Poverty, value system erosion spark persistent gang violence
By Rex W. Huppke and David Heinzmann
The new year was about 43 hours old when Joseph Budakovic turned his mother’s Ford Escort north onto Avers Avenue in Logan Square, following a street lined with well-kept two-flats still draped in garland and strands of Christmas lights.
He double-parked outside a friend’s house and waited, seemingly secure on a block just south of bustling Fullerton Avenue, a block that would blend in seamlessly in any working-class Chicago neighborhood.
Shortly after 7 p.m., two bullets shattered the car’s rear driver’s side window, pierced the seat cushion and hit the 23-year-old Budakovic in the lower back. The factory worker’s head slumped on the steering wheel and the assailant vanished into the night.
Budakovic’s murder was, in the coldest of terms, statistically significant--his was the first homicide of 2004 in a city that ended last year with the most murders of any U.S. metropolis.
But beyond statistics, the details of this murder highlight the petty and unpredictable nature of violent crimes in Chicago, the danger of entrenched neighborhood gangs that recklessly pursue vengeance, and the ease with which a person--even innocent--can drift into harm’s way.
Before Budakovic turned onto that street, a pair of Spanish Cobra gang members had been ordered to cross turf borders and shoot a rival gang member in retaliation for earlier violence, police believe.
The block Budakovic was on--the 2200 block of North Avers--is in the heart of Latin Disciples territory. When the two Spanish Cobras approached his car they assumed he was the enemy. Investigators say the men flashed gang signs, Budakovic told them he wasn’t in a gang, and they shot him anyway.
Budakovic didn’t belong to any of the several factions of the Latin Disciples, or the Imperial Gangsters, or the Latin Lovers, or the Latin Kings, or any of the other gangs that vie for turf in the Logan Square and Humboldt Park neighborhoods.
He belonged only to his family.
“He was gentle in nature, he really was,” said his mother, Darlene Budakovic, still struggling to comprehend how her son’s life could be halted so casually.
“He didn’t really even speak loud. He had that grin about him that I’ll remember for the rest of my life.”
Joseph Budakovic died because he crossed the invisible boundaries of a gang territory and parked on a street where violence was waiting to erupt. He died because his killers--like so many others--inhabit a world where the barrier dividing right from wrong was broken down long ago.
City problem
The 598 murders of 2003 aren’t so distant as Chicagoans far removed from the city’s most violent streets and neighborhoods might think, and Budakovic’s death is a painful reminder that this is everyone’s problem.
These homicides exact an immeasurable human toll: young lives lost; families fractured; a new generation of Chicagoans scarred, doomed to grow up in an environment where a life is regarded as shockingly cheap.
Police have long recited the mantra that most murders are the result of a deadly trinity that runs rampant in Chicago: street gangs, guns and drugs. Concerned citizens, from parents and priests to social workers and professors, lay heavy blame on a violent culture that has gone unchecked, nurtured by poverty and a collapsed social structure.
Reformed gang members say the city’s strong sense of neighborhood identification fuels territorial battles and allegiances to gangs. Others even point to the city’s colorful history of gangsters and rampant corruption.
Chicago lagging
The bottom line is homicides in U.S. cities have been falling for a decade after the bloodbaths of the crack cocaine wars in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But Chicago has seen a slower decline in the number of murders compared to other large cities, especially New York.
Police Supt. Philip J. Cline and his command staff are firm in their belief that the answer to turning the corner toward “making Chicago the safest big city in America” lies in superior technology. They want to use intelligence to stop gang-related retaliatory violence before it happens and constantly keep after gangbangers, doing everything possible to disrupt the economic cycle that keeps them going.
“Guns and dope and money all go together in the gang’s arsenal,” Cline said. “The more dope they sell, the more guns they buy so they can sell more dope.”
According to police data, guns were used in 80 percent of last year’s homicides.
New approach
Since June, police have been pursuing several revamped strategies, tracking violence through cutting-edge computer analysis coupled with gang intelligence from investigators and officers on the street. Most of the violence in Chicago stems from one gang fighting another or internal disputes within a gang, so police are trying to keep step with the shootings, sending teams of officers into neighborhoods where violence is brewing.
In the last six months of 2003, the plan appeared to be working. After starting 2003 on pace to exceed the previous year’s homicides, the numbers fell by the end of the year to a 36-year low.
Cline and his commanders have promised to keep canvassing the violent hot spots in 2004.
As of Saturday evening, Chicago had 27 homicides, 12 fewer than last year at this point and fewer than New York and Los Angeles. As of Jan. 26, New York had 42 murders, up 10 from the same date in 2003.
But people who deal with violence in their neighborhoods, along with politicians and academicians, say stepped-up law enforcement alone isn’t enough.
“I’m always intrigued by the notion that the police are going to stop violence,” said U.S. Rep. Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.), a former alderman from the West Side. “It’s the most ludicrous thing I’ve heard. The mere presence of additional law-enforcement personnel can help, but we need people to be mentors, big brothers, Scout leaders. We need to foster the evolution and development of certain moral values.”
Many of the young men who kill or are killed grow up on streets divided by constantly disputed gang boundaries, where the distance between safety and mortal danger can be two lanes of asphalt and a crumbling sidewalk.
It’s an environment, experts say, where social responses have literally been altered, where the logical reaction to some affront--from an insult at a party to a wayward glance at a girl--is to pull a pistol from a waistband and shoot.
