The day–Feb. 6, 2003-began simply enough. Sherrie Phillips telephoned home from work at 6 a.m., as she did every school day, to give her daughter, Ashley, a wake-up call.
“At 7:30, go and wake up your brother so he can go to work,” she told Ashley, who was then 15. Phillips hung up the phone and continued her duties at the Northtown Post Office.
A little after 8 a.m., her pager went off. It was Ashley. Phillips dialed her home number. This time, Ashley sounded upset. She was crying.
” ‘Mama, I heard gunshots and Dad’s leaning over the fence,’ ” Phillips remembers her daughter saying.
“Tell Dad to come to the phone.”
” ‘No, I’m scared.’ “
“Ashley, I don’t have time for this.”
” ‘OK, but I’m afraid.’ “
Ashley put the phone down and went out to the back porch to get her father. A minute later, she picked up the phone more hysterical than before, “You got to come home,” she wept.
An instant later, a police officer was on the phone. Without telling her what was wrong, he too told her she needed to come home.
As Phillips approached her house on the 8000 block of South Michigan Avenue in the Chatham neighborhood, she saw a restraining line of yellow police tape and at once knew that her husband of nearly 20 years, Roosevelt Phillips Jr., 52, was dead.
From the sidewalk she could see his body slumped over the banister of the back porch. Police officers were snapping pictures.
Phillips screamed. She tried to fight her way to the back of the house, but was held back.
“Please, just let me go over and hold his hand,” she said, trying to reason with the officers. “Let me say goodbye to him.” But they continued to resist.
Quickly, her concerns turned to her children. Ashley was OK, but what about Immanuel, she wondered.
Phillips called the workplace of her 18-year-old son, a recent graduate of Lincoln’s Challenge, a program run by the Illinois National Guard that helps high school dropouts earn their GED. She was told, to her shock, that he had been on vacation all week.
“Did Immanuel get up?” Phillips asked of Ashley. “Did he ask for a ride?”
“Yes, he got up,” she replied. “He told me to tell Dad that this would be the last time that he would ever have to take him to work.”
Phillips would soon learn that police believed Immanuel, who was planning to attend Tennessee State University in the fall, was responsible for her husband’s death that Thursday morning, and for the murders of four next-door neighbors a month earlier.
Their conclusion was based on a note found near the elder Phillips’ body in which the son implicated himself in all five deaths, apologized, and talked about jumping in front of a Metra train.
The fact that he could be armed with an Uzi submachine gun stolen from the site of the quadruple homicide led police to begin a citywide manhunt for the young man that would last through much of the weekend.
“He doesn’t care whether he lives or dies,” declared Philip Cline, then chief of detectives and now the city’s police superintendent. “I can’t think of a more dangerous man than this on the streets of Chicago.”
With dozens of officers searching for him, and the media interrupting regular programming with frequent bulletins, Immanuel turned up that Friday night in a North Side apartment building and killed an 18-year-old woman who he believed had given police information about him in an unrelated firearms case.
Then on Sunday, he was finally cornered at a motel on South Cottage Grove Avenue, ending a seven-hour standoff with police by fatally shooting himself in the head with a 9 mm handgun.
And for Sherrie Phillips, just as surely as her husband and only son were dead, so were any notions that her life could ever be the same.
For months she couldn’t come home without being assaulted by the memory of her husband’s lifeless body on the back porch.
She couldn’t sleep knowing the house next door was empty because her teenage son helped kill the neighbors: Prescott Perry, 48, her husband’s best friend; Sarah Perry, 18, whom Immanuel grew up with; Sarah’s boyfriend, Ronald Ryals Jr., 21; and their 2-year-old son, Ronald Ryals.
Immanuel’s alleged accomplice in those murders was his childhood friend, Jason Johnson, whom police arrested in February 2003. Johnson, 20, is currently in jail awaiting trial on charges of murder, home invasion, armed robbery and residential burglary.
Phillips never returned to the U.S. Postal Service, where she and her husband had worked for more than 20 years. Too distraught to work, she went on disability.
All she could do was think about what had gone wrong. What would make a son shoot his own father, all those people and himself? Maybe it was her husband’s fault for not letting Immanuel do things that normal teenagers do, Phillips thought-like going to the skating rink or learning how to drive. Or maybe the gangs were to blame for intimidating Immanuel and stripping him of his self-esteem. Or was there something wrong with Immanuel that drove him to this?
She had no answers. But what hurt most was that she had seen signs that her son needed help and felt she hadn’t done enough for him. The feeling of guilt remains.
“I think as time has moved on, in some ways our lives–my daughters’ and mine–have gotten easier,” says Phillips, 47, almost 18 months after the tragedies. “But on the other hand, there is a lot of pain still there because you think about what you could have done, what you should have done.”
