The recovered gun, it turned out, was a Smith & Wesson revolver, so old and clogged with “dirt and grime,” according to a state police examination, that it was inoperable. Nearly a hundred years old, it had been manufactured in 1919. Moreover, all six bullets were still in the chamber. Investigators found no gun residue on Calvin’s hands and no fingerprints on the gun. Given all this, the natural question is, how could Calvin Cross have shot at the police as they contended?
Benson continued, “The officer said something to that effect. I was like, ‘Oh, really.’ And he was sweating. Big balls of sweat coming off of him. He said, ‘What did you see?’ I said, ‘I didn’t see a thing.’ And then he asked for my ID. I gave him my ID. I said I didn’t see nothing. I said that because I didn’t want to give these low-down cops—I knew they were low-down cops—any information. I just held it.”
Benson caught himself. He didn’t want Dana and Senetra to think he had let them down, and so he reminded them of how they connected, of how, in the end, he came forward. “It was God that led me to that McDonald’s that day to y’all family,” he said. Two weeks after the shooting, Benson had stopped at a nearby McDonald’s for a cup of coffee, and while he was there he heard a gaggle of kids, all of whom looked to be in their late teens, talking and crying. He could make out bits of their conversation, and it became clear that they were talking about the shooting he had witnessed and that some of them were related to the victim, whose name he didn’t know at the time. Benson approached them and introduced himself, told them he was there at the shooting, and said that if the family needed him or wanted to get in touch with him, to give him a call. He wrote down his phone number on a napkin and handed it to one of the boys, who, it turned out, was Calvin’s cousin LaVell. The family passed along Benson’s phone number to Tony Thedford, the lawyer they had hired (and who coincidentally also represented Antuan Joiner). They planned to file a civil suit against the police.
Senetra leaned forward. “Thank you so much,” she told Benson.
Benson nodded, still leaning back in his chair. “No problem.”
At this point Senetra stopped filming, and the three sat around for another half hour, relieved, more relaxed. Dana had remained quiet during much of this. She revealed little, though it was clear she was taking it all in. It was almost as if she was angry with Benson, just for being there, just for being privy to the death of her son. Something occurred to Benson. He turned to Dana and said, “Another thing, I still don’t know how your son look.” Senetra went into the living room and returned with a framed photo of Calvin. He’s smiling, in a button-down plaid shirt and a Yankees baseball cap. Benson held the photo. “You have a very handsome family,” he told Dana. “Thanks,” she replied. “It’s been hard. After we get over one stumble, we hit another.”
This is how it often happens in Chicago. One act of violence follows another which follows another and so on. Sometimes there’s a causal relationship between them, and sometimes they just happen, almost like an infection being passed along from friend to friend or family member to family member. For Dana, it didn’t matter why it happened. It just happened. And each time it took a little more out of her.
First there was Virgil, who was Calvin’s cousin but was really more like a big brother to him. They grew up together; Virgil lived with Dana and her family for a number of years. He was three years older than Calvin, and like brothers they fought. Once when they were young they got into an argument. Calvin burned Virgil’s thigh with a hot iron, leaving a scar. “I’m kind of glad it’s down there now,” Virgil told me at one point. “Something to remember him by.” Virgil seemed more unmoored by Calvin’s death than just about anyone. He’d periodically visit Calvin’s gravesite and sit there and just talk to him. I once accompanied him, and Virgil stood at the gravesite, which was unmarked. “What’s up, bro? Just stopped by to tell you I love you. You know me and LaVell took the fire department test and we all passed. If you were here, you would’ve been right with us.” Virgil, who worked for a private security company, had aspired to become a police officer, but that changed after Calvin’s death, for obvious reasons. He took the firefighter’s test instead—his dad had been a firefighter for twenty-three years—but Dana mused that that seemed an unlikely job for him, since he was afraid of heights. The summer after Calvin was killed, Virgil worked security at a housing complex in Richton Park, a southern suburb. At 11:30 p.m. on August 12, 2012 (“I’ll never forget that date and time,” he told me), Virgil was on patrol with an off-duty deputy sheriff who was moonlighting when they saw a young man shoot a gun from inside a car. They approached him, their weapons drawn, and ordered the shooter to drop his weapon. The shooter replied, ‘No, y’all drop y’alls.’ He shot at Virgil and his partner. They shot back. Virgil was so disoriented that he didn’t know how many rounds he’d fired until he checked his magazine afterward. He’d shot three times; his partner shot twice. The young man was killed instantly. When Virgil found out that the victim, the person he’d shot, was the same age as Calvin, he couldn’t forgive himself, he couldn’t go on. He quit his security work. He had flashbacks. He couldn’t get rid of the smell of burning flesh, of the fresh wound made by his bullet. “He didn’t see that young man laying on the ground,” Dana told me. “All he could think about was Calvin.”
