Duy Dang was the first in his family to be more American than Vietnamese.
He fled his homeland in 1984 at age 5, his mother clutching his hand and willing their escape. He came to Chicago and learned English quickly. Basketball became his passion. He took a liking to hot dogs and pizza, losing his taste for the rice dishes and fried noodles of his childhood. He embraced hip-hop fashion, baseball caps and baggy shorts and name-brand sneakers.
In the end, he was also killed in a most American fashion.
Duy (pronounced DOO-ee) Dang died on June 3, almost 18 hours after he was ambushed by a rival gang member and shot in the head. It was his 14th birthday.
“We were going to have a barbecue,” Duy’s 25-year-old sister, Thu, said the day after his death. She picked up a pair of black Nike basketball shoes she had bought as a present. “He begged me to give them to him early,” she said in halting English. “He was wearing them when he got shot.”
Thu stood in the dimly lit dining room of the family’s two-bedroom apartment on the Northwest Side, where Duy lived with his parents and three brothers. A dozen friends and relatives congregated around the large table, eyes red, voices quiet.
The family was weary with grief and confusion. They knew no more about Duy’s death than what was in that morning’s newspaper. The language gap had made conversation difficult the day before with doctors at Children’s Memorial Hospital, where Duy had lingered in a coma before being declared dead. And because an autopsy had yet to be performed on Duy’s body, the family at that time was unsure when his traditional Buddhist funeral could begin.
Once again, the Dang family was in the dark about Duy.
“We don’t know the reason why they shoot him,” his sister said.
They also didn’t know about Duy’s affiliation with the Spanish Cobras gang, immigrants themselves or the sons of immigrants who fight for turf in the Albany Park neighborhood. They didn’t know about his mounting problems in school. They didn’t know about a deepening insolence he felt toward adults.
And maybe they didn’t understand the pressures he faced, the desire to fit in, the need to feel a part of something beyond a family still steeped in the ways of the homeland.
Their blindness may have been fed in part by a culture that holds educators in such reverence that parents feel it is not their place to get involved at school.
To the Dang family, Duy was a rambunctious boy, but one who minded his parents and older siblings. He was just a child. Why would anyone want to hurt him?
Like thousands of other Vietnamese in Chicago, the Dangs sought to flee Vietnam as soon as possible after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Duy’s father, Them Dang, had been a soldier in the South Vietnamese Army (a portrait of him in uniform hangs prominently in the living room), and partly because of that, his family suffered under the communist regime.
Work was made hard to find. The children could rise only so far in school before being turned out. “Everything was controlled,” Thu Dang said. There was, simply, no future.
Them Dang escaped in 1981, taking his two older sons and leaving his wife, Cuc Tran, to care for Thu and Duy. Traveling as a group was too expensive and too dangerous.
After three months in a Hong Kong refugee camp, Dang made it to Chicago and was welcomed into the Vietnamese community, which helped him find a job and a place to live. Cuc Tran kept herself and Thu and Duy going by selling produce in their home village near Da Nang.
“All that time, we were hoping to get one chance to escape,” Thu said.
In 1984, the three set out for the United States. But they got separated on the way, and while Thu made it to Hong Kong on her own, Cuc Tran and Duy had to turn back. Later that year the mother and son set off again. This time, they broke through.
With Them Dang already living in Chicago, getting into the United States from Hong Kong was easier for Cuc Tran and her two children. Soon the Dang family was reunited and began making a life in Chicago.
Them continued working at the factory that hired him shortly after he arrived. Thu and Cuc found assembly jobs in other plants. The two older boys, now 20 and 22, grew up nurtured by friends and relatives from Vietnam and later found work as well. And Them and Cuc had another child, a boy named Tan, in 1986.
A year later the family bought a two-flat in the 4600 block of North Central Park Avenue, a solid working-class neighborhood of small apartment buildings and single-family homes.
Duy picked up spoken English, and when he enrolled in Haugan School in the fall of 1988, the promise of the American Dream lay before him.