To prevent any more “could haves” or “should haves,” Phillips decided last fall to be more active in working directly with children: She became a 2nd-grade teacher in the South Side elementary school, John T. Pirie Fine Arts & Academic Center.
“My desire right now is to help other people, to help parents and help them with their children. Because I don’t ever want what happened to my son to happen to any kid–not ever in this life,” Phillips says.
“She has been driven to make a difference in the world and that’s what she’s doing,” says Phillip Jackson, executive director of the Black Star Project, a Chicago-based student motivational group for whom Phillips volunteers, lecturing and mentoring youths and young mothers.
“One of those tragedies would have broken a lesser woman. It took an incredible woman to suffer that, to weather that, and then to come back from it better and stronger and more positive than before,” Jackson says.
That quiet strength has helped ease the adjustment for daughter Ashley as well. “Every time I pray, I pray for my mama and I thank God for her, for how strong she is,” says Ashley, now 17.
In the days after the tragedy, Sherrie Phillips was left feeling the way she often did after trying to talk to Immanuel–confused.
“He would always say to me, ‘Mom, you don’t understand.’ I would say, ‘What is it that I don’t understand? Help me to understand.’ But he never got to the point that he really shared with me. He’d say, ‘Mom, you don’t understand. You never will.’ “
Immanuel felt he lived in a different world than she, Phillips says.
“Many parents are living in different worlds than their children, especially parents that are dealing with African-American boys,” she says. “You’re finding more young people going to jail, dying, being in gangs, selling drugs. It is truly a crisis in the African-American community and it’s just unfortunate that we as a community are not jumping up and down about it.”
Immanuel grew up in Chatham, a middle-class neighborhood where successful African-Americans move when they want a nice community atmosphere but don’t relish the suburbs. Though the lawns are well manicured, the neighbors friendly and the blocks fairly quiet, Chatham isn’t completely immune to elements of ‘hood life.
Just outside the community’s boundaries, members of the Gangster Disciples and the Black Disciples loiter on street corners day and night. Immanuel had to pass them on his way to and from school. With his chubby face, academic ability and protective father, Immanuel often found himself the target of their ridicule.
“We didn’t know till later that he got picked on a lot,” Phillips says.
A yearbook from Immanuel’s first year of high school helps shed light on his troubles. “Why don’t u laugh sometimes?” wrote one student in the book. Wrote another: “You pretty much need to let people luv + like you for you. Try hard 4 yourself, not for no one else,”
But Immanuel didn’t stop trying to fit in. The only way he thought the gangs would quit harassing him was if he joined them, Phillips says. So that’s what he did. And that’s when he changed.
Perceiving Immanuel as weak, his new gang cronies forced him to commit crimes, including the theft of money from his own parents. His family responded with tactics to help him escape the gangs, sending him to different schools, including one on the North Side. But leaving the gang after a year only incited the gang to beat Immanuel severely and later paint a death threat on the side of his home. Immanuel begged his parents not to ask police to help–he figured it would make things worse–then had a destructive outburst at home so violent he was admitted to a hospital. But doctors soon released him, concluding he had no serious mental disorder.
Police believe Immanuel may have acquired the Uzi to protect himself from the gangs. He had a premonition of early death, his mother says.
“He would always say, ‘Ma, I’m not gonna live. I probably won’t live to see 18,’ ” Phillips says. “Oh Immanuel, don’t be silly,” she’d respond, thinking nothing of it.
After she buried Roosevelt and Immanuel together, there were many Thursdays and Sundays when Phillips practically drowned herself in tears thinking about the horrible deaths they suffered.
“There are times that she needs to close her door and lay on her bed and cry,” says Latrice Eggleston, 31, Phillips’ oldest child from a previous marriage. But, says Eggleston, she is always able to pull herself together by remembering her responsibility to Ashley. “A lot of her strength comes from her desire not to let this tragedy stifle my baby sister.”
Immanuel appealed for Ashley’s welfare in his suicide-confession letter: “Mommy, please, if you don’t do anything else, listen to Ashley. Don’t let her become like me.”
His words also motivated Phillips to pursue her dream of becoming a teacher so she could help other children.
She was initially accepted into the Golden Apple Teacher Education program in 2002 but hadn’t followed through with it after failing the basic skills exam. A few months after her husband and son’s deaths, Phillips found the drive she needed to get re-involved with the program.
“I was excited about this venture. I was even more excited about it after dealing with the tragedy of my son because I felt that God was giving me a second opportunity,” Phillips says.
Through Golden Apple, Phillips is seeking a master’s degree in education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She expects to graduate in December.
At the same time, she’s making sure her students at Pirie do the best they can. “They’re the other force in my life that helps me to keep going,” Phillips says. Because of her experience with Immanuel, she says, she’s more sensitive to the needs of her students.
“If I can help anybody’s son, if I can build up anybody’s son’s self-esteem,” Phillips says, “I will feel I’ve done justice for my son.”
