Checking in with the 8th graders at Mitchell Elementary School for a rundown on what’s been happening lately:
The hockey team came in second at the district championship. Rafael Lima found a waterbug in his mashed potatoes in the lunchroom.
“Oh yeah,” says Maria Sanchez, “two of our classmates got shot.”
It’s not that the kids don’t care about Danny Rucci and Sebastian Mendez, the 8th graders who were wounded. They’re two of the most popular boys in the class. And everyone is so relieved that they were “only” hit in the legs. It could have been so much worse.
It’s just-and this sounds like a cliche, but it’s true-the boys and girls in this West Side neighborhood expect violence. And that’s what breaks their teachers’ hearts. Young people should be concerned about their grades, about the Bulls, about pimples-not about staying alive.
“I was amazed,” says Barbara Adkins, a beloved and generous 8th-grade teacher at Mitchell, the public school the Tribune is chronicling this school year.
“I expected them to say, `Oh, Mrs. Adkins. Did you hear about Danny? Did you hear about Sebastian?’ But I’m the one who brought it up.”
“It was like no big issue,” says Adkins. “I expected them to be devastated. But they’re not. That’s very, very scary. They pretty much accept it.”
The boys were shot while they were hanging out with a bunch of their friends near the corner of Race Avenue and Leavitt Street, just a few hundred yards from the old brick schoolhouse.
Police have no motive, no suspects and only a vague description of who did it. At least two men, 20 to 25 years old, in a beige- or copper-colored car, drove past the boys three or four times. Then the driver pulled out a .22 revolver, shot four or five times, hit two kids and sped off.
With a shooting every 39 minutes in Chicago-13,608 of them reported last year-what happened to Danny, 14, and Sebastian, 13, is a tragedy but not a surprise.
It was just before 10 o’clock on the last Saturday night in January. Sebastian’s mother, Maria Diaz, heard the shots from her living room on West Race Avenue, which overlooks the spot where her son went down.
Danny’s mom, Karen, got a phone call at the family’s immaculate bungalow a couple blocks away. “You don’t EVER want a phone call like that,” she says. Her husband, Joe, who is the president of Mitchell’s local school council, raced out of the house so fast that he dropped his cigarette and burned a hole in the kitchen floor.
Rucci says he can’t even remember running to his Ford Bronco, his shoelaces flapping in the slush, or hoisting his bloody 14-year-old son into the car, or driving to Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center and carrying the boy into the emergency room.
“It was only when the doctor said Danny was going to be OK that I started to exhale,” says Rucci, whose father, grandfather and great-grandfather grew up in the community near Mitchell, 2233 W. Ohio St.
Don’t misunderstand. This neighborhood is not a slum. It’s no ghetto. There are no high-rise public housing buildings here. It’s small apartment buildings and well-kept, modest homes. There are some yuppies, but mostly just hard-working people, many of them Italian or Mexican, who grew up here. Everybody knows everybody else’s business. They have a shared history.
It’s a place with a church on one corner, a tavern on another and a grocery on a third.
Rucci’s father owned one of those corner groceries. “He’d leave soda and produce on the street overnight. People would leave their money in an envelope.”
And the gang fighting on the street then-there was plenty of it-was mostly fists. Not guns.
Deanna “DD” Rattner, the Mitchell principal, has been trying to walk the fine line between seeming to glorify gangs by putting too much emphasis on them in classroom discussions and, on the other hand, not doing enough to discourage them. Rattner and the teachers in the higher grades know that the older kids have been toying with gangs.
They could tell from the “WCN” spray-painted on the school and written on the sides of the boys’ math books. Although some parents say that the Wrecking Crew Nation is just a harmless group of 8th graders hanging out together, police say it’s a street gang and it’s dangerous.
Whatever the truth is, early in the school year Rattner called a meeting of those parents whose sons and daughters were in the Wrecking Crew or might be, plus the teachers who know the kids best and a Chicago police officer. About 20 people in all were there in the school library.
“You have good kids. They’re going in the wrong direction,” said one of the adults.
“My son is 13 years old, and I don’t know who he is. I don’t like who he is,” said an anguished mother, who said she was losing control of her boy.
There were no easy answers. There never are. Two parents got so angry they stormed out of the session. Finally, everyone agreed to keep in touch, to keep an eye on one anothers’ children, to exchange phone numbers and to cross their fingers.
“Who wants to go to someone’s house and say, `Your kid’s dead. Your kid’s been hurt.’? ” said one of those at the meeting. Three months later, that’s exactly what happened.
On the first school day after the shooting, school counselor Sue Pour went to both 8th-grade classes and invited anyone who felt like it to come talk about what she referred to as “the incident.”
Only 8 of the 40-plus 8th graders took her up on it.
In the basement lunchroom at Mitchell, the bigger kids toss food and spitballs at one another and talk about gangs, guns and violence. They’re scared about what happened to their friends and realize that it could have been them.
Tony Hernandez, 14, tells two other boys, “You’re my friends. I’m worried about you. I can’t see you in a casket.”
Danny Gardiner, 13, who was with Sebastian Mendez and Danny Rucci when they were shot, says, “I was damned scared. I was crying. I almost got killed. . . . That’s scarier than just hearing about it.” He speaks of flashbacks. “It’s not in my mind. It’s in my eyes.”
“We grew up around here. My whole life I been seeing people get stabbed, shot,” says Orville Parker, 15.
If anyone knows the reason that Danny and Sebastian were the victims of a drive-by shooting, they’re not saying. They and their parents and their friends say it was a case of mistaken identity or being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
With the Disciples and Kings and Jivers and C-Note$ fighting in the area, maybe some gang member mistakenly thought the boys were somebody else.
Maybe, says Sgt. Michael Chasen of the Harrison Area violent crimes unit, the men in the car were just trying to “indicate their supremacy of the neighborhood” by firing at a group of kids on a Saturday night.
“Where are you going to go?” says Danny Rucci’s father, Joe. “It’s all over. It’s not worth it to get up and move.”
Barbara Adkins and so many of the teachers at Mitchell love their children, really love them, and they feel helpless. Adkins says it is “heart-stopping” to think of the dangers they face.
“Our goal,” says teacher Jan Deustch, “is to help these kids lead a fruitful, positive, long life.”
