See, I was passionate about research, and
Frankie was passionate about politics. So our dream was that I
would come up with some kind of research that would be useful in
making the education system better, and then Frankie would
implement it. It was probably a little over-simplistic, but I think
we would have made it work. Yeah, we would have made it work...
For Halloween, Frankie and I were like,
“Let’s do something.” And a few days before Halloween, my friends
from Elgin had posted a message on Facebook. They had rented a
ginormous house in the city for a weekend, and they were having
this party. And then, I think one of them texted me and was like,
“Hey, you should come by.” And I was like, “I don’t know. We’ll
see.”
And that night, Frankie and I were supposed
to meet one of his friends. But then his friend ended up canceling,
and we were like, “Okay, now what do we do?” And I was like, “Oh,
well, here’s an option.” We were planning just to say hi to people
at the party, and then we were going to go hang out with his
family. I think his parents were at a bar or something. I don’t
really remember.
We walked in, and it felt like Elgin High
School because everyone looked familiar. It was mostly Latino kids.
People were kind of shocked that I was there because I didn’t
really go out often. So it was like, “Whoa, it’s crazy that you’re
here! How cool!” and stuff. And this whole time, Frankie was with
me, so I just kept introducing him to people.
There was a dance floor and people were
dancing. There were a lot of people, but it wasn’t packed, like
where you’re sweaty and trying to get through a crowd. It seemed
like a nice house, but it wasn’t really until my friend started
giving us a tour that it was like, “Oh, okay, this is a really
expensive house. This is a luxurious house. Look at this indoor
waterfall.” I mean, I was aware of gentrification in Humboldt Park,
but I didn’t put everything together until afterwards.
What I found out was that, when we were on
the tour, three guys from the neighborhood tried to get into the
party. And I guess when they came in, they got kicked out. But we
didn’t know anything about it at the time. On the tour, it was just
me and Frankie and my friend Manny. Then Manny, he got a phone call
from another friend who was waiting outside and needed somebody to
let him in the front gate. So the three of us went outside.
There was a gangway on the side of the house,
and this whole time, Frankie was behind me. So Manny opened the
gate, and we were walking back in—and that’s when it happened. I
heard four or five pops, and Manny yelled, “Oh, shit!”
I threw myself on the ground, and when I got
up my neck just felt numb, so I grabbed it, and I was like, “Oh,
man, I probably fell to the ground too fast and I sprained my neck
or something.” And then I saw my hand, and I was like, “Oh man,
somebody got shot, somebody’s splashed blood on my hand.” And then
I was like, “Oh, it’s me.”
The bullet came in through the back of my
neck and then came out through the front on the left-hand side. My
neck is really small, and the bullet missed everything—my spine, my
jugular vein, my esophagus, my trachea, my voice box. And, I don’t
know, maybe because I had already survived a couple crazy car
accidents, I wasn’t like, “Oh my God, I’m going to die.” I was
like, “Oh, this is going to be so tedious to deal with. Trying to
explain to my family that I was at a party. Ugh, this is going to
be inconvenient, basically.” That was my first thought.
There were suddenly a lot of people around,
and everybody was calling the police. And people were staring at me
and stuff, and I remember yelling at them, “Hey, stop staring. This
is not a show. Keep moving.” And there was a guy from the party who
was like, “Just breathe. It’s going to be okay.” And he kept
calling me “baby.” And I was like, “Can you stop calling me
that?”
And Frankie was sitting near me on the side
of the house. I guess I kind of assumed that he had been shot, but
I thought, “I’m okay; he’ll be okay.” And then the police came. And
I just walked over to the ambulance. And I kept asking them, “Is he
going to be okay?” Just to make sure. “Is he going to be okay? Is
he going to be okay?”
They were like, “We’re going to do the best
we can.”
Then they put him in an ambulance. And I
didn’t see him again.
A friend visited me in the ER. It was three,
four, five in the morning. I’m not sure, just really late. She came
in and was like, “Oh, I just wanted to check up on you.” And I was
like, “I’m fine. I don’t care, as long as Frankie’s okay. I just
want him to be okay.” Because I hadn’t heard anything. And that’s
when she told me that he didn’t make it.
