His left eye still swollen shut, Vashion Bullock doesn’t deny fighting in the brawl that killed a Fenger student two weeks ago.
He’s watched the fight video and has seen himself in the mob. Together, the mob’s actions are horrific. Individually, they’re students who made the honor roll, played sports and planned for college.
Bullock and other students bused in from Altgeld Gardens housing complex have fought for years with teens who live closer to Fenger and see them as outsiders. The senior said he often races to the bus to avoid confrontation. But that Thursday he’d been suspended for a fight. He’d had enough.
“How many times you want me to walk away?” asked Bullock, whose brother is charged with murder for striking 16-year-old Derrion Albert with a plank. Three others were charged in the fight that involved at least 50 teens. “I’m tired of running.”
The fight sparked outrage and prompted the White House to send the nation’s chief law enforcement official to Chicago this week to call attention to youth violence.
Schools and police once again are being called upon to provide safe passage for students.
Violence in Chicago has already claimed five teens in the last month, three of them public school students. If previous years are any indication, more will die this school year.
Sometimes the violence is race-related such as a brawl last year at Foreman. Sometimes it’s gang-related such as rivalries at Crane on the West Side.
Sometimes, like Fenger, it’s about neighborhoods — the area by the school called the “Ville” and Altgeld Gardens several miles south.
Yet the two sides in the Fenger melee share much in common.
Both live in impoverished neighborhoods. When challenged physically, they feel they have to fight. Neither side said they meant to kill anyone.
“I object to the notion that these kids are somehow disturbed or abnormal,” said Dewey Cornell, director of a youth violence project at the University of Virginia. “Street fights between rival groups are not new to Chicago or any other part of the United States.”
On Sept. 24 Montrell Truitt left school with his brother and headed for the bus stop.
Trouble was already brewing there, so they headed east on 111th Street to Michigan Avenue, to catch another bus to the Gardens. A crowd started to swell behind them.
Truitt, 17, and his brother finally reached the train tracks a half-mile from Fenger on the eastern edge of the Ville. It’s the unofficial safe zone for Gardens kids heading home.
“All I was thinking was, ‘OK, we’re getting close to the tracks, so they’re going to turn around,'” Truitt said.
But the kids didn’t stop following that day. After crossing the tracks, Truitt said he felt the bash of a plank across his back.
He stumbled, then turned and fought.
The rest was captured by a camera held by another Fenger student.
As part of an anti-violence plan, schools chief Ron Huberman has launched Safe Passage, which provides security or buses for students who walk through gang boundaries or dangerous areas.
But the plan hadn’t been implemented when the violence erupted. The district is now providing buses for Altgeld kids to be shuttled to and from Fenger.
Two weeks after the fight, some students seemed to hold a sense of remorse. Bullock, for one, is starting to recognize the gravity of what’s happened.
“I apologize that something bad happened,” he said. “But I might (never) see out of my left eye … or see my brother again.”
But the violence between the two sides is unlikely to stop.
Almost no one thinks it’s over.
