Carita McBride was sitting on her cousin Zenobia Weatherspoon’s front steps Tuesday afternoon when a black truck pulled up and a man jumped out, offering his condolences.
He was scheduled to do some work on Weatherspoon’s mother’s home, he said, and had stopped by after he heard about her daughter’s death, days after Weatherspoon’s body was discovered in a garbage can about a block away.
“I’ll do the work for free,” the man said. “Whatever she needs. I know how it is. Justice will go a long way. We’re going to figure it out.”
Weatherspoon, 38, had been raised in the Back of the Yards area since she was a baby, McBride said. Everyone knew her, she continued. And everyone was at a loss for words at her death and the shocking way her body was found.
Weatherspoon’s official cause of death was still pending as of Tuesday afternoon, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office, and the investigation into her death was still classified as a death investigation. McBride, though, said something awful must have happened to her cousin, leaving the family with many unanswered questions.
Weatherspoon, who owned a dog named Coco and a brown and white rabbit named Mufasa, was often the person who talked McBride out of a confrontational mood, she said. McBride has been asking herself what someone would have wanted with Weatherspoon for her to die the way she did.
“She already got health issues, can’t even really put up a fight … to throw her away like she was nothing, that’s pure evil to me. I just feel like doing something like that, it’s impossible for it not to eat at your conscience.”
Word of Weatherspoon’s death first spread via Facebook, McBride said, adding that “social media found out before the family — it was just really tacky and messy. We’ve still got questions, we don’t know anything.”
According to a police report obtained by the Tribune, a group of people had waved down Deering (9th) District police Saturday night in an alley in the 700 block of West 54th Place, where they’d found the partly decomposed body of a woman wearing a multicolored dress in one of the trash cans. Her mother told the Tribune she had reported her daughter missing the day before her body was found. She described her daughter as a “good-hearted person,” who loved drawing, reading and braiding hair.
McBride, 35, said she’d been looking for Weatherspoon to get help with her hair ahead of her birthday and hadn’t been able to track her down. When she found out that even Weatherspoon’s mother hadn’t heard from her, she started to worry in earnest.
State Sen. Lakesia Collins, who said Weatherspoon used to babysit for her sons, on Monday held a news conference in the alley where her body was found and called for renewed attention to the cases of missing and murdered women around the country and in Chicago.
McBride, speaking Tuesday afternoon, echoed Collins’ call for attention to Weatherspoon’s death: “I want this to get out to the world,” she said. “I want people to shout her name.”
Weatherspoon had recently pulled out of a difficult stretch, McBride said. She had suffered a stroke and some lasting issues with mobility, as well as a period of depression that followed the death of a good friend. For a while, she mostly stayed inside, coming out of her room briefly to greet visitors but otherwise kept to herself.
But that started to change in recent months, her family said. She’d started reading more and spending more time out, though her cousin didn’t know her friends from outside the neighborhood.
“She was back to herself,” McBride said. “She was dressing up. She wasn’t drinking. She was smiling. Everybody was happy for her. So for (something) this tragic to just happen after she gets out of (this) is just devastating for everybody.”
