It was on a one-way street. There was a car,
an LTD Ford, parked in front of us. And they threw up gang signs. I
threw up gang signs. I was the passenger and, when I opened my
door, I heard another car come right behind us. And by the time I
looked back in front of me, the guys that were in the first car
came out firing.
I dove under the dashboard. I do not
understand to this day why I did not even get wounded. Both them
guys put their guns in the car, and I did not get hit one time. But
they ended up shooting Ray. They shot him
13 times.
I remember hearing him gargling for air, and
when I heard the other cars take off, I stuck my head up and I
looked up at my brother, and I seen he was full of blood. This was
in the afternoon, about 2:30. The kids were coming out of school.
There was a candy store right on the corner and I ran to tell the
lady at the store to call the ambulance. When I got back to the
car, there was an old Puerto Rican lady holding his body. Half of
his body was in the car and his head was hanging out. I put my arms
under his head. When I did that, a big…a big thing of
blood…could’ve been his brains, I don’t know…came down. He was
squeezing my left thumb. He had a bullet hole underneath one eye
and his other eye was looking straight to the sky. He took his last
breath. When that happened, I went straight to the dark side.
The night we buried him, it was like five of
us walking around, trying to find the enemy. We were hurt. Full of
anger. Full of pain. I didn’t worry about getting locked up. I
didn’t worry about dying. I was looking for death, bro. I was
running right into it, head on. The next day, I was arrested for
murder.43
I was 16 years old, but I was tried as an
adult. I fought my case for a year and a half or two years. In
1981, I got found guilty and sent to Joliet.44 From Joliet, I went
to Menard. And then from Menard, I went to Stateville.45 And then
from Stateville, I went to medium-minimum joints. You know, getting
transferred from hole to hole to hole. I was incarcerated from the
age of 16 till the age of 35. It was something else, man. It was
something else. Prison was something else.
I did a total of five and a half years in
solitary confinement. I would do 18 months one time, one year
another time, six months one other time. A lot of people go to the
hole and they find the end of the world. For me, I found a new
world. I found a world of self. That’s where I learned how to
think. It’s where I learned how to read. It’s where I learned how
to cry. I needed that so much.
Once, I was in the hole at Menard. And this
brother next door to me, his name was Pops. He was from the Hells
Angels, he was a biker. He looked like those bikers from the
movies, man. Long hair, short, ugly, mean-looking. You know, for
real. But he was a beautiful, beautiful brother, man. A beautiful
brother.
When I first got there, he goes, “Hey little
brother, how you doing? I’m a biker.” He was trying to help me out,
but I was so ignorant I thought he was representing.
“Biker? I don’t give a fuck about a biker.
I’ll chop your ass up.”
And he just says, “You know what, brother?
I’ll talk to you another time.”
So then, like a few weeks later, he asks me,
“What are you in solitary for, man?” And I started telling him,
kinda explaining to him, but he goes, “What does your ticket
say?”
I go, “My ticket?”
He goes, “Yeah, that yellow paper that they
give you—your disciplinary report.”
I said, “Oh, I…I…don’t know what the fuck
this says.”
And now he’s got this little mirror he’s
sticking through the bars of his cell so that he can see me. Now
we’re looking at each other in the mirror.
He goes, “I don’t mean no disrespect, but do
you know how to read and write?”
I go, “But I ain’t stupid.”
And he says, “Little brother, I’ll work with
you, man.” And, I mean, he taught me. At night, he would write the
vowels—you know: a, e, i, o, u. For a rugged-looking dude, he was
smart, man. He was fucking smart. I mean, he got me to start to
read, and I was a straight knucklehead. I was in 10 or 12 schools
and none of them could do it. But he did it.
Acquiring the ability to read, it transformed
me, man. Like we say it in Spanish,
la
cultura cura
.
Culture heals. And that’s what healed me was culture. It made me
positive. One thing for sure it did, it helped me to stop seeing my
so-called enemy as my enemy and to start seeing him as my brother.
Before that, man, I was so into gangbanging, I was in a trance—a
trance of hate and confusion. You know, like a terrorist. To me, I
was a soldier. I didn’t see myself as a criminal. I wasn’t a
dope-dealer. I seen myself as a soldier.
