Sameere Conn joined a football team instead of a gang.
He was known in his Southeast Side neighborhood as a gentle 13-year-old who loved girls, haircuts and keeping the peace, especially when it meant evading peers who wanted him to join a gang.
He had whiled away the summer in a different world, with his father in Wisconsin — boating, fishing and making plans to attend school there — then returned to the South Deering neighborhood, where he lived with his mother and grandmother and dodged bullets with his friends.
Weeks after returning to Chicago this fall, he wound up on the hit list of a boy who was two years older. Sameere laughed off the threat with his friends, who said he was targeted after he refused to join the gang.
“We thought it was a joke,” said Joseph “BJ” Neal, Sameere’s 12-year-old friend.
Days later, on his way home from a football game, Sameere was fatally shot in the stomach while buying his favorite snack at the neighborhood convenience store.
The slaying of a boy just trying to buy hot crunchy curls at the store — a child trying to carve out a normal, happy 8th grader’s life while being on a hit list — seemed an outrage, even for a city with so much cruelty to its youth.
After Sameere’s death Oct. 2, Ronald Safer, a former federal prosecutor, sent the Tribune an open letter to the U.S. attorney’s office, in which he observed: “The gangs aren’t resting. We are asking you to get mad. And to get even. For those of us who cannot, or will not.”
Weeks later, it’s clear the gangs still aren’t resting — not in Sameere’s neighborhood, not in his school and not in his family. His old principal fought last week to keep a lid on tensions in the school, while his mother sent her youngest son away for his safety.
And in the neighborhood, the slaying has chipped away at whatever veneer of security remained for residents. Students rush home from school, and teachers hurry to their cars.
A hit list is no longer laughable.
Prosecutors said that three days before the shooting Sebastian Rodriguez, a 15-year-old boy who had attended Bright Elementary School last year, told Sameere he was on the hit list. Rodriguez, who has been charged as an adult in Sameere’s killing, was supposed to have been confined to his home because of a pending juvenile case in which he allegedly pointed a gun and threatened to shoot a boy.
Until a new group of students enrolled last year, Bright Elementary had been a refuge from the gangs.
“They respected the school enough to never bring it here,” Principal Millicent Clyburn said. Last year, that changed as fights broke out. “We suspected we weren’t dealing with children’s issues any more.”
An officer patrols the school, known as a dividing line between gangs.
The school community remains on edge, including lingering fears about the hit list, Clyburn said.
“The school has seen some retaliation,” she said, noting there was a fight Thursday. “It seems to stem from Sameere’s death.”
Two children were suspended and arrested. One was a friend of Sameere, the principal said.
“Yesterday I left here feeling so defeated,” she said. “I’m spending so much of my time on things that have nothing to do with education.”
On Friday, she was meeting with district officials about taking precautions so nothing else happens. “I’m very worried because I don’t know how it ends,” she said.
The week before Sameere was slain, gang members riddled his public housing complex with bullets. Sameere and a friend heard the shots and ran to their homes.
“Me and Sameere were coming from the park,” BJ recalled. “We were right here, and we got shot at.”
Sameere’s grandmother, Elaine Mayo, 61, asked whether he felt any pressures.
“Somebody bothering you?” she quizzed Sameere.
“No,” she said he told her. She tried to keep track of him while his mom, Dominique Mayo, 34, worked at a beauty shop. She took him bowling and skating in the hope he could hold onto his innocence. He joked with his grandmother, stealing her candy and socks.
He was showing signs of growing up. He wore cologne, loved to be photographed and liked to talk to his girlfriend on the phone. And he told family not to call him “Stink” anymore. He wanted to be “Six-Pack.”
Mayo had spoken to her son about becoming a mechanic when he grew up. Sameere wanted to be a professional athlete.
While in Appleton, Wis., with his father, Sameere expressed interest in playing football and basketball this fall, so William Conn, 37, encouraged him to eat healthy and to not forget his grades.
Conn, who grew up in Englewood, spoke to his son about gangs, drugs and guns. Sameere never mentioned pressures to join a gang.
“If I had known that, I would have never let him come back,” Conn said.
Sameere asked his father to attend his football game Oct. 1. Conn, a train conductor, told him he would make the next one. Sameere said he understood.
“If I had made it to the game, my son would still be with me,” Conn said, shaken.
After the game, Sameere and his friends didn’t take the long way home — the route kids took to avoid gangs. They walked to the grocery, a store riddled with bullet holes.
Sameere stood at the counter, waiting to pay for his snack, when “a boy came in front of the door, shooting by the window,” a witness said.
Accustomed to gunfire, his friends assumed he would be fine. By the time his grandmother arrived, the ambulance was leaving. Sameere waved to her from inside.
At the hospital, his mother learned he had been shot in the hand and side. She expected him to come home. Then she was asked whether she wanted to see the chaplain.
“No,” she said. “I want to see the doctor. I don’t want to see no chaplain … because then, that’s over with.”
The question that still haunts her: Why didn’t he tell her about the gang pressure?
She was preparing last week for the arraignment Tuesday, where she will see the teen accused of killing Sameere for the first time. She was nervous, scared and anxious.
“I’m just thinking about court — that’s all I’m thinking about,” she said.
The teddy bear that had lain near Sameere’s casket now rests on the top bunk he used to sleep on. His 9-year-old brother, brokenhearted and lonely, sleeps on the first.
After the shooting, Derrick taped photos of his brother on a dented chest of drawers, near the black high-top sneakers Sameere had pouted for, the Scooby-Doo stuffed animal he loved and the basketball he scribbled his name on.
Derrick recently got into a fight at school, his mother said. She said the other boy threatened: “That’s why your brother got shot.”
It was enough to make her send him to live with his father in Appleton.
“It scared me so I shipped him,” she said. “I don’t want trouble.”
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ocasillas@tribune.com
nahmed@tribune.com