Then there was Ryan Cornell, who was with Calvin the night he was killed. Ryan, who was a tall, narrow kid, had a troubled childhood. By his own account, he’d been kicked out of two high schools, both times for fighting, and so his mom, who was worried about his idleness, insisted he join the Job Corps, which had a location in Golconda, Illinois, at the very southern tip of the state, a six-hour drive from Chicago. He and Calvin ended up in the same dorm. One day Ryan needed to borrow $60, since he was making his biweekly run to Walmart. He needed odds and ends, mostly toiletries, and no one would loan him the money except for Calvin, who barely knew him. Ryan paid him back, and they soon became close friends. Both attended the brick masonry program together. Calvin completed the program, but again, Ryan got kicked out because of fighting. Both Ryan’s father and his brother were in prison, and when the two returned to Chicago, Calvin invited Ryan to move in with his family. He slept in the basement with Calvin. He got so close to Dana that he came to call her “mother.” Ryan became so much a part of the family that he was given a key to the house.
Ryan remembers the night well. He’d been hanging out at his cousin’s nearby, and when he returned to the house, Calvin was asleep on his mother’s bed, the first game of the NBA Finals on television, the Mavericks versus the Heat. Ryan woke Calvin, who had lost interest in the game because the Mavericks were losing; the two retreated to the kitchen and heated up chicken noodle soup. Calvin convinced Ryan to join him as he went to meet some girls a few blocks away, and as they walked, Calvin showed off his new G Shock watch and seemed pleased with himself that he had figured out how to turn on the watch’s green light. Then the squad car pulled up. Ryan remembers the headlights were off and that the police shined a spotlight on them. The officers jumped out of the car, one of them with an assault rifle strapped to his chest. “Freeze,” they yelled, and Ryan did just that. He stopped moving. But Calvin ran. Ryan doesn’t know why. No, he insists, Calvin did not have a gun on him. That wasn’t Calvin. The last thing Ryan remembers before he ran to get Dana was the officer with the assault rifle held to his shoulder, using the sights to zero in on his target.
After Calvin’s death, Ryan says, “I just didn’t care anymore. I didn’t care about living.” When he tells me that, it’s as if there’s nothing else to say. I ask whether he ever thought about hurting himself. He shakes his head vigorously but then tells me he thought about hurting others. He got into fights. He smoked a lot of weed, popped Ecstasy, anything to take him away from the images in his head. Some rivals in the neighborhood taunted him, claimed that earlier that evening it was they who had shot at the police and that the police shot at
Calvin thinking it was them. He started stealing cars, robbing people on the street. Dana asked him to leave the house. He got tattoos on both fists. On the left it reads: RIP May 26, 1992. On the right: Jack May 31, 2011. (Jack was Calvin’s nickname.) Ryan served a year in prison after leading the police on a high-speed chase in a stolen car. When he got out, he moved in with an uncle in Burlington, Iowa, thinking that if only he could put some distance between him and Chicago, maybe it would muffle the memories. Maybe he could stop thinking about revenge. Maybe some of the anger would dissipate. But in Burlington, a down-and-out town along the Mississippi, he continued to get into trouble, and got arrested again for trying to rob a drug dealer. “My mind wasn’t right,” he told me. “I just felt like my temperature was going up.”
