuff, about revenge.” He’s talking more than usual, and neither Anita or I want to interrupt. And then, as an afterthought, almost to convince himself, he assures us, “It’s not gonna happen overnight, but it’s gonna get better.”

  Chapter 16

  This Is What He Remembers

  AUGUST 23…AUGUST 24…AUGUST 25…

  Quinntellbua Benson asked me to arrange the meeting with Calvin Cross’s mother. It troubled him that he had been there when Calvin had been killed. He didn’t know Calvin. He wasn’t even from the neighborhood; he’d been visiting his sister. But he can’t get the evening out of his head. He remembers it so clearly: When he heard the gunshots, he threw himself on the sidewalk, flattened out, low to the ground, not moving. From his time in the military, because of the rhythm of the reports, he could tell it was a semiautomatic weapon. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty rounds. He lost count. With such a large magazine, he thought, it must be an assault rifle. He heard a bullet hit metal. My truck, he figured. All he knew was to stay down, pancaked, as if he and the sidewalk were one. But over his left shoulder, out of the corner of his eye, he could see a boy in shorts and a black T-shirt sprinting across the street toward a church, a squat red-brick building. Safety, Benson thought. But then the realization. Not now. Not at ten at night. He could make out the locked gate pulled across the church’s front door. And so the boy ran north of the church into the thick brush of a vacant lot, out of sight, his pursuers running, too, one with the assault rifle, the other with a semiautomatic pistol, the rounds just coming and coming.

  Benson, a forty-seven-year-old former long-haul truck driver who had returned to school to become a computer specialist, holds things tight, but he did tell me that he thinks of that night a lot. Too much, he said. He wanted to tell Calvin’s mother all that he knew, tell her what he saw, what he heard. He wanted to explain why he didn’t talk to the police. He wanted to make it right. He wanted to get it out of his head. Maybe meeting with the family would be a move in that direction. Could I make it happen? he asked. When I mentioned it to Calvin’s mother, Dana Cross, she immediately said yes, and so we found a Saturday afternoon that worked for everyone.

  * * *

  —

  Benson, as he likes to be called, arrived on time. He has a shaved head and wears a small gold loop earring in his left ear. He’s trim and fit and still has the erect bearing from the time he served in the Army’s 82nd Airborne. He was dressed in jeans and a gray henley which had a food stain he clearly hadn’t noticed. He wore a Chicago Cubs hat, backward. Although Benson can seem aloof, if not distant (though I wonder if it’s simply a general suspicion of strangers), he greeted Dana warmly. “It’s so nice to meet you,” he told her. “Please, just call me Q or Benson.” Dana introduced him to the youngest of her two daughters, Senetra, who’s twenty-four and a manager of a local restaurant. Where Dana is restrained, Senetra is direct, saying what comes to mind. Where Dana dresses in grays and browns, Senetra wears large, floppy, colorful hats. She dresses to be noticed. They made small talk, mostly about the weather. Benson folded his arms across his chest. He wanted to get to why he was there. “I’m sure there are questions you want to ask me,” he told mother and daughter.

  Dana directed him to the kitchen table, on which sat a jar of cookies and an elephant-shaped ceramic bowl for sugar, and asked if he wanted anything to drink. Water would be fine, he said. This ranch home didn’t belong to Dana. She had been hired to care for her pastor’s eighty-nine-year-old father, who has dementia, and so Dana lived here, trying to keep him and the home in order. Before Calvin had been killed, she worked at a day-care center where she’d been for fifteen years. But afterward she found she couldn’t concentrate—the kids got on her already highly taut nerves—and so two months after his death she quit.

  Dana, who’s forty-seven, is sturdily built and missing two front teeth, which I suspect leads many to underestimate her will and her thoughtfulness. She’s been through a lot. When she was sixteen, she became addicted to crack cocaine. Six years later, when she had her second child and started attending church, she quit, on her own. She hasn’t touched cocaine or any drug since. She went on to have three more children: two girls and then Calvin, the youngest. Their father disappeared from their lives, and so Dana raised them herself. To some she seemed restless, but she moved regularly because she worried about her two sons; it was like searching for the perfect wave, searching for the perfect place where she could feel assured that her sons were safe.

