All I got to say—you don’t got nobody else
but yourself. Even me. I’m a twin, but no matter what, you still by
yourself.
I was born and raised in the neighborhood. It
was tough, rough. I been shot, gangbanged, but I’m not in a gang no
more. I ain’t been in a gang—all right, you could say I’m
affiliated, yeah, but I don’t sit on the corner no more. I don’t
hang with the wrong crowd anymore.
I live with my grandma. She my guardian. Me
and my brother had drugs in our system when we was born. That’s why
my grandma got custody of us. My parents, they on drugs, both of
them. But my mama, she straightened out a little bit. She live a
block away. She got a little job at a little
junkyard. Today, she’s going to give me some money. But I don’t
really see her
that much.
When I was growing up, there was a lot of us
in my grandma’s house. Like, 10 or 11 peoples. And the sad thing
is—three bedrooms. Me and my brother used to sleep on the let-out
couch. Grandma used to sleep on another couch in the dining room.
And my uncle and his friends, they used to smoke weed in the house.
He would leave 10 of them in one room, playing games and shooting
dice for money, so we’d just go outside and play basketball.
Me and my brother, we were just raw with
basketball. We used to play ball in the cold. We used to bring
shovels and just shovel the snow so we could play. We couldn’t
really bounce the ball, it was so wet and cold. And then, in
summer, we used to play tag, throw water balloons, then we’d go
back playing ball. Ball, ball, ball, basketball, basketball. We was
just outside having fun. Then, that’s when all the drugs, all the
guns, came to the area. And that’s when everybody just became bad.
Became negative. It’s just the hope, like, went away.
“Rough twins,” they used to call us. Bad
twins. Like, if anything would go wrong, they’d say, “They did it.”
But we ain’t never used to do it! We would just steal bikes, but we
were never going in people’s houses. But the more we grew up, the
more stuff we seen, and the more we wanted it. It’s like, you see
people with new shoes, so you want new shoes. You want this, that,
that. We seen drug dealers; they had females and cars. So we just
wanted to make a name for ourselves. That’s how the bad stuff
started.
There wasn’t no joining no gang. It was just,
you born in it. If you were around this neighborhood, that’s what
you going to be. Mexicans, we different from them. For a Mexican,
you gotta beat up somebody to join a gang; you gotta kill somebody
to join a gang. You gotta sell drugs, do all types of stuff to join
a gang. It’s about loyalty. Loyalty to your fellow gang members.
For blacks, everybody now is just about the money. Black people
don’t care who you are. It’s about the bread down here. About
getting money, that’s all it’s about. Or family.
The guy that shot me, we used to be friends.
I probably know him all my life. We used to be cool. One of my
close friends be his cousin. Then, when my close friend moved out
of town, that’s when he stopped hanging with us. He went back
across the park. You know how it is. The gang split. Divided. And
it was just them against us.
They hated us. I don’t even know why. Me and
my brother and my friends had summer jobs, and we had bought two
cars. We used to just drive around there, everything looking good.
We had new clothes, but we wasn’t really stunting. We weren’t
showing out. We were just—us. We wasn’t thinking about them.
Them—they be thinking about
us
.
So it’s like that. They can’t go over here;
we can’t go over there. It’s like a bridge. You got this side of
the bridge; we got this side of the bridge. But instead of a
bridge, it’s the park: You got this side of the park; we got this
side of the park. That’s how it is. If they catch you, you finna
get shot at—
boom, boom, boom, boom.
June 16, 2010. It was daytime. Sherman Park,
kids was out—it was hot. It was a sunny, sunny day. Everybody was
out. So he approached us like, “Hey!” And he said something, so we
got to chasing him. He just shot, like
bam
. I think he
wanted to shoot one of us, but, like, he didn’t care if it was me.
He just finna to shoot. He shot like at least nine times.
Doon,
doon, doon, doon. Doon, doon, doon, doon.
I didn’t know I was hit. I thought it was a
paintball gun. I was laughing: “Take a look, they shooting
paintball guns!” But then, I felt it. And I get to the alley, and I
felt a burn, and it was hurting. And I just seen the blood: “Dang,
I been shot. I been
shot
.”