I visited Ryan in prison, and it was there, in the brightly lit visiting room, that he recounted all of this for me. He’s bulked up from lifting weights. We sat across from each other in plastic chairs, and Ryan leaned back in his, speaking in a soft, quiet voice. Sometimes he’d turn to the side when he was talking. He’d invited me to visit him, but I felt like once he had his curiosity sated, he wanted to go back to his cell. He seemed almost embarrassed by his pain. Often I had to ask him to repeat things. He told me that every May 26 he celebrates Calvin’s birthday and makes a special drink, a mixture of coffee, Kool-Aid, and pop, so loaded with caffeine and sugar it gives you a rush. To accompany the cocktail he’ll make tacos on his hot plate, stacking summer sausage, cheese, packaged chili, and barbecue sauce on a tortilla. I stopped asking about that night right after he muttered, “I hate talking about this stuff.” He paused. “I just wish I stayed at my cousin’s or that the Mavericks were winning. We woulda stayed [inside].” For a moment he imagined what might have been. “When he died,” he told me, “I didn’t have anyone to motivate me.”
Two years later, after Benson’s visit, Calvin’s cousin LaVell Southern, whose father was Dana’s pastor and who was the one Benson met at the McDonald’s, was at a nightclub near downtown Chicago with Senetra and some friends. Outside, an argument erupted. One of the young men pulled a gun. As Senetra tells it, as LaVell tried to get people to calm down, someone emerged from the crowd and started shooting. LaVell was shot in the back of the head, and was pronounced dead at Stroger Hospital.
And then there was a close friend of Calvin’s, a pallbearer at his funeral. Dana didn’t want to give his name. She said he was torn up about Calvin’s death and then devastated by the murder of LaVell, whom he was also close to. One weekend afternoon, according to Dana, this young man told his grandmother he was headed to the garage to unwind, and about fifteen minutes later the grandmother smelled smoke. She rushed to the garage and tried to open the door, but it was jammed shut. She called the fire department, and once they had squelched the flames, they found the young man hanging from the rafters by his belt. When Dana told me this story, I thought that of all the stories I’ve heard over the years, stories of wending one’s way through the aftermath, on some level this made the most sense. It felt understandable. You lose two best friends within the span of a couple of years, and you give up, you sink into your grief, you think you’re next.
* * *
—
On the day of Benson’s visit, Dana’s thoughts wandered. She seemed to speak in non sequiturs, but if you listened closely enough, there were connections. “I’m not moving yet,” she declared. “I got too much to do.” In other words, she wasn’t going to stumble like the others.
Standing by the door, Benson assured her, “Any help you need, I’m right here.”
Dana leaned into Benson and to me, and again she was moving somewhere else in her mind. “At first—I’ve never said this.” She spoke so low we needed to move closer. “I never seen Calvin with a gun. But I wondered. You never know what your child’s doing around others. I thought to myself, he must’ve shot at them the way they shot at him. I needed to give myself an excuse for the pain. But the next day, when I talked to the coroner on the phone for half an hour, he was so sympathetic. He was almost crying. He told me which bullets hit first. He said he first got shot in the back.” But, she continued, that wasn’t the shot that killed him.
The two officers who chased Calvin into the vacant lot, into the thick brush, told investigators that Calvin, who had been wounded at this point, lay in the high weeds on his stomach and refused their orders to show his hands. One of the officers said it appeared as if he was trying to hide from them. At close range, they fired again—with their handguns. The bullet that most likely killed Calvin entered at the bridge of his nose. The bullet exploded as it entered his skull, and fragmented rather than passing through. He died on the scene. The coroner determined he had been shot a total of five times.
“When we saw him at the coroner’s, it was like he was saying no,” Senetra told Benson. “The way his mouth looked, the way it was shaped.” Senetra and her mom argued. Dana insisted that the fatal bullet had entered under one of his eyes. Senetra said no, it was above. They realized, almost simultaneously, what did it matter? “They meant to kill him,” Dana declared, putting an end to their disagreement.
