Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (33 page)

T
HE WEIGHT OF
S
OUTH
Chicago’s troubles seems to have settled on Tyshon Anderson’s eyelids. In most pictures his eyes appear as two narrow slits struggling to make their presence felt as the lids head south in
search of slumber. His Facebook pictures show an oval face with a weak chin and a high brow that owes its definition to the dreads cascading from the center of his scalp and hanging symmetrically to the middle of his neck. They frame a handsome, full-lipped face.

One of his parents was particularly taken with his smile—“his mouth would twist a little, it was cute,” they told a local reporter.
¹⁸
But in the pictures he posted of himself, it is rarely evident; in some he looks pensive, in others wasted (the most likely explanation for those heavy eyelids is that he was often high). “Even as a little kid he was an old soul,” says his godmother, Regina Gray. For the most part, his Facebook page attests to an unremarkable if somewhat rambunctious teenage existence. In one picture, like Pedro he’s clutching a bottle of Hennessy in one hand while the other arm is wrapped around a girl. In others, as on Edwin’s page, there are depictions of weed. Elsewhere the occasional kitten and puppy and a range of other girls. If his trousers are in the shot, then the seat is generally halfway down his bottom and his boxers are on full display. His favorite films were
Rambo
and
The Hills Have Eyes.
His favorite TV shows included
Futurama, Family Guy,
and
Twerkers Exposed,
a softporn site of sorts on which mostly barely dressed women take selfies of their sizable behinds.

Many pictures have him posing without a shirt; he was a slender-built teen with a lean but not particularly well-defined torso of which he was nonetheless clearly proud. On his police mug shots (of which there are quite a selection), he looks quite different. Dreads that are more tousled expose a jawline more defined. His lips have lost their pout; his eyes have clawed back some space from the lids. The stats—five feet eight inches and 145 pounds—indicate that physically, at least, he was an all-American boy: average in every way.

A
T AROUND
11:05
P.M.
on November 23, on the echoey, rank first-floor stairway of a four-story walkup on East 80th Street, just around the corner from his home, someone walked up to Tyshon, shot him in the head,
and left. Whoever called 911—the Chicago Police Department won’t release the recording—found him bleeding on the landing. An ambulance took him on a twenty-five-minute drive to Northwestern Memorial Hospital. When they picked him up he was in critical condition; by 11:50 p.m. he was pronounced dead.

In the forty-five minutes between Tyshon’s getting shot and his dying, a seventeen-year-old boy was shot and injured less than a block away in what may have been a retaliation.

It was less than a year after Sandy Hook, and with the public still sensitized to the ubiquity of such tragedies, there remained a strong civic interest in reporting the victim of every gun death. The
New York Times
still ran its daily “Gun Report,” and Tyshon was on it;
Slate
still ran its Gun-Death Tally, and Tyshon was on that, too. Locally, a website called
DNAinfo.com
had a mission to report on each homicide, and so the next day a young reporter, Erica Demarest, went to Tyshon’s home.

Erica had met the families of many victims while working on this project. Even three months after Tyshon’s death, when we met in a coffee shop near my son’s school, she recalled his family as being one of the more challenging. By the time she’d arrived, relatives had gathered to offer condolences. She spoke briefly with the grandfather, who would not be named. Then a parent arrived and said they would only speak to her with the proviso that neither their name nor gender be revealed—the latter being a stipulation I have never come across in my twenty-one years of reporting. Even then, Erica was in and out of the house within eight minutes—she timed it.

In that time, she learned the following: “Tyshon was ‘joyous,’ ‘playful’ and ‘a typical teenager.’ He liked tinkering with electronics, they said, and could often be found watching TV or playing video games with his siblings. [He] had had trouble in school . . . and was looking into alternative education programs. He was planning to get a state ID this Monday so he could begin applying for jobs.”
¹⁹

“He was trying to get his life straightened out,” his grandfather said.

“He was trying to find an alternative way,” said the parent, who then asked Erica’s readers to think twice before inflicting on others the pain
they were now feeling. “You know, it could easily be your family,” said the parent. “So think about that before you do it to somebody else.” Then Erica was shown the door.

By all accounts, Tyshon had quite a bit of straightening out to do. Police told DNAinfo he was a “documented gang member” and speculated that the shooting may have been gang related. The “parent” confirmed he had been in “gang trouble in school,” and another family member pointed out he was no longer in school.