He quickly made friends with classmates and adults alike at the overcrowded, ethnically-mixed school. Although he was diagnosed with learning disabilities and received extra tutoring (math and reading English gave him trouble), he made a point of alerting teachers to his accomplishments and kept up with his class. He played basketball with the local park team and at school, earning a trophy that still sits on the family’s television beneath their Buddhist icons.
He charmed teachers, and girls, with his smile.
But about 18 months ago, Duy began to change. It wasn’t all at once, like “What’s wrong with Duy?” It was in stages. He’d blow his temper more frequently and passionately-school officials called it “impulse control problems.” His rejection of authority figures intensified. His gang involvement deepened.
Fellow Spanish Cobras said he became more aggressive in displaying his colors. “He was always getting in people’s faces,” one gang member said. “It was Cobras this, Cobras that.”
Many afternoons he gathered with gang mates near Jensen Park. One day he even took a black and white baseball cap and colored the white part green to make it Cobras colors, then perched it on the head of his younger brother.
He turned his back on the activities he had once enjoyed at Jensen Park: the weightlifting, the Ping-Pong, the basketball. He developed an insolent attitude toward park employees who once looked out for him.
One episode over the winter showed the depth of his problems. A Haugan teacher confronted him in the hall and tried to confiscate his baseball cap: Wearing it was against the rules. Duy flew into a profanity-filled rage.
Minutes later he was in the principal’s office, 5 feet and 90 pounds of adolescent fury pacing the length of the room. Principal Terrence Murray tried to break through the anger and frustration that Duy packed like a weapon.
“What are you so mad about today, Duy?” Murray asked.
“I don’t know,” the boy replied-pacing, pacing, pacing.
“What are you so mad about?” Murray tried again.
“I don’t know!”
It took Murray 30 minutes to talk Duy down that winter day. But by the time the boy left, he was under control and the hat was on the principal’s desk.
It was a small victory in the school’s losing battle to keep the youngster from self-destructing. The school counselor had spent hours with the boy but with no lasting effect. He was an exceedingly honest boy, Murray said, but they were never able to learn what was at the root of Duy’s anger. Maybe Duy didn’t even know.
Duy, who was placed in a special class for children with behavioral problems, lost interest in his schoolwork. Haugan officials talked to his parents and even contacted an outreach group in the Vietnamese community, both to no avail.
The family seemed to defer all responsibility to the school. The counselor from the outreach group gave up after getting little cooperation from Duy or his family.
For many Vietnamese who came to this country as refugees, those kinds of problems are not unusual, according to Ha Nguyen, executive director of the Vietnamese Association of Illinois.
Nguyen, who came to the U.S. in 1984, said Vietnamese parents are often baffled by the cultural differences they face in raising their children here.
The teacher is the most honored person in Vietnam, more so than parents, Nguyen said, and many Vietnamese believe the schools have ultimate power over their children.
Nguyen points out, too, that children in families who adhere strictly to the ways of the home country often feel excluded and may be more vulnerable to the sense of family offered by gangs.
For two weeks after his death, Duy’s White Sox cap hung on a small wooden cross erected on the blood-stained sidewalk where he was shot June 2. Surrounding the cross were flowers and cards and rosaries and notes and poems left by the 7th-grader’s friends. Etched on the cross were nicknames and graffiti put there by the 7th-grader’s fellow gang members.
RIP Duy. Little Spooky. Happy Birthday.
The night Duy was shot, he and his best friend, James, were playing basketball. Shortly after 7 o’clock, they headed toward Jensen Park, in the 4600 block of North Lawndale Avenue.
As Duy, James and another boy walked west on Leland Avenue not two blocks from their homes, 16-year-old Jose Ramirez approached from behind, according to police. Duy was a Spanish Cobra, Ramirez an Imperial Gangster, and the two gangs were in the middle of a raging war that had led to several shootings over the last few months, police said.
On top of that, Ramirez and Duy had gotten in a fight a week earlier. Although Duy had told his brother he wanted no part of Ramirez, the older boy sought revenge, he later told police.