I hit Stateville in 1984. That’s where I met
Jose Pizarro, the guy I work with now. But back then, I was still
banging against his group. I was People, and he was Folks;46 he was
the enemy. The first time I saw him was on the gallery, the walkway
in front of the cells. Stateville is a roundhouse. It’s like a
big-ass birdcage, and you can see everything. And they would be
over there, and we would be over here, sizing each other up. Jose
was his chief of security—personal security for the leader of his
gang. And I was a security guy for my guys, so I knew that if we
was ever gonna hit his chief, we had to hit Jose first.
We had this one brother in Stateville, Luis
Rosa.47 He was a beautiful, intelligent brother. He preached to us
about Latino awareness and Latino unity. But I wasn’t educated
then. I couldn’t understand. That shit sounded like Chinese to me.
I thought it was too late for peace, ‘cause too many brothers had
died.
But after I went to solitary a few more
times, I really got an understanding of myself and what it means to
be Latino and everything. I started reading the history of
Mexicans, what we went through with my father, what
my grandfathers and them went through. I kinda started feeling what
Luis Rosa was talking about then. I had an awareness, an awakening.
And when I came out of solitary, I got involved in what Luis and
these other guys
were doing.
I guess that’s what really got me and Jose
Pizarro close to one another; we both started preaching Latin
unity, you know. We didn’t say to each other, “Hey, you go talk to
your guys; I’ll talk to my guys.” We didn’t have that agreement. It
just happened like that.
I had to explain to my guys, “This is what I
feel, bro. I feel we’re wasting our lives. We’re killing ourselves
for no fucking reason. This is crazy. This shit’s gotta stop.”
In fact, I even had to kind of manipulate the
situation a bit to make it seem as if this unity was a good
criminal enterprise for us. For me, it was all about Latino unity
for real.
But to have them understand it and accept it, I
had to present it in a way where, you know, this would expand the
criminal concept of what we’re doing as an organization: As a
united mob, we can do more shit.
When we had our first meeting between the two
sides in the chapel at Stateville, nobody sat down. Everybody was
standing up. Everybody had their knives on them, pipes. Everybody
had vests in case we got stabbed so it wouldn’t penetrate. It was
hilarious. It was serious as hell, but it was hilarious. It was
funny and scary at the same time, man. Nobody sat down, but we
talked. We presented our case. Jose did it for his group, I did it
for mine. That night, I figured one of two things was gonna happen:
If I live to the morning, this is gonna work and, if not, I’m gonna
get hit tonight. But it did work. This was in the early 1980s.
We’re out here now in 2012, incorporated and in the heart of
Humboldt Park.
Death is contagious. It is, man. Especially
when you’re lost and you’re confused and you got everybody around
you telling you this is what you’re supposed to be doing. It’s so
contagious, it becomes part of you. If you ain’t hit somebody in
one night—jump them, beat them up, shoot them, whatever—you can’t
even sleep well. I couldn’t sleep well till I knew I hit somebody
that night.
Yes, I was part of that stupidity and that
madness. I believed in that crazy shit. Just like these kids from
Afghanistan who come from a war-torn state, I was coming from a
war-torn state of mind. But when I look at that mug shot of myself
at age 16, it also reaffirms who and what I am today. It tells me
that, no matter how bad our past was, it’s not how the story
begins. It’s where it leads to and what kind of legacy we leave
behind. That people can change.
I’m proud of who I am today and what I’ve
done and what I’m trying to accomplish. Getting kids out of gangs,
helping parolees prepare for reintigration into society and working
with mothers who lost kids—it’s a form of redemption. But all that
stuff that happened with me years ago when I was younger, it don’t
go away. You know, man? It just really don’t go away. Guilt,
remorse—you’re like, damn, man. Especially when I see a mother on
TV crying that one of her kids got killed. There’s times when I
think about the moms I may have made cry. And it, it just, it
really just fucks with me. It don’t go nowhere. The more humble you
become, the more remorseful you become. You know?
—
Interviewed by Miles Harvey
Endnotes
37 William Recktenwald, “On the Wall,”
Chicago Tribune, Jan. 10, 1984.