  Benson told Dana and her daughter that he had been visiting his sister, to loan her $200. She lived at the northeast corner of Wallace Avenue, where it intersects with 124th Street. The neighborhood, West Pullman, has been beaten down over the years, with the loss of the steel mills and a Sherwin-Williams paint factory, but it’s holding on, knowing that with each foreclosed home, with each overgrown vacant lot, with each street robbery, it teeters like a cat on a ledge fearful of falling. As if to fight back, people take great care of their homes and post signs of hopeful thinking, including one hand-painted in three different colors along a wood fence which reads: US AS PEOPLE NEED TO BELIEVE THAT IF WE STAND TOGETHER THAT SHOOTING CAN AND WILL STOP. On the night when the shooting began, twenty-one different neighbors called 911 to report multiple shots fired. They cared. They wanted the police to protect them. They were doing what neighbors do.

  On the eastern side of this narrow, tree-lined street, along with Benson’s sister’s brick house, is a row of tightly packed single-family
homes, most of them wood-framed, some with small vegetable gardens. Across the street, on the western side, sits the Spiral Temple of Truth church. It looks tired, a tarp covering one corner, where the roof is damaged. The city has a propensity to name streets after famous and not-so-famous Chicagoans, and this street has been given the honorific title Rev. Gladys P. Harrell Street, named after the founder of the church and mother of the current pastor. A chain-link fence runs along the back of the church, separating it from a paved bike path which extends three miles north and three miles south. On the other side of the bike path is an eyesore, precisely what neighbors worry about: four abandoned three-story apartment buildings, the windows covered with sheets of plywood, the courtyards littered with broken beer and cognac bottles. Adjacent to the church, just to the north, is an empty lot, which at the time of Calvin’s death was overgrown with weeds, so high and so thick that it had the feel of a tropical forest.

  Taking a sip of water, Benson began at the end of that evening. It just occurred to him, he told Dana, that he remembered seeing her minutes after the shooting. She lived around the corner, heard the shots, and so drove her purple van to the scene. There, Benson recalled, he saw her get out, dressed in a full-length housedress, clearly panicked. He remembered her asking the police something, and while he couldn’t quite hear her question (“What was he wearing?” she had inquired, wanting to know if the victim was her son), he clearly heard the officer’s response, a bellowing Move! Get this car out of here! Get this damn van out of the street! Move on! Benson remembered the officer had his pistol unholstered and was gripping it in his hand. He told Dana that he remembered she looked scared, and that she got back in the van and quickly turned around and took off. Dana nodded. Whooo. She let out a breath, like she had been holding it in all this time. “That’s just how it happened,” she told him. She thought to herself, He really was there. At this point, before Benson told her everything he had seen, she knew she could trust him.

  Benson sensed that, and visibly relaxed. He removed his Cubs cap, placed it on the table, and leaned back in his chair, his arms still folded across his chest. Dana told him, “I appreciate you coming forward. I want these policemens off the street.”

  “I want them dead,” Benson proclaimed, the words seemingly at odds with his unemotional tone. He can seem restrained at times, like he’s holding on to a lot. Dana saw that. “I don’t know how they live with themselves,” she told him. “They don’t have no heart.” Benson offered an almost imperceptible nod of agreement.

  Benson has his own history with the police. He lost both his parents by the time he was twelve, and he was subsequently shuffled from one older sister to another. His mother had been a preacher, and he regularly attended church with her, but in his teens he became a part of the Black P Stones, a gang on the South Side. He doesn’t like to talk about it—“That’s a part of a chapter that’s closed”—except to say he saw a lot, too much, really, and that some of it involved untoward run-ins with the police.

  “Ask me questions,” he directed Dana. “Anything.” Senetra interrupted and asked if it would be okay if she filmed him with her smartphone. She said she wanted to put this on Facebook for others to see. Benson consented, and so she filmed the exchange, her elbows planted on the table so they formed a makeshift tripod. She framed him so that you can see the jar of cookies in front of him, and on the wall behind him two flyswatters hanging from elaborate hooks resembling sunflowers.

  Senetra asked the first question, really the only question, the one both she and her mother had wanted answered: “I just want to know, what did you see on the night my brother was killed?”

  Benson seemed unfazed by being filmed, took a breath, and continued. “What I saw,” he explained, “I was standing in front of my sister’s house and we was talking through the gate.” At the front of his sister’s home she had erected a seven-foot-high iron gate, which she kept locked. Along the south side of the home she had erected a wood fence made of slats, which had enough space between them that you could make out movement on the sidewalk.

  “I heard your brother and his friend walking down the street, having a nice conversation, just laughing and joking,” Benson told Senetra. “I don’t know what they was talking about, but they was laughing.”