A young girl saw Ramirez, saw a gun in his hand and tried to warn the boys.
“Run!” she yelled.
James dashed down an alley as Duy and the other boy raced toward Lawndale. Ramirez began firing at Duy with a 9 mm handgun, six, maybe seven, times, he allegedly told police. Duy turned onto Lawndale before a bullet hit him in the left side of the head.
James and the third boy were unhurt. An 8-year-old girl playing nearby was grazed on the arm by a bullet. Duy lay dying on the sidewalk.
Within a few hours, Ramirez was arrested by Albany Park Police District tactical officers. He was identified in a lineup by witnesses and, according to police and prosecutors, he confessed to shooting Duy.
Ramirez, who was later charged as an adult with first-degree murder, is being held in the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center in lieu of $300,000 bond.
At a probable cause hearing June 3 before Juvenile Court Judge Arthur Rosenblum, Ramirez was accompanied by his mother, who said she came to Chicago from Mexico five years ago. Her son, she said, had been here two years.
Rosenblum was taken aback.
“Two years in Chicago and he’s accused of murder?” Rosenblum asked no one in particular. “He’s become a real American citizen. He’s got the credentials.”
Then Rosenblum turned to the boy’s mother: “Two years here and he’s already in a gang, he’s already been accused of murder? Is that right?”
Mrs. Ramirez managed a weak, befuddled smile and a half-shrug.
“No se,” she said. I don’t know.
The neighborhood that Ramirez and Duy uneasily shared is a jumble-of nationalities, of income groups, and, dangerously so, of gangs.
They are not necessarily dictated by racial lines. The Cobras are mostly Latino but have some Anglo and Asian members. That mixing raises the danger level, according to a tactical officer.
“A Hispanic kid might go after an Oriental kid in the Cobras not only because he’s in another gang but because he thinks he has no right being in a Spanish gang,” the officer said.
Adults who befriended Duy tried to warn him of the pitfalls of gang life, but even the several shooting deaths of young men in his own neighborhood over the last few years didn’t register.
“I sat him down and told him what would happen if he stayed in the gang,” recalled one man who tried to look out for Duy. “I told him he would get killed.”
“He said, `I don’t give a care.’ “
” `Duy,’ I told him, `once you’re dead, that’s it. You’re gone.’ “
” `I don’t give a care,’ he said.”
At Duy’s funeral, his fellow gang members showed little of the bravado that young men in Chicago’s gangs often exhibit when one of their own dies at the hand of a rival. Maybe they were bowed by the richness of the Buddhist funeral ritual.
For two days, almost 12 hours a day, Duy’s family and friends mourned him at Rowland Home for Funerals on the North Side.
Placed on a table in front of the open casket were Duy’s picture, incense sticks, plates of food-fried noodles and rice dishes-and a birthday cake. The food was for Duy’s spirit, which Buddhists believe stays with the family after death before going to heaven. For the next year, the Dangs will set out a plate of food for Duy each time they gather to eat.
On the Sunday after Duy died, a yellow-robed monk prayed over the boy’s body for several hours, accompanied by a half-dozen assistants who chanted prayers and tapped a wood block and sounded a gong. Two days later, amid wails of sorrow and mournful singing, the monk prayed again as Duy’s casket was closed. His body was taken out of the funeral home in a procession led by the monk and Duy’s brother Quy, who carried a tray bearing the boy’s picture and a can of burning incense sticks.
As a light rain fell, they walked out and around the funeral home, the gong sounding every few seconds until they loaded Duy’s body in the hearse.
“It’s such a shame,” said a family friend. “People struggle to make a life, and then someone takes it away.”
Since Duy’s shooting, Albany Park tactical and gang crimes officers have come down hard on gang members in the area, occasionally lining them up and warning them: Any retaliation for Duy’s death and everybody goes to jail, from the leaders on down.
As long as the cops can keep up the attention, gang members acknowledge, the warning will be heeded. But nobody, not the gang members, not the residents, not the police, think the shooting is over.
“The retaliation will happen,” a Cobra said. “You can’t let something like that go.”
