I attended an impromptu vigil tonight at an apartment building in Roseland where four children died in an overnight fire.
The four were siblings, living together in a third floor apartment on Chicago’s Far South Side with their mother and her boyfriend. The fire began in a second floor unit and while the adults were able to jump out a window to safety, all four children perished together in a bedroom.
All afternoon, a growing pile of stuffed animals accumulated at the gate of the courtyard building as neighbors and children came to pay their respects. Many signed posters and left mementos but there didn’t appear to be close family members at the scene.
That all changed after six o’clock when a couple hundred people gathered for a memorial vigil. There was a large contingent of extended family members gathered inside the courtyard with a couple of pastors. Many other friends and neighbors packed the sidewalk for prayers and a balloon release.
The mood was raw and tense. Halfway through the vigil Carl Clark, the father of three of the four children, arrived.
He was shaking with grief, barely able to say more than a few sentences before being led away. Simulateously, in the back of the crowd a family member collapsed leading to calls for an ambulance.
In the midst of all this one family member asked everyone to finish the brief memorial and exit to clear room for the medics. The assembed family and friends released their pink and blue balloons skyward, yelling “We love you!” to the children they lost.
These kinds of events are terrible to cover. The human part of you wants to provide all the space in the world for the family to grieve, but the journalist knows that you need to be close to communicate the depth of this tragedy to the public. My approach is hopefully to take as few photos as I can, watching and waiting for things to come together before lifting the camera unnecessarily. As architect Mies van der Rohe would agree: “Less is more.”
