With his throat slashed and his shirt covered in blood, the 15-year-old boy cowered in the garbage can where he had been tossed and left for dead.
Occasionally, he could hear sounds — cars passing, people walking by — but he wouldn’t look out or call for help for fear that his attackers would return.
For 90 minutes, he huddled in the garbage can and held a balled-up sweater to his neck to try to stanch the bleeding.
“I was thinking about what was going to happen to me, how was I going to get out and who was going to help me,” he says.
His attackers, police say, were members of the Latin Kings, the gang that ruled his Little Village neighborhood. They grabbed the quiet teen, who weighed barely 100 pounds and stood 5 feet tall, outside his family’s front door on a cold evening in March. They told him this was his initiation, police say. They were going to make him a King.
The boy said no, according to police; he would not join the gang.
In the hours that followed, the three gang members allegedly beat him, stabbed him in the neck and dumped him into the garbage can.
Now it was past midnight. Light snow fell over the city.
There was the sound of a car stopping, and a nearby garage door. The boy mustered the courage to lift the lid of the can and look out. In the alley stood a man.
Help me, the boy pleaded.
The man looked terrified. He got in his car, pulled into the garage and closed the door behind him.
For that long, awful moment, the boy thought that he would die alone, in the garbage can.
Then he heard the sirens. The man from the alley had dialed 911.
“I was scared,” the boy recalls. “I was thinking, ‘I have to be a man. I have to fight. I have to survive.'”
When he arrived from Mexico just seven months before, his mother had warned him: Stay away from the boys who spray-paint walls and doorways with five-pointed crowns.
You have to stay safe, she said.
But how exactly does a boy stay safe in a neighborhood that belongs to the Latin Kings?
For a 10th-grader named Victor — whom the Tribune is not fully naming because his family says it fears for his safety — the answer was far from clear.
Amid the family bodegas and bustling taquerias of Little Village, the Latin Kings seemed to be everywhere. They were in the hallways at school and on the corners as he walked home.
And soon, teachers at Farragut Career Academy worried that Victor was headed down a dangerous path. He was caught with a black-and-gold bandanna. On his Facebook page, he posted a picture of a lion.
Both are symbols of the Latin Kings.
A small kid, new to the neighborhood as well as the country, he could have been easy prey for the gang, despite his family’s best efforts. Was Victor in the Latin Kings, or pretending to be?
He says no.
Police and prosecutors say they believe him.
The attack on Victor drew widespread attention in the community because the circumstances and severity were highly unusual. People who work with gang members in Little Village say they had never heard of a person being so violently attacked because he refused to join the Latin Kings.
Over the past three months, the Tribune conducted dozens of interviews with family members, law enforcement, neighborhood residents and school officials in an effort to understand what happened to Victor and why.
This is the story that Victor tells.
Growing up in a village in Mexico, Victor longed to see his mother.
He was only 3 years old, his family says, when his father was hit by a truck and killed. Two years later, his mother, Maria, left him and his two older brothers with her parents and traveled to Chicago to search for work.
When are you coming home, Victor asked his mother, every time they spoke by phone.
Soon, she said — though she knew that wasn’t true.
In and around the village of 100 cinder-block and wood-frame homes, Victor was free to wander and play. He and his family knew everyone; there was little danger, his family says.
In 2010, about seven years after their mother’s departure, Victor’s oldest brother left for Chicago. By then, Victor knew his mother was never coming back. He told her: I want to come to Chicago too.
Maria had remarried and was living in a Little Village apartment where she hung a copy of the Ten Commandments in the kitchen.
Outside her third-floor window, she could see the gang members on the street corner. She worried that it was a dangerous place to bring a teenager. “I have seen how they have killed other boys,” she says.
But she missed her youngest son. In the summer of 2013, she promised $5,000 to a “coyote” who agreed to bring Victor across the border, the family says.
In Mexico, Victor had just turned 15 when he said goodbye to his grandparents, knowing he would likely never see them again.
He traveled north by car and bus with a family friend. At the border, he went on alone, met the coyote, crossed the Rio Grande in a raft and walked through the desert with 20 people, he says.
The journey to Chicago took 11 days. On an overcast day in August, he was dropped off at a restaurant on the South Side. When his mother pulled up in her truck, he walked quickly toward her.
They had not seen each other for a decade. Victor had become a teenager. But the longing he felt since he was a child remained as strong as ever.
As he embraced his mother, Victor remembers thinking that — at just 37 — she looked old.
In Chicago, Victor marveled at the glittering towers of downtown. He tried to get used to the disorienting experience of living in a third-floor apartment where the windows looked out on the tree tops. As fall turned to winter, he was mesmerized by his first sight of snow.
He spoke almost no English and, according to his family, wasn’t allowed to go anywhere by himself, except to the corner store. His family warned him about the gang. “There is no way you will leave a gang alive,” said his brother. If a Latin King ever approached, his family said, Victor should walk away.
But Victor found it wasn’t so simple.
There were Latin Kings in two of his classes and in the lunchroom at school.
Some, he says, he considered friends.