The Jan. 4 murder of Alejandro Martinez, 20, is a prime example. A woman at a party Martinez hosted in his basement apartment on the Southwest Side got into an argument with a man. Martinez had nothing to do with the argument, but the woman’s boyfriend thought otherwise. Police say he broke into Martinez’s apartment early the next morning and shot him to death as he slept.
Matter of survival
Artrell Jackson, 32, grew up in the ABLA housing complex on the Near West Side, surrounded by drug dealing and the sort of inexplicable violence that led to Martinez’s death. Jackson survived a violent streak himself, has spent time in prison and has a lengthy criminal record. Now an aspiring comedian, he still lives in the chaotic neighborhood where he grew up and says it continues to spiral out of control.
“It’s survival of the fittest now,” Jackson said, crossing his arms defiantly.
“You can’t trust nobody, because the person watching your back probably has his gun to your head, waiting to take you out.”
What’s worse, according to Jackson and a number of former gang members, is that many have come to view a violent, lethal response as justified. People know the rules of the street, and those rules have become law.
“This is a behavior,” said Gary Slutkin, a University of Illinois at Chicago professor of epidemiology and head of the Chicago Project for Violence Prevention. “It’s nothing more than a behavior. It has now become acceptable to shoot a gun when a person does something wrong.”
Slutkin runs an outreach program, CeaseFire, which employs longtime residents of high-crime neighborhoods, often ex-convicts and former gang members. These outreach workers are on the streets at all hours of the day, trying to convince people there are alternatives to violence, standing between gun-wielding gangsters who are one finger twitch away from killing each other.
Chip Evans was a member of the Four-Corner Hustlers from age 12 to 32. He’s now 37 and works for CeaseFire, and his standing in the West Humboldt Park community helps him get young people to listen.
They’ll listen, he says, but they don’t always hear.
“Nowadays these young brothers, they already feel like they’re not going to live long,” Evans said. “They want to get money now, live life and enjoy it while they can, because they figure they’re going to die. A lot of them feel they ain’t got nobody on their side. I just try to show them some love.”
Large outreach efforts like CeaseFire are bolstered by grass-roots organizations that surface in violence’s wake.
Healing from hurt
Christopher Collazo, 19, was found beaten to death and burned in an alley on the South Side last March. Now, on the 10th of each month, his friends gather in the family’s sparse living room and recite the rosary. A dark wooden box filled with the teenager’s ashes sits on a small table to one side of the room, his picture on top.
Collazo’s mother, Madilen Mercado, has formed a parents group called Christopher’s Club, dedicated to showing people the anguish one act of violence can cause.
“I feel strongly when I talk to people,” she said, preparing for a meeting in the basement of Our Lady of Grace Church in Logan Square where her son was an altar boy. “I hope more parents start reaching out and helping each other. We can do it together.”
For those regularly confronted with death, however, it’s difficult to believe anything will ever change.
Sheila Reid Johnson runs the House of Branch Funeral Home, one of the few vibrant businesses along a decaying strip of Roosevelt Road on the West Side. She sums up the neighborhood by pulling the handle of the funeral home’s front door, which always remains locked: “I’ve been held up twice, so I can’t even keep the door open when people come to see us.”
From June to December of last year, she handled funerals for the victims of 25 homicides, most of them gang-related, young men ranging from age 13 to 20.
During the funeral of one teenage gang member last year, a little girl approached the casket and slipped a piece of paper next to the body. The young man had been teaching the girl how to rap, working with her regularly and encouraging her to write down her rhymes. The paper she placed in the casket contained the words to a song she had written with his help.
“Even if they were dealing drugs, they still had good in there,” Johnson said, putting her hand to her heart.
Dreams dashed
Chicago Police Officer Joe Panos saw plenty of good in three teenage brothers who were gunned down one night in December in the lobby of a high-rise in the ABLA housing complex. He has worked in that area for 10 years, watched the three grow up and witnessed firsthand the environment that never gave them a chance.
“They had dreams,” Panos said. “But they never saw 20.”
Rashawn and Vashawn Austin were twins, 17, and Vincent Austin was 18. Investigators say they were part of the New Breed gang that rules the ABLA complex, but they split off on their own and were dealing drugs in the high-rise lobby Dec. 9. They were apparently shot by other New Breed members who didn’t appreciate the competition, police say.
The family says the brothers weren’t in a gang, and Panos won’t talk about whether they were or not. He just knows what the teenagers were up against.
“I’d tell them to stay straight and they’d tell me, `Officer Joe, if you were living in the conditions we are, you’d be doing the same things we do,’” Panos recalled.
“And they were right. I’m sure I would be. It’s hard to be good when a lot of people around you are being bad.”
During the Austin brothers’ funeral, Panos stood before hundreds of mourners and talked about his relationship with the young men, then tried to put their deaths in some kind of context.
He struggled to find the right words, fighting back tears. Then he reached a simple and frightening conclusion.
“I don’t have any answer for this,” he said, looking out at grieving faces. “Nobody does.”
Panos was back on the beat the next week rolling through one of the most violent parts of the city. The Austin brothers’ death shook him up, but he has regained his focus, helped in part by a new after-hours job.
He now works security two or three nights, guarding the lobby of the high-rise where the brothers were killed.
Tribune staff reporters Manya A. Brachear, Glenn Jeffers and Carlos Sadovi contributed to this report