  Dana already knew that on this night, May 31, 2011, her son Calvin, who had just turned nineteen, and his friend Ryan Cornell had left her house to meet some girls at a nearby bus stop. They were planning to walk the girls back to the house. Calvin and Ryan had met in the Job Corps in southern Illinois, and when Calvin returned to Chicago he convinced his mother to let Ryan stay with them, since he came from a fractured family. Calvin was like a big brother to Ryan. When Calvin got a job during tax season, he helped Ryan get one, too. The two were hired to dress up as the Statue of Liberty and hand out flyers for a local tax-filing service. At home, Dana ran a tight ship. She insisted that her children attend church with her, and so Calvin was a member of the choir. The church’s pastor, a Chicago firefighter, was his godfather. Most of Calvin’s friends were from church. The only time Calvin got into trouble with the police—at fifteen, he got picked up for violating curfew—Dana had him sit in the police station for three hours before picking him up. She wanted to teach him a lesson. Calvin was a playful kid, and so Dana wasn’t surprised to hear from Benson that he and Ryan were joking and laughing as they walked to the bus stop that night, just a few blocks away from her home.

  “Next thing I know, I saw a spotlight flash through the fence.” Benson paused before continuing. “I heard a car. And before the car stopped moving, shots rang out, and when they rang out, I took one or two steps back and I dove on the concrete, on the sidewalk.” His sister, he said, ran into her house. “I looked over my left shoulder. I saw Calvin run and I saw two police officers run after him, going across the street, never coming down the sidewalk. And I mean I heard so many shots I wouldn’t move until they stopped shooting.”

  Indeed, on those twenty-one 911 calls, as neighbors spoke to the dispatcher, the shooting continued in the background. There were so many shots that some callers tried to count them for the dispatcher. One woman simply declared, “They’re shooting like crazy.”

  According to the police, the city’s Law Department and the Independent Review Authority, a civilian agency established in 2007 to examine police shootings and alleged police misconduct, here’s how events unfolded that night: Three police officers riding in a marked squad car came upon Calvin and Ryan walking on the sidewalk, just along the wood fence by Benson’s sister’s house. All three officers were a part of the department’s Mobile Strike Force Unit, which was deployed to high-crime areas, and so they were dressed in all-black uniforms. The officer in the backseat, Macario Chavez, had a military-grade assault rifle strapped to his chest. The officers said they saw Calvin fidget with something in his waistband, leading them to believe he may have had either drugs or a gun, and so they pulled to the curb, illuminated the two with a spotlight, and ordered Calvin and Ryan to freeze. One of the officers yelled at them, “Show me your hands.” Ryan, who had been stopped by the police before, remained in place and raised his hands in the air. Calvin ran. Two of the officers told investigators and later recounted in depositions that as Calvin fled, he pulled a revolver from his cargo shorts and from over his shoulder shot at them. In a deposition, one officer testified that Calvin shot “more than three times.” Another recalled that “as I got closer to him, I saw Calvin Cross reach into his front waistband and he began to fire his gun…toward my direction and in my partners’ direction.” One testified to seeing the muzzle flashes. The officers continued shooting as they chased Calvin around the corner and across the street, behind the church, and then into the high brush in the adjacent lot. Altogether the three police officers fired forty-five rounds of ammunition. Officer Chavez fired the full twenty-eight rounds from his rifle, and then shifted to his Beretta pistol when they found Calvin ly
ing in the bushes.

  Benson continued his story. He told Senetra and Dana that once the gunfire subsided, he got up, cautiously, and had his sister unlock her front gate so he could take refuge in her house. A few minutes later he poked his head out the front door to see what had happened to the boy in the brush across the street. He couldn’t make out anything, so he walked to the sidewalk and continued past where he’d been lying down. There, he told them, “I stepped over a pistol.”

  Senetra leaned in with her phone. She couldn’t help herself. She knew what was coming. “When you seen that gun on the ground, you knew that that wasn’t my brother’s.” It was less a question than a statement. “My brother did not have a gun.”

  Benson felt reasonably certain that he knew that, too. The gun on the sidewalk lay in the spot where he had taken cover, where he had lain on the ground. He was perplexed, because Calvin Cross never ran anywhere close to him. He couldn’t understand how the gun got there. “Yes, I knew,” he told Senetra, “because your brother never ran past me. He ran directly across the street, behind the church.” Benson went on to explain that as he stood there, “This white police officer, he didn’t say nothing to me, didn’t say ‘go back into the house’ or ‘get on the sidewalk’—he just went straight to the gun, shined a spotlight on it…And then started asking me questions. Did I see anything? And then he said, ‘You know, there’s people going around here shooting and killing people.’ ” In Benson’s mind, the officer was already trying to justify what had taken place.