School officials, meanwhile, grew worried that Victor was being lured into the gang. They saw him on the corner of 24th Street and Christiana Avenue, a corner that belonged to the Latin Kings and where students were forbidden. Victor says he was on the opposite corner and simply waiting for a friend.
In February, a teacher spotted a bandanna in Victor’s school bag and a drawing on a notebook. The bandanna was yellow and black; the colors of the Latin Kings. The drawing was of a five-pointed crown. Victor says a classmate asked him to hide the items. The classmate was his friend, Victor says, and he didn’t want to say no.
“When I got that call from the school, I started to worry,” his mother recalls. She read to him from Proverbs: “Keep company with the wise and you will become wise. If you make friends with stupid people, you will be ruined.”
The school asked Benjamin Estrada, a former gang member who now mentors youths for a local nonprofit, to speak with Victor. They sat down for about 45 minutes. Afterward, Estrada guessed that the boy was just trying to make friends.
“I figured he was starting to hang around with kids in the gang, and was trying to figure out if he wanted to get more involved. I would say he was on the fence,” recalls Estrada, 38. “We have kids in the neighborhood who are like that. They will hang around with (gang members) and might wear the colors and might wear their hat to one side or another. But they are not fully in and have not made a commitment.”
Estrada wasn’t overly worried about Victor. “I didn’t get the sense that he was going to plug in with anyone,” Estrada says.
Victor didn’t mention to Estrada or his mother that, on recent days, he had been walking home from school with a boy named Juan. A slightly built 16-year-old, Juan told Victor that the boys in the gang were the toughest kids in the neighborhood.
During their talks, Victor says, Juan had been asking him to become a Latin King.
It was cold and dark when Victor stepped out his front door about 8:30 p.m. March 15 to buy soda and chips at the corner store. According to a police report, this is what happened next:
Juan was outside. With him was a stocky man in his late 20s who had a tattoo of a crown on his arm. Victor had never seen the man before.
They told Victor to come with them. When Victor refused, they threatened to beat him.
Thus began six harrowing hours, during which the gang members walked Victor to a laundromat, where a third assailant — later identified by prosecutors as Heriberto Ramirez, 20 — joined them. They blindfolded Victor and walked him to a house. There, Juan removed Victor’s blindfold and announced that this was his initiation into the gang.
Juan explained that Victor would start in gang security, and would be given a gun and a street corner to protect. He would be a man. He would swear allegiance to the Latin Kings. They would be his family now.
Victor said no, the report said.
Then, his assailants became angry. Juan assured Victor that the gang was cool and, to be cool, Victor needed to join them.
Again, Victor said no.
The man with the tattoo allegedly kicked Victor in the side and head. The gang members angrily took Victor’s wallet, iPhone and keys, the report said. But they seemed resigned to his resistance, and said they would let him go. They blindfolded him, walked him outside to a nearby alley and then removed the blindfold.
“You’re a Latin King now!” Juan yelled, according to the report. Juan and Ramirez punched Victor and knocked him down. Then the man with the tattoo attacked Victor with a knife.
Victor tried to defend himself, but the more he struggled, the more violent the man became, the report said. The man allegedly stabbed Victor four times in the neck. Then Victor — desperate to save himself — held his breath, let his body go limp and pretended he was dead.
“We did it,” Juan said, according to the report. “This mother…’s done!”
That morning Victor’s mother, Maria, rushed to Mount Sinai Hospital, arriving around 2:30 a.m. Outside an operating room, she found Victor, his neck in a bandage, his face swollen and bruised.
“My God, what did they do to you?” she gasped.
The knife had missed the arteries in Victor’s neck but left him unable to turn his head, chew his food, drink from a cup or even sit up on his own.
From the hospital, Victor gave statements to police that led to the arrests of two people. One was Juan, Victor’s classmate; the Tribune is not printing his full name because he is charged as a juvenile. The other was Ramirez, an alleged Latin King who goes by the name “Young Rocket.” Both now face charges including attempted murder, kidnapping, robbery and battery. Ramirez is also charged with gang intimidation. The man with the tattoo remains at large.
Three days after the attack, Victor was discharged from the hospital with 32 stitches in his neck. Over the following weeks, he slowly recovered his ability to move and eat. Doctors said he would be fine. But his family — worried about his safety — did not send him back to school. “The people who did this to him, they tried to kill him and, thank God, they didn’t. But if they see him on the street, they will finish him,” Maria says.
She wants to move to the suburbs, where she believes it is safer. But she makes only $9 an hour, working as a painter. She says she took a month off from work to care for Victor, and she doesn’t have the $1,800 she estimates it will cost for a deposit and the first month’s rent for a new place. They haven’t even finished paying for the coyote who brought Victor to Chicago.
Now, as the weather has warmed, Victor passes the time indoors — the family does not want his location disclosed — with TV and videos on YouTube.
Maria goes to work every day, trying to scrape together money to move. After work, she prepares dinner.
On most evenings, she says she can look out the window and see, on the corner, about a dozen Latin Kings.
Tribune reporters Rosemary Regina Sobol, Annie Sweeney and Jeremy Gorner contributed.
