Close to home

Last Saturday afternoon while my children were searching the stacks for books to check out, I was at the Rogers Park branch of the Chicago Public Library, putting the finishing touches on my last blog post on gun violence in Chicago. At the same time a few blocks away, a young photographer named Wil Lewis was walking through the neighborhood toward Devon Avenue to catch a bus. My kids and I left the library around 3:10, precisely the time the meter would run out on my parked car. We headed south on Clark Street, passing Devon Avenue around 3:15 on our way south to the Loop. According to police, at approximately 3:20, as Lewis stood at the bus stop at Devon and Glenwood, a few blocks from where we had just passed, Eric Vaughn, a member of a street gang known as the Conservative Vice Lords, was driving around the neighborhood with some associates, allegedly looking for trouble. They found it in the vicinity of where Lewis was standing, as members of another gang were walking down the street. One of Vaughn's associates allegedly expressed his eagerness to shoot one of the members of the rival gang. Vaughn then allegedly handed his associate a gun telling him to "Wet up that tee shirt," gangspeak for shoot the motherfucker. The associate got out of the car and started shooting. It was reported that ten rounds were fired at the members of the rival street gang. He hit none of them, but he did manage to hit Wil Lewis in the back. I'm still not clear if the shooter mistook Lewis for a gang member or if the 28 year old photographer just got in the way of a bullet, it now hardly matters. Lewis, an innocent bystander, was taken to the hospital just a few blocks from our home, where he died an hour later.

He left behind his wife and two parents who live in Wisconsin.

I first heard of the shooting Sunday morning on a Rogers Park Facebook page. Later in the day I received an community e-mail from the office our alderman, Joe Moore, who witnessed the event. He wrote how shaken up he continued to be about seeing the gunman whom the alderman described as a teenager, chasing a group of people while shooting. Moore described the humbling experience of returning to the scene to assist in the cleanup of the blood stains on the sidewalk.

The original reports stated that all parties involved in the shooting were gang members. Unsettling as it was to have such a violent act take place so close to where we had been only minutes before, I think every city resident feels some sense of relief, however fleeting, upon learning that a shooting victim was engaged in criminal activity; rightly or not, we feel that he had it coming, live by the sword, die by the sword, and all that. Callous as it may be, if you live in a big city you eventually become numbed to the banality of evil that is street violence; those of us removed from the world of gangs and guns don't feel particularly threatened by gang murders in general, as they don't normally effect us.

That tenuous feeling of calm was shattered on Monday when I learned the victim was an innocent bystander. It could just has easily have been me I thought, or much worse, my children.

Words cannot express the pain and sorrow I feel for Wil Lewis and his family. A young, promising life snuffed out stupidly, by people who have no regard for any life other than their own. I mourn for my city which has been suffering from too much violence brought about by the abject stupidity of too many guns available too easily, gangs fighting to the death over insignificant pieces of turf, people who have absolutely no intention of doing the right thing as they bring children into this world,  politicians more interested in pointing fingers than legislating and making a real difference, the list goes on and on.

And I especially mourn for the children of Eric Vaughn, two already born, and one on the way. I pray to God they they won't grow up following in their father's footsteps. Unfortunately too many prayers like these go unanswered every day in this city. This morning in another e-mail from the alderman's office, I learned of yet another shooting in Rogers Park. Last night, at about the same time I began to write this post, a car drove up to two men walking on the sidewalk. Shots were fired from the car and both men were hit.

That incident took place on the block where my son's best friend lives.

Lord have Mercy.