As they were saying goodbye, Dana told Benson, “Continue to pray for me. I don’t wish this on nobody.” Each of them—Dana, Senetra, and Benson—seemed unsure, hesitant, almost as if there was more, or they hoped there was more, to say. In what felt like an afterthought, Benson blurted out something he had forgotten to mention. “They were dressed in black op uniforms,” he said. It’s not revelatory, nothing Senetra and Dana didn’t already know. But it was clear that Benson wanted to make sure he told them everything he could remember. “If we ever go to trial,” Dana told Benson, “you can come and sit there with us.” Benson hugged Dana, then Senetra, and then he was gone.
After Benson left, Senetra put the video on Facebook with this explanation: “I don’t know him. All I know is it took courage for him to speak in the defense of my brother Calvin Cross—‘Jack’…This is the first time my mother and I met with Mr. Benson. For those of you who don’t know, my brother was killed by Chicago Police officers…but nothing can bring my brother back. Where are the officers? What are they doing? Are they looking for their next victim? My nephew doesn’t have a father. I’m sharing this touching video with you hoping justice will be reached sooner than later. Rest up Jack. We love you and haven’t and will not forget.”
Many months later I met Benson for coffee at a Starbucks on the South Side. He told me that he’d been jittery and nervous when he’d gone to meet with Dana and Senetra. “I just wanted to tell her what I saw,” he told me. “I wish I could do more.” He told me he’s never been contacted by detectives or by investigators for the Independent Police Review Authority. “I think about that night all the time,” he told me. He paused. “I try not to.”
Two years later, Dana told me she was ready to visit her son’s gravesite. She hadn’t been there since she’d buried him. Virgil, who’d been there often and knew how to find Calvin’s plot, joined us. It was unmarked, in part because Dana had been unable to afford a headstone. But she also worried that when they did lay a headstone, it would feel permanent, and she wasn’t ready for that. “I needed to think he was gone for only a while,” she told me. “That he’d be back.” It was a warm, windy day, and Virgil knew from previous visits that Calvin’s gravesite lay atop a small hill next to the grave of a gentleman named Melvin Jackson, and so it was reasonably easy to find. Virgil, with a bottle of orange juice in one hand, spoke to Calvin, as he often did, while Dana stood by in silence, the long, windblown grass dancing at her feet. It had been a hard few years. The night Calvin was killed, just hours afterward, she noticed about a dozen packets of crack cocaine in a decorative vase that sat in her living room. She knew right away that they belonged to her half-brother, who had come by to comfort her and who dealt drugs and who must have panicked with all the police around. She was tempted. She threw the bags in the gar
bage but couldn’t stop thinking about smoking just a little, just enough to calm her. Then she thought, I’m not going back there, and took the bags from the garbage and emptied them into the toilet. She took medicine to help her sleep. She started smoking cigarettes again. She developed boils from the stress; they became so infected she needed to take antibiotics through an IV. “It made me mad when people said, ‘I know what you’re going through,’ ” she asserted. “No, you don’t.”
Dana has kept fighting. The Independent Police Review ruled that “the use of deadly force by Officers Mohammed Ali, Macario Chavez and Matilde Ocampo was in compliance with Chicago Police Department policy.” The officers were not disciplined. They were awarded certificates of valor. When Calvin was killed, his girlfriend was pregnant with their child, and so Dana sued the city and the police on behalf of her grandson. After taking depositions from the officers and learning the status of the gun found on the sidewalk—that it was inoperable, with all six bullets in the chamber—the city’s lawyers settled and agreed to place $2 million in a trust fund for Calvin’s son. In the ten years preceding Calvin’s case, the city had paid a total of $521 million to families of victims of alleged police misconduct, often the only acknowledgment that an officer might have acted unprofessionally. The city’s lawyers were troubled by what they learned about Calvin’s death, so they turned the case over to the state’s attorney’s office. No charges were ever filed. “They paid us off,” Dana Cross told me at one point. She was reluctant to settle, but in the end agreed to because the money would go to her grandson. “It feels like blood money,” she told me. “I just want those police officers off the street. If they did it to my baby, they’ll do it again.” At Dana’s insistence, the case has since been reopened.
An American Summer Page 24