S
URE ENOUGH
,
EVERY NOW
and then Tyshon’s Facebook page showcases the brutal alongside the bacchanal. A picture from January 14, 2013, shows at least $400 laid out on a table, about $250 of which is splayed out in a fan with a gun beneath it. The caption reads, “A days work.” A few weeks earlier, he posted a picture of himself standing in a living room pointing a gun straight at the camera. In many pictures, he’s holding both hands out with the thumb reaching in across the palm to touch his ring finger and the rest of his fingers extended in what is most likely a gang sign. His Instagram account went by the name “Lakesidegangsta.” Just over a year before he died, he stood in a hallway with his left arm held outstretched with his fingers making like a gun while his right hand pointed to the floor with just one finger—like a single barrel. The caption says “Get popd.” His Facebook page is littered with RIP messages to fallen friends, shout-outs to others who are in jail, and posters indicating that he was in the Lakeside Gangster Disciples—a nationwide gang. Tyshon was not merely a victim of the media distortions of black pathologies; his actions actually provided the raw material for them.

“Tyshon was not an innocent boy,” says Regina, one of Tyshon’s mother’s best friends, who says she knew Tyshon “before he was even thought of.” “He did burglary, sold drugs, he killed people. He had power in the street. He really did. Especially for such a young kid. He had power. A lot of people were intimidated by him, and they were scared of
him. I know he had bodies under his belt.” If I’d chosen another day, I could well have been reporting on one of Tyshon’s victims.

Tributes following his passing blend a sense of loss at his death with a moral ambivalence about his life. Like a soldier slain in combat, expressions of lament are framed with the understanding that such a tragic outcome was, at the very least, an occupational hazard. “You live by the sword, you die by the sword,” says Regina. “He lived by the guns and the gangs and the streets, and that’s how he died. It was sad to see him laying there at the funeral. I seen him grow up and I loved him and I know he could be a good kid. But there ain’t no point in sugarcoating it. He was a bad kid too.”

Many of the messages on his Facebook page took the form of elegies—literally poetic farewells. There’s one from his elder sister, Kiyana:

You’re not the devil you just went along with his game.

But an Angel I still pray to God you became.

Bad decisions everyone makes,

But never did I believe for them

Your life they’d take.

And one from his friend Chris:

It seem like just the other day we was chilling having fun

Now my Lil Homie gone from another with a gun

how many more can I take I tell you right now it’s none

the ones who did it I hope they die aint no biting my Damn tongue

G
ANGS ARE NEITHER NEW
nor racially specific. From the Irish, Polish, Jewish, and Puerto Rican gangs of New York to the Mafia, various types of informal gatherings of mostly but not exclusively young men have long
been part of Western life. They often connect the social, violent, entrepreneurial, and criminal. And although they involve a relatively small minority, it amounts to a significant number of people. According to the National Youth Gang Survey, in 2012 in the United States there were around thirty thousand gangs and over eight hundred thousand gang members
²⁰
—roughly the population of Amsterdam. The terms of membership and rules of engagement differ, as do the perceived benefits, depending on the context. Some people join through fear; others to instill fear in others; some identify just enough to keep below the radar or, like Edwin, associate for the sake of social status. Many aren’t really clear why they join; like many teenagers they just blow with the winds that are guiding their friends. Some don’t join at all; as was pointed out earlier they are “gang-related” for the simple reason that in the neighborhoods where they live gangs are dominant and there’s no way to avoid them.

“Joining a gang is free,” says Bautista, the community organizer. “There are parks around here, but they’re underserved, understaffed, and under-resourced. They’re taking down a lot of the basketball courts. If you don’t have money there’s very few options to do something thrilling.”

What is new is that in recent years gangs have become more deadly than ever. According to the National Youth Gang Survey, between 2007 and 2012 gang membership rose 8 percent, and gang-related homicides leapt 20 percent.
²¹
The principal reason why gang activity has become more deadly, it seems, is because of the availability of guns. Studies of Los Angeles County between 1979 and 1994 revealed that the proportion of gang incidents involving guns that ended in homicide leapt from 71 percent to 95 percent.
²²
“The contrast with the present is striking,” argued sociologist Malcolm Klein after reaching a similar conclusion in Philadelphia and East Los Angeles. “Firearms are now standard. They are easily purchased or borrowed and are more readily available than in the past.”
²³