How Long Will I Cry? (4 page)

Chicago was the first place I ever lived
where I didn’t move around a lot. Really, to be honest, Chicago has
been my first home. When I arrived in Roseland, I saw a community
that was hurting. But I also saw people who were willing to do
something about it, people who weren’t accepting things as they
were, people who were saying, “We’ve had enough.”

So, I don’t know that I felt scared when I
walked out the door to try to help Derrion Albert. I felt like I
was doing what I needed to do. And I did for him what I would have
done for any kid in our neighborhood. And I did for him what I feel
like I would have wanted someone to do for my child if that was my
child out there. So, if there was any fear, the fear was of what
would happen to him, not of what would happen to me.

It was chaotic out there. I mean, it was kids
running in the street; it was just people everywhere. I don’t
remember seeing very much, because my focus was getting him out of
there. I do remember a black SUV coming through the alley at the
time, and I just kind of waved to the driver and said, “Please, get
out. Help me. Help me get him.” He got out of the car. But I have
no idea who he was or where he went after that—never heard anything
else from him.

My focus immediately became Derrion. All I
know is I went over to the crowd and I remember saying, “Get away
from him,” you know, “leave him alone.” And I just wrapped my arms
around his chest and picked him up and carried him into the Agape
Center. He felt as light as a feather at the time. I don’t know if
it was adrenaline; I believe it was the Lord that allowed me to
lift him. I lifted him up off the ground. And someone—I think it
was the man that got out of the black SUV—I think he had his feet,
but I’m not sure. I took him inside.

We laid him on the floor of our receptionist
area. I immediately got on my knee to check to see if he had a
pulse, which he still did at the time. He had a lot of swelling in
his face. There was blood coming from his nostrils, from his mouth.
I could definitely tell that there was head trauma. He looked like
he wasn’t sure about where he was. He looked to me like he felt he
was still outside, still vulnerable, about to get hit again. He
looked very intense.

There was so many people around me at the
time and I’m pretty sure someone said his name, but he also had on
a school name tag. So, I looked at his name tag and immediately
called Fenger High School and told them that I had a student named
Derrion Albert. I said, “He’s badly injured and we need to get in
touch with his family, immediately.”

One of the other staff members at our
facility had already called an ambulance. I reached back down to
check his pulse again. When I called his name, he did what I
thought was him trying to answer me. But he took a deep breath and
nothing. And so I called his name again and he took another deep
breath, but then I called his name again—and after that, no
more.

We waited for the ambulance. It took them a
while to get there, which I was very angry about. And when they
came, they were not prepared. They came in with a stethoscope.
There was no defibrillator. I didn’t see any type of equipment that
would address what looked like a pretty traumatized kid, you know,
in terms of injury. One ambulance guy did say, “We need to call for
backup.” And the other guy said, “No, we’ll just put him up on the
board.” So he came in with the board, and they put him up on the
board and took him out.

Roseland’s always been kind of notorious for
deaths associated with violence, but it has increased within that
last five years or so, after they began to tear down the big
housing projects of Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green.3 The
Roseland area got an influx of families that moved from those
particular projects and, while there were some really beautiful
families that moved to the area and wanted a chance to make it and
do okay, there were some other families that brought on a lot of
conflict to our community. Gang activity increased, territorial
wars began to take place, and we began to start losing a lot of our
kids to gang violence. It’s because of money, to be honest. People
want money from the drug trafficking and with that comes a cost, so
they fight over it.

In the last five years or so, it also became
more evident that our kids were coming from families that were in
distress. There’s a different kind of poor taking place right now.
And what do I mean by that? I’ll give an example. Though my mother
put me at a high risk in terms of her lifestyle, there was still
the expectation that I would do better than she did. My mom would
always say, “Don’t end up like me.” And my grandmother had a
sixth-grade education, but she expected me to not come home with
less than a B on my report card. The expectation was that I would
not back-talk to teachers; the expectation was that I would respect
adults.

But with the new poor, it feels like the
family is in such distress that the expectation to do well in
school, to have respect for adults, has gone down tremendously. Not
even grandparents are stepping up the way they did when I was
growing up. We have a lot of grandparents my age—and I’m only 39—so
for multi-generational households, things have really gone down in
terms of people feeling responsible for the young people in our
community. I’m not against public aid, but in some ways it has
handicapped some of our family dynamics, because it’s taken away
the ownership that poor families once had with their children.
Don’t get me wrong, I support Section 8 home vouchers, for example.
But the way the program is structured, it is taking away the
dignity and the responsibility of those who are receiving it. So
our people have been given and given and given and given to, and
because of that, parents don’t have that sense of responsibility
anymore. And so, the kids are kind of left to their own
devices.

A lot of the time, kids I work with don’t
even want to go home. And this is why they end up doing some of the
things they end up doing out on the streets. It opens up the door
for them to get involved in what we in our community call “traps.”
A trap house is an abandoned building that has been overrun by
gangs in the neighborhood—they do drugs there, they sell drugs
there, a lot of times there’s sex involved there—and they do what
people do on the streets. And so our kids are hanging out at the
trap instead of going straight home.

Then you have a situation where some kids are
actually growing up in the trap. Can I just keep it real with you?
Their situation is that everybody in their family gangbangs. That’s
all they know, that’s all they do, that’s what they’re about. It’s
their lifestyle. It’s what is considered
the norm
in their
home.

I knew that this was a community that was at
risk when I moved here. I knew full-fledge what I was getting into.
I was not going in blind. So while one event in my life, the
killing of this young man, took me aback—yeah, it did—it’s a kind
of event that has long been known to happen in Roseland. Until
Derrion’s death, it just wasn’t publicized.