After she left, I was by myself. So I was
just alone with that…
The funeral and the memorial service were
hard. I just felt guilty. I was the last person that he was with.
And he didn’t know anyone at this party except for me, so I felt
like it was my fault.
I’ve been to a lot of therapy since then, and
I’ve just kind of learned that guilt is not helpful because it’s
inhibiting you from dealing with other emotions. So like if you
feel angry, if you feel like this was unjust, if you feel sadness,
if you feel grief—it’s almost like guilt is preventing you from
feeling those things. So you have to kind of like peel off the
guilt, and then deal with what you’re really feeling. Those bad
feelings don’t really go away; you just learn how to live with
them. But sometimes I do still feel guilty. Depends on the day.
The scar in the front of my neck was swollen,
kind of 3-D, but now it’s pretty much flattened out. I have a big
laugh and if I find something really funny, I tilt my head back.
And that’s when people see it. I like scars, because I think they
tell a story. And this one, it’s bittersweet. I don’t think you can
avoid thinking about the pain. But it also tells the story of my
friend—my friend who I was able to dream with, my friend who I
hoped for a better future with.
And I think that makes it beautiful.
—
Interviewed by Lisa Applegate
Endnotes
76 The Chicago Reporter is an investigative
news organization with a distinctive focus on race and poverty.
This important resource rarely gets the public
recognition it deserves.
77 Kari Lydersen and Carlos Javier Ortiz,
“More Young People are Killed in
Chicago Than Any Other American City,” The Chicago Reporter, Jan.
25, 2012,
http://www.chicagoreporter.com/news/2012/01/more-young-people-are-
killed-chicago-any-other-american-city
78 Chicago developer Anthony Mazzone designed
and built the $1.2 million
luxury home on a blue-collar street in Humboldt Park. Unable to
sell it, he
decided to rent it out as a weekend “vacation rental.” A website
advertising the property boasted that it was “located in a serene
family neighborhood.” It failed to mention that the block was
controlled by the Maniac Latin Disciples. See Mark Konkol and Frank
Main, “Killing Puts Spotlight on ‘Vacation Rentals’—Aldermen Push
Crackdown on Short-Term Deals for Vacant Homes,” Chicago Sun-Times,
Nov. 15, 2009.
79 The TEC-9 assault pistol has no military
use. It was designed and marketed
to kill civilians. Capable of unloading a 50-shot magazine in
seconds, it was
used in the Columbine massacre. One writer called it “the perfect
implement of mayhem, because it does nothing well except spray
bullets into terrified crowds.” See Robert L. Steinback, “Gun
Advocates Often Rely on Self-Delusion,” The
Miami Herald, Nov. 18, 1997.
80 The Jumpstart program at DePaul is aimed
at helping overcome “the
state of inequality in early educational experiences in America.”
It was one of several social-justice and service programs that
Frankie Valencia took part in
at the university.
HOW DO YOU LEARN TO LIVE
AGAIN?
JOY McCORMACK
The stories in this book don’t end with
these final few pages. For many people we interviewed, there is no
such thing as “closure,” much less a happy ending. But that doesn’t
mean they have lost hope. So perhaps it’s fitting to end with Joy
McCormack, the mother of slain DePaul University honor student
Francisco “Frankie” Valencia.
On Oct. 21, 2011—the day a Cook County judge
sentenced 21-year-
old Narcisco Gatica to 90 years in prison for her son’s
murder81—McCormack told the court she still suffered from
“unimaginable despair, pain, rage and
deep grief.”
“
On many days,” she added, “it seems like
this darkness is stronger than
I am.”
Two years after the conviction, she
continues to fight a day-to-day battle with that “darkness.” But
that has not stopped McCormack from throwing her considerable
talents, energies and organizational skills into a new effort aimed
at helping other survivors. Frustrated by the lack of resources
available to her in the aftermath of her son’s death, McCormack
founded Chicago’s Citizens for Change (CCC), an organization
designed to address the needs of families devastated by youth
violence. In addition to serving as a citywide clearinghouse for
information and resources, her group provides referrals for grief
counseling and funeral services, guides families through court
proceedings and helps them keep in contact with police about
criminal cases. Through a CCC program called Chicago Survivors,
families find a real community with other people who have lost
loved ones.
