"He Wasn't In a Gang"

Tragedy in Humboldt Park:

• A boy celebrating his 15th birthday Monday night was shot and killed in the city's West Humboldt Park neighborhood, officials said today.
  
  Killed was Jovany Diaz, according to the Cook County medical examiner's office. Diaz was a freshman at Amundsen High School, according to his family and school officials.

Then someone gets shot on the same block a day later:

• A man was wounded in the legs when shots rang out in the West Humboldt Park neighborhood this afternoon, officials said.

  The 24-year-old man was taken to Illinois Masonic Medical Center in good condition, said Chicago Police News Affairs [...].

  The shooting happened around 2:30 p.m. on the same block where 15-year-old Jovany Diaz was shot and killed about 10 p.m. Monday while celebrating his 15th birthday.

And one of the witnesses is our old acquaintance Kim Janssen:

• The expected makeshift sidewalk shrine, complete with dozens of candles, empty liquor bottles, hand-written notes of condolence taped to the railings, a graffiti-covered basketball and two photocopied pictures of the dead boy, was well-established when I arrived at the corner of Hirsch and Kildare Tuesday afternoon to interview friends and relatives of Jovany Diaz.

Because empty liquor bottles and graffiti covered walls are always on hand at non-gang associated street corner memorials. Oh, and the guns. No non-gang memorial is complete without at least two guns and shots fired in broad daylight:

• I knew the gun couldn’t be real because the shooting always happens before I get there.

  Even when the crazed teenager standing five yards from me on the corner fired two warning shots into the sky, it didn’t sound loud enough.

  Nobody in the crowd of 25 to 30 mourners seemed to believe he could be so brazen.

  Then the gunman lowered his snub-nosed black revolver, aimed down Kildare and fired two or three shots, and we stopped rationalizing and ran for our lives.

• As we bolted I glanced up at the second floor balcony above Diaz’s shrine and saw a second teenager take a running jump over the iron railing and 15 feet down into the street and towards the shooter.

  Holding a semi-automatic handgun in his left hand and wearing shiny white Nike Air sneakers, the youth lept with the balletic grace of Michael Jordan at his peak. I was still marvelling at it when the original gunman ran past on the other side of the street, and a man opened his front door to me and shouted “Get in!”

And the non-cooperation of neighborhood residents:

• A minute later I’d returned to the scene and found the tattooed victim, sitting in a plastic chair, bleeding from the leg and turning a shade of greyish green.

  A tableau of friends gathered tightly around him and glared at me. I asked him his name and he shook his head, grimly, before police and paramedics arrived and his friends split in a hurry.

  “Nobody’s talking,” I heard a sergeant say into his radio. As I made myself scarce, a passing dreadlocked witness said to himself, “I didn’t see nothing, I didn’t hear nothing, I don’t know nothing.”

As someone once said, "What gang problem?"