38 In recent years, Cerda has returned to
Mexico several times to conduct anti- violence workshops. These
trips were sponsored by the U.S. State Department.
39 Menard Correctional Center is a state
prison in downstate Illinois.
40 The Chicago Crime Commission Gang Book,
published in 2012, still lists Cerda as an active gang leader. He
vehemently denies this and has filed a complaint against the Crime
Commission for false depiction. See James D. Hubbard and Katherine
Wyman, eds., The Chicago Crime Commission Gang Book: A Detailed
Overview of Street Gangs in the Chicago Metropolitan Area (Chicago:
Chicago Crime Commission, 2012), 78-79.
41 Zenith was a radio and television
manufacturer. It had a factory in Melrose Park, a western suburb
adjacent to Maywood.
42 Cerda is referring to a deadly war that
broke out between the Insane
Unknowns and the Spanish Cobras.
43 See Bonita Brodt, “2 Slain in New Gang
Terror: Shooting Linked to Street War,” Chicago Tribune, April 23,
1979.
44 Joliet Correctional Center opened in 1858
and closed in 2002. After closing,
it was used as a set for the Prison Break TV series.
45 Stateville Correctional Center is a
maximum-security state prison for men in Crest Hill, Illinois.
46 People and Folks are the two major gang
alliances. They were formed in
the penitentiary system during the mid-1970s by incarcerated gang
members seeking safety in numbers.
47 Luis Rosa is a Puerto Rican nationalist.
In 1981, he was sentenced to 75 years in prison for his illegal
activities with the FALN, the Spanish-language acronym for the
Armed Forces of National Liberation. He was released from prison in
1999 after President Clinton gave him and other members of the
group clemency.
UNANSWERED PRAYERS
PAMELA MONTGOMERY-BOSLEY
Pamela Montgomery-Bosley is an energetic,
40-something South Side resident who is not fond of sharing her
real age. In 2006, her 18-year-old son, Terrell Bosley, an aspiring
gospel musician, was gunned down in the parking lot of the Lights
of Zion church on the city’s Far South Side. In 2008, a 27-year-old
man named David Stanley was acquitted of murder. Despite extensive
publicity surrounding the case, and a $5,000 reward, Terrell’s
killing remains unsolved.
While she spent more than 20 years in the
banking industry, Montgomery-Bosley now devotes her considerable
talents to ending youth violence. In addition to her full-time job
with a community youth center at St. Sabina Church in the Auburn
Gresham neighborhood, she is the co-founder of Purpose Over Pain,
an advocacy group started in 2007 by parents who lost their
children to gun violence.
My greatest wish is to get my baby back. When
I go to visit my son in the cemetery, I say to God, “I won’t tell
nobody; just give Terrell back to me.” And I know that God can do
this. I’m lacking in a lot of other ways, but
I believe He can do it. My faith is
that
strong. I know He
can do it, but
He won’t.
Even so, I still have Terrell’s stuff down in
my basement like I’m waiting for him to come back. My husband and I
are waiting for him to come and ring the doorbell. We wait for him
to call. This is something that you cannot accept as a parent; no
mother or father should bury their child.
I grew up in K-Town, on Kedvale Street in
North Lawndale on the West Side. Violence wasn’t what it is now. We
had people on the West Side just hanging out. Everyone liked to
stay outside and enjoy the weather. I would ride my bike to
downtown. We’d walk to school and feel safe.
My son Terrell grew up in the Rosemoor
neighborhood, which is right next to Roseland, on the Far South
Side. My husband, Tom, grew up in that area, which is why we
purchased a home there in 1991. It was okay when we first moved
there, and then as the years progressed, it started changing. Once
the city started tearing down public housing projects in the 1990s,
people started renting out homes to different individuals, and that
changed our neighborhood. We didn’t hear guns on my block, not till
the later years. Now, I can be in my house and hear
pow, pow,
pow, pow!
And everyone just walks around desensitized.
Terrell had freedom, to a certain degree, but
not a lot. My boys now—I have a 17-year-old and I don’t even want
him to walk around the corner; I drive him around the corner. I
know that I am sheltering him too much. He even says that he feels
like he lives in a bubble. It’s overbearing for
him and his brother. I’m not letting them grow up. I’m not letting
them feel like teenagers.