Last spring, Angela Bowers got what she said she wanted more than anything-an apartment she could call her own.
On the 13th floor of a dilapidated high-rise in the Henry Horner Homes, the duplex apartment boasted four bedrooms, two baths and a clean refrigerator. It was spacious, with a black cinder-block staircase connecting two floors that faced the Lake Street `L’ below.
Within hours of entering her new home, Bowers abandoned it, heading straight for the West Side shelter where she and her children had eaten meals during the previous weeks.
“She said she was scared to stay there because she didn’t have furniture, no beds, nothing to lay on,” said Delores King, director of West Side Services for Battered Women, who befriended Bowers when she was homeless. “I said, `You get some milk for your kids and take them blankets and coats, and lay down and go to sleep.’ “
Bowers followed King’s simple directions. But four months after trading in the streets for her own household, the apartment was still bare, and new tensions were threatening to tear the family apart, friends and acquaintances said. On a summer night, tragedy intervened.
On July 7, according to police, Bowers beat her 23-month-old daughter, Tiarah, so viciously that Tiarah’s lungs, kidney and liver were bruised or torn. Her skull was fractured. Her body showed other signs of abuse when she became the 31st child under the age of 15 to be killed in the Chicago area this year.
Police and medical reports indicate that at least three children living in the apartment were subjected to physical abuse. Taneva Bowers, 1, had suffered a fractured skull.
Bowers is in Cook County Jail awaiting trial on murder charges. She pleaded not guilty. Despite Bowers’ protests that her young family was stable and cared for, interviews with her acquaintances paint the picture of a woman who, for much of the past year, was without a home and using drugs, while keeping her children at her side.
Like many other homeless mothers, Bowers grew to rely on the porous safety net strung together by social agencies, overnight shelters and the goodwill of the bureaucrats and volunteers who run them. There was no shortage of people willing to provide Bowers with money, food and clothing while she searched for a home. In the end, they couldn’t force upon her advice and opportunities she apparently didn’t want. Delores King even wrote a check for her first month’s rent. But when Bowers finally got the chance to live on her own, she didn’t know how.
“Most times, there’s a cloud that hangs over these young women’s heads,” said Willa Anderson, director of Tabitha House, a shelter where Bowers lived for three months. “It’s pressure-housing, drugs and men. There’s a small percentage that turns around. The larger percentage continues from shelter to shelter. They’re in a rut. A dead-end rut.”
Many people who came into contact with Bowers in the past year say she could have avoided that fate if she had tried. In their view, she was a quiet, street-smart 22-year-old woman who was not openly hostile to her children.
Her own past was not steeped in poverty. Bowers grew up in a sturdy two-story brick house on a well-kept West Side street with both her parents. The family got together regularly for holidays, “even when there was no holiday,” as one neighbor recalled.
One day about 10 years ago, relatives and neighbors said, Bowers accidentally poured paint thinner on a barbecue grill instead of lighter fluid, setting herself on fire. The flames turned her arm into a mass of rumpled skin.
At 17, Bowers, a senior at Flower Vocational High School, became a mother. She had three more children, all of them, except Tiarah, fathered by the same man.
Last summer, Bowers left her parents’ home with her children-Tanjela, 5, Travelle, 3, Tiarah and Taneva.
“Every woman with kids should be on her own, especially when there’s not room where you at,” she said in an interview at Cook County Jail.
Friends, however, recall Bowers saying she was forced out of the house. Her father, James Bowers, a retired postal worker, would only say: “She had four kids. She was an adult. She couldn’t have boyfriends coming over. Privacy was limited.”
After a short stay with relatives in Milwaukee, Bowers returned to Chicago, beginning a dark journey through the West Side. Her first stop was Tabitha House.
“She was one of the rock-bottom type persons when she came in,” said Anderson, executive director of the shelter. “She wasn’t able to manage herself. I’m talking about managing to get up in the morning, to clean your body, clean your surroundings, clean your children.”
She favored cocaine-laced cigarettes known as primos, acquaintances said.
“She used drugs, but it would be hard for you to know it,” said Martha Clay, who also lived in the shelter. “When most parents use drugs, they yell at their kids. When we did what we did, she got her kids organized. She set them down. She told them she’d be back to get them.”