I knew about the video even before it hit TV
and the Internet. There was some police officers at the Agape
Center right after Derrion was loaded onto the ambulance. They
asked if they could view our video footage. We have a control room
where you can play back all of the video and all that, and they
asked if they could go up. And one of the staff members there said,
“There’s another video. There’s a guy with a video camera.”

It was not a cell phone as the media has
often reported—so let’s just correct that. It was one of those
small video cameras—handheld. She said the guy doing the filming
tried to enter the Agape Center to follow me in when I was bringing
Derrion into the building. She shoved him out of the building and
told him that he could not come in.

I turned to the police officer, and I said,
“YouTube. They’re going to post it on YouTube.”

He said, “What do you mean?”

I said, “Sometimes they do that if there’s a
fight or something like that. They’ll record it and then upload it
to YouTube.”

And then, a few days later, one of the kids
said, “We saw you on TV.” I thought that they were talking about
seeing me on TV from the initial interview that I’d done with the
media about the incident. But they said, “No, we saw you on the
video. It’s on the Internet.”

So that’s when I discovered that Fox News had
the breaking story, you know: Derrion Albert, teen boy beaten on
the South Side, and this, that, whatever—and you see the whole clip
of video. And at the time, I knew it would probably go viral, but I
didn’t know it would go viral like
that
.

The publicity surrounding the case has been
very hard for our community. I’ll give an example. The year that
Derrion was killed, I had a group of seniors from Fenger High
School that I was working with at the time—they’ve since gone on to
college. It was a group of five girls, and they were sending in
their college applications and trying to pull themselves together
from everything that happened, being surrounded by the media. Some
of my girls went to college fairs, and I remember a specific
instance where one of them had given her transcript and her résumé
to a particular school, and they asked her what school she was
from.

And she said, “Aw, I’m from Fenger High
School.”

And the person said, “We’re not accepting
applications from there.”

And I had kids looking for jobs—you know,
trying to make a little change to have something to contribute
towards expenses your senior year. And some employers literally
tore up the applications in their faces because they were from
Fenger High School. Whenever they would go somewhere for a school
activity or for a basketball game or volleyball game, schools would
beef up their security, because Fenger students were coming. Or
schools would say, “Well, can you all come here, because we’re
afraid to come there.” Like all of our kids were animals.

That did something to the hope of our kids.
Their whole thing was, “It’s not all of us. We didn’t do it. I
wasn’t there. Why are they treating us like this?” And so I feel
like our kids and our families have been boxed into this stigma.
They have been portrayed negatively by the media as unpromising, as
a breed of animals, as a menace.

What I would say to those outside looking in
is to expect from our kids what you expect from your kids wherever
you are, and to give our kids an opportunity. I want you to know
that there are future doctors, there are future lawyers, there are
future advocates, there are future actors, there are future
environmentalists, there are future scientists, there are future
mathematicians coming out of Fenger High School and coming out of
Roseland. These are kids that need our support and encouragement.
And the media has taken that opportunity from them.

But we have people just like myself, from
Roseland, who are still pushing our kids. We tell them, “Despite
the odds, despite the disadvantages, you still need to do what
needs to be done, because the world is not going to be accepting
excuses. They’re not going to accept that you grew up in a hard
neighborhood and you had it difficult and you didn’t have the same
education—they’re not going to go buy that story. They’re going to
be looking to you to produce.”

So the airing of the video had its negative
side, but it definitely had its benefits, too. I think a lot of
people who saw what happened, it opened their eyes, not just about
what’s going on in Roseland, but what was going on across the city
with our youth. People who didn’t have any idea that things like
this could happen—who were just kind of removed from these
problems—it was a wake-up call to them, and now they’re just trying
to figure out what it looks like for them to be involved. I mean,
look at yourself. Would you be interested in Roseland, had not
Derrion’s death gone the way it did?

I have never gone back and watched the video.
Every time I saw it in court, I broke down, and probably if I saw
it this moment, I would still break down. But, honestly, I didn’t
really need to see a video. I saw what the video didn’t show.

I’m pretty sure that Derrion was pretty near
death when I was with him. I’m convinced that I am probably the
person that he had his final moments with. I really do believe—and
this is why it’s taken me two years to even openly share what my
experience was that day—I really do believe that God placed me
there for those moments to make sure that, if the Agape Center was
in fact the place where Derrion died, he died with some dignity and
he had some people around him that truly cared. We tried to give
him what his mom or any of his other family members would have
wanted him to have—some comfort.

And that is a very sacred moment when someone
is transitioning from this life to the next. I don’t want to defile
the experience. So I would just ask that, whatever you take from
this interview, you would honor and respect that the dignity of his
family be preserved and that Derrion’s dignity be preserved. Though
he died a very violent death, he had purpose, he had life, and we
need to honor that. So whatever happens with this project, my
expectation would be for it to be used as a vehicle for exposing
young people to the idea that they can make a choice. No matter
what your circumstances are, you don’t have to allow someone else
to write your story. It’s not how you start; it’s how you
finish.

—
Interviewed by Miles
Harvey

Endnotes

3 Spread out along two miles of State Street
from 39th to 54th Streets, Robert Taylor Homes was once the largest
public-housing project in the United States. In the early part of
this century, its high-rise towers were torn down as part of a
community redevelopment scheme, displacing thousands of residents.
The Cabrini-Green public housing project on the Near North Side was
razed around the same time, as was the Stateway Gardens project in
Bronzeville.