An intense and restless 40-year-old,
McCormack embodies the struggles of so many people we spoke to for
this book. “We all come through this life with some battle wounds,”
she says, “and sometimes those don’t allow us to be as whole as
we’d like to be as we walk through the world.” Nonetheless, she
keeps moving forward.
I had a very non-traditional background. My
mom was a hippie; she and my father divorced when I was about 1.
The last memory I have of him was when I was 4. I haven’t seen him
since.
My mother wasn’t always around, either. She
went to South America for a few years when I was a child, and
that’s how I came to Chicago to be raised by my grandmother. Then
my mom came back to Chicago and we stayed here. Drugs, alcoholism—I
grew up around that. It was all part of my childhood. I never
remember having that kind of pure innocence that I remember seeing
in other kids. I never really went through that phase of believing
in the world.
I met Frankie’s father when I was 12. I was
still in elementary school at Nettelhorst, on Broadway and Melrose.
Chico82 was older than me; I was best friends with his cousin. He
gave me a ride home from her house one night, and that was it. We
became friends, started dating and stayed together.
Chico came from Acapulco, Mexico. A bunch of
the family had migrated here, and so he had this beautiful network
of people who spent time together and raised kids together and ate
meals together and did all of these things that were just not part
of reality in my own dysfunctional childhood. And I fell in love
with that. I wanted it. I think that was one of the driving forces
behind us getting together.
I was 15 when I found out that I was pregnant
with Frankie. I was a freshman at Lincoln Park High School, in
their International Baccalaureate program. I was having some
irregular periods and my best friend was saying to me, “Joy, I
think you’re pregnant.” And I was like, “No, I don’t think I’m
pregnant.” There was really a part of me that kind of knew that I
was, but I didn’t want to deal with it because I knew that my mom
would really
be upset.
Although she was a great friend, my mother
was never a great mom. Being a parent was always secondary to the
other parts of her life. So when I told her the news, her reaction
was like, “I’m 32; I can’t be a grandmother.” She really wanted me
to have an abortion. She tried convincing me; she tried bribing me.
But I decided I was going to have that baby.
I used to read
Goodnight Moon
to
Frankie at night when I was pregnant: “Good night moon, good night
stars ...” And at the time, there was this theory about how
classical music would develop the child’s brain. So I would put on
the classical music station. Sometimes I would even put the
headphones on my belly and hope that he was getting it, you
know?
I had complications in the pregnancy, and
there were a couple of times when it wasn’t clear that everything
would be okay. He was 3 ½ weeks late, and I was very sick with
toxemia83 by the time he was born. I was in labor for 2 ½ days. It
was such an emotional experience, because I had been going through
it for so long and the whole pregnancy had had all this turmoil.
And then it all just kind of went away because there’s this
beautiful thing that I was holding.
He was 8 pounds 12 ounces when he was born at
Illinois Masonic. He was a big boy. And he had very dark hair, and
he had very red skin. And some of his hair was standing up. And he
was very angry. He came into this world very angry.
I was 19 at the time my second son, Victor,
was born. As an only child myself, I wanted Frankie to have a
sibling. I didn’t want him to be alone in the world.
But by then, my relationship with Chico was
not healthy. He is a great person with a good heart; we are still
great friends. But he never learned how to be a husband. So I chose
to leave when Victor was a baby. My husband had closed the door on
our commitment by the choices he was making. And once he did that,
I felt like, “Okay, I owe nothing to this relationship anymore. I
gave it my best; it didn’t work out.” And so very quickly after I
left, I allowed myself to be true to me and began dating women.
I think I had known that I was gay for a very
long time, but I rebelled against it. I didn’t want it to be true,
because of the stigma that went with it. And there were not
examples around me of gay parents, so it was challenging to see
myself both as a parent and as a gay woman. But when Victor was
about 3 years old, I met my life partner, Siu.84 And six months
after we started dating, I had a conversation with the boys about
whether or not they thought it would be okay if Siu joined our
family, and they both said yes. By then I had graduated college and
was building a career.85