I remember everything. I thought I was going
to die. I was like, “Yeah, this could really kill me right now.”
But I wasn’t really panicking; I was just calm. I was walking slow.
I walked two blocks. I sat down when I made it back on Bishop
Street. And the ambulance people, the paramedics—they wasn’t trying
to help me. They was just, “Who did it?” That’s all they wanted to
know, the police and all of them.
I was in the hospital for a day and a half.
They wanted to keep me for a week, but I didn’t want to stay in. I
knew I was in pain, but I just wanted to go back home. I was just
bored at the hospital, you know? So I went home. And after that,
when I tried to walk to the store, I’d just have to pause and stop
for a minute or two, ‘cause it would get to burning and stuff. So
that feeling, it would sting my heart. Just that bullet. It hit my
stomach, but it entered through my hand, right here. But I’ve still
got the bullet in me. I’m going to get it out, probably.
After the shooting, that’s when I started
getting mature. I had a friend named Martez who got killed. A lot
of people in the neighborhood were getting killed. Before that, we
ain’t killing anyone. We just thought it was fun, you know. Then,
it went to killing people, so that’s a big change. That’s a big
difference. People right now are still getting their friends
killed, and still just wanting to do dumb things. Don’t wanna make
a change.
Sometimes I’ll say, “Forget the community,
man. Forget everybody. I just want to go away, be rich and never
come back.” I ain’t racist and all, but I don’t want my children
growing up in a black community. And I don’t want them to go to no
CPS. No Chicago Public Schools. If I have kids, they will be
successful if I raise them in a good neighborhood, like the suburbs
or up north. ‘Cause they wouldn’t be around all this negativity,
all the homicides. I want them to grow up in a good area, like,
with white people. ‘Cause growing up around a lot of black people
is going to be tough. It’s going to be rough. It’s going to be
really rough.
But then I got my other good side when I feel
like I ain’t going to give up on the community. I’m just going to
go do good, and come back and help the community. I think about the
time I get grown—like 25, 26—the violence will probably have died
down. I don’t think the violence is going to be here forever. It’s
going to be violence, but not like how it is now. There’s a lot of
violence, because it’s the money, people broke, the poverty. It’s
like hot water. Steam. You know, when steam needs to just open up
the cap and you just let it go, and you see the hot air and stuff.
That’s like people, and they just shoot you—
boom, boom,
boom!
From now on, I got my eye on the future. You
shoot at me, I’m not finna come back and shoot at you. I’m telling
you, you shoot me, I’m running; you ain’t going to see me no more.
You trying to make me get a felony. You trying to make me throw
away my future. You just want me to fall for you. And I’m not going
to fall for you. Stupid people, I’m wise.
I’m just going to focus on school, get my
grades back up. I been trying to get in college. I think I’ll study
marketing. I could find myself doing business, record labels and
stuff. I’m hoping to go to St. Joseph College in Indiana. I want to
go to a private college. I been there three, four times. I love
that it’s laid-back; it’s not a university. They’ll help you out.
They’re going to really help you out and be like, “Man, come on.
Take it step by step. You’re going to have your diploma. You’ll
have a degree, bachelor’s degree, everything—probably a
master’s.”
So it’s up to me to be successful. I ain’t
depending on nobody but myself. I gotta make that change. You want
the jewelry, you want the girls—but I want the future.
—
Interviewed by Rachel Hauben
Combs
DEFENDING THE GONERS
KULMEET GALHOTRA
Kulmeet Galhotra is an attorney supervisor
for the Homicide Task Force for the Cook County Public Defender. He
was born 7,741 miles from Chicago in Allahabad, India, in 1966.
When he was 6 years old, his parents moved to the United States,
inspired by the progressive images of the civil rights movement.
During his childhood, the family moved into a two-flat house in the
Austin neighborhood before settling in Bucktown on the Near West
Side. Originally on the path to become an engineer, Galhotra
graduated from Illinois Institute of Technology as an English major
and went on to attend Chicago Kent College of Law. At age 24, he
began his career at the Public Defender’s office representing
juveniles, before moving to the adult division after 5 ½ years.