What seemed a well-camouflaged habit to Clay was much more obvious to others. Just when Bowers was wearing out her welcome at Tabitha House, she moved to Rockwell Gardens with a woman she had met at the shelter. But within months, by early 1993, Bowers and her children were back on the streets.
“She’d come early in the morning. She had no place to go,” said King, who runs the West Side Services for Battered Women and storefront shelter at 5642 W. Division St. “She’d have these kids piled up in the stroller. One would be walking. I’d fix her breakfast-bacon and scrambled eggs and juice-and I’d bawl her out-`There’s no need for you to be in this predicament. There’s no need for you not to have food to eat.’ She got public aid. She got paid for those children. Where did the money go?”
“She used drugs, no question,” King said. “She said, `I got to get myself together because I been using a lot of drugs.’ Those were her words. I refer women to drug rehab. I told her, `If you go, your life will be better.’ She said, `Yeah, but I don’t want to go.’ “
While she lacked initiative, none of the shelter administrators saw Bowers physically abuse her kids.
“She did like an old lady,” King recalled. “She kept cookies in her purse. . . . She didn’t seem like she’d hurt a hair on their heads.”
King, still hopeful Bowers could pull her life together, helped her to get an apartment in the Henry Horner Homes.
“I told her to go talk to this lady,” recalled King, who knew someone working in the Department of Human Services. “They told her she needed $98. She asked would I help her. I said, `I’m not giving you money, but I’ll write a check to CHA.’ “
While serving a vital role for the homeless, shelters like those on Division Street are far from comfortable places. On a recent afternoon at the People Reaching Out Center, 5627 W. Division St., where Bowers and her children had slept on thin, worn mattresses, women hovered around a black and white television set while their kids ran about wildly. A boy poured a pint of milk over himself as he tried unsuccessfully to drink it. His mother was resting on the couch.
For Bowers, the shelters, with their raucous activity and constant companionship, had become familiar retreats. When she finally left them for Horner, three women she had met at the shelters moved with Bowers and her children into the apartment.
In Horner, life took on new pressures.
“When she was in the shelter, she was quiet and sweet as pie,” said Wyvonia Leggins, who moved in with Bowers and rented a room from her. “When she got to the projects, hell busted wide open.”
Bowers’ drug use continued, according to Leggins and Daniel Searcy, Bowers’ boyfriend, who also moved into the apartment.
“She’d leave the apartment at 10 at night, leave her kids, and I wouldn’t see her until the next day,” Leggins said.
A doctor at a West Side clinic who saw the Bowers children in the spring, noted no evidence of abuse.
In May, Tiarah had cuts on her skin that appeared to be related to eczema. She also had an abscess on her buttock. Taneva had a broken blood vessel on the left side of her head.
“You can’t doubt every story,” said Dr. Maurina Galvez, of St. Anthony’s Medical Specialists. “(Bowers) gave a story that (Taneva) hit her head.”
“It’s hard to differentiate what is inflicted and what is natural-normal things a child would incur on himself,” Galvez added. “You could suspect every child of being abused here. Sometimes you don’t know who to report. I don’t know anymore.”
At about 2:30 a.m. on July 7, Searcy told police, he awoke to get a drink of water. He saw Tiarah lying at the bottom of the stairs.
“She was mumbling like she was in pain and her eyes were rolling,” Searcy recalled. “She had clothes on, a T-shirt. She vomited on it, some corn. I could smell it. . . . Angie was asking what happened, pushing her, trying to get her up.”
In the scenario pieced together by detectives, Bowers delivered the fatal blows to her daughter earlier that night.
According to police, the beating started when Tiarah cried for a sip of soda. To silence her, Bowers slammed Tiarah into the wall, then dragged her daughter up the stairs by her ankles, her head slamming into the stairs. Bowers shoved Tiarah back down the stairs, descended them herself, and kicked her daughter repeatedly in the abdomen.
Only then, with the baby eerily quiet, did Bowers return to her bedroom, get into bed beside Searcy and go to sleep.
Speaking from jail where she is being held in a psychiatric ward, Bowers brushed aside the difficulties she and her children faced this past year.
“It wasn’t all that hard,” she said, sounding alternately callous and confused. “I don’t want (this article) to say I was wandering around the streets and that the pressure got to be so great, I started going crazy. That’s not how it is.”
Bowers refused to talk about Tiarah.
Turning her head away, and grabbing a hand-rolled cigarette, she quietly said she doesn’t like to look back.