At the Homicide Task Force, Galhotra and his
fellow attorneys face an incredibly challenging workload, as 8 out
of 10 people arrested for murder in Chicago are represented by
public defenders.32 Candid and quick with a wry observation or
joke, Galhotra speaks with a nasally Chicago accent that would make
any native of the city proud. Nonetheless, he believes his
background as a member of a minority helps him identify with his
clients.
To me, there is nothing more important than a
person’s liberty. So it was pretty easy to decide to become a
public defender. I wanted to walk into court and do things that
didn’t have a price tag on them. It didn’t seem meaningful enough
to just do it for the money. I think I’d have a real conflict with
representing people, especially in criminal law, if I had to
wonder, where does a client’s money come from? You know, if Grandma
just had to put up her house, I kind of feel bad about that. I
don’t know if I want Grandma’s money. If the client just sold four
kilos of cocaine to come up with the retainer, I’m not so sure I
feel good about that, either. So it’s nice not to deal with that
whole business end of being a criminal defense lawyer, and to just
deal with the law.
It seemed like, okay, if I went through all
this trouble to get a law degree, I want to do something really
important. And I thought the job was interesting. There’s sort of
the cops-and-robbers aspect of it, which is pretty cool. I have
this fascination with thinking about why people do things, what
makes them tick. Then there’s just the absolute love of walking
into a courtroom and arguing in front of a jury or in front of a
judge, and cross-examining police officers and witnesses. So that’s
why I became a public defender. I get a kick out of doing it. I
still get a kick out of doing it.
My first case—I don’t remember the name but I
remember what happened. It was this little kid. At juvenile court
you either get sentenced to the Temporary Detention Center for up
to 30 days, you get put on probation in addition to that, or you go
to the Department of Corrections. So the kid had pled in a juvenile
court, and I think he got something like 10 days—and I was
devastated. I wanted him to get nothing. Now, of course, it seems
like kind of a joke—10 days. Now, my clients, most of them are
looking at 45 years to life on shooting murders and 20 to 60 years
for murders without a firearm.
The youngest person I ever defended was 9
years old. This was, of course, 15 to 20 years ago. This was from a
south-suburban area. This 9-year-old was in the kitchen and his
grandmother was, I don’t know, I think she was cooking bacon or
something like that, and somehow an apron string caught on fire.
And the kid threw the apron string behind a couch and ran out of
the house. And the house caught on fire, and Grandma succumbed to
smoke inhalation, and she was in the ICU for months, and the whole
place was destroyed, so they charged this young man with arson. Not
really the brightest thing to do. And this kid had post-traumatic
stress disorder. He couldn’t even talk to me about what happened.
So he was found unfit to stand trial. Eventually, I think he was
found guilty of criminal damage or something like that. But it was
just a very sad story all around.
The really young clients are fairly easy to
deal with—when they’re 12, 13, 14, they are kind of bewildered by
what’s going on. They’re not very talkative; they’re just trying to
get out. But as they get older, as they’ve been through the system,
they start becoming a little more skeptical. They start questioning
you. If you’re working with somebody who has got at least a
reasonable amount of intelligence—can read and write—there’s a lot
of time that they’re spending in the jail with nothing to do. So
they start trying to bone up on legal matters. It’s absurd to me
how they don’t go to school, but when it comes to their own case,
they’ll be happy to look up laws and try to understand them. And
usually, they have no concept of what the hell they’re talking
about.
Typically, I would say that when I first meet
them, my clients are at a very self-destructive phase—at a very
defiant phase in their life. I work with individuals who have
basically spent a whole life making poor decisions. When they meet
me, they don’t suddenly start making good ones. I mean, there was
one client—I had to put Band-Aids on his face every day at trial
because he had teardrop tattoos; and he got them while he was in
the jail. It’s like: “Oh God, why did you do that?” But a lot of
these young people just have a track record of being unrealistic
and making bad decisions. It’s very frustrating as a lawyer to give
advice to somebody and then watch them not follow it. That’s their
prerogative—you can’t live their life; it’s their decision.