In The News
Stop the Violence
The Fighter and the Coach
The problem was, he had just been shot – for the third time. And that really made him mad. “I’m just angry! I’m just emotional,” Devontay Williams explained to the men surrounding him. After all, he and four others had just been shot the previous weekend, marking...
Boxing Out Negativity
It’s been a tough year for Boxing Out Negativity, largely because boxing is a contact sport, not recommended during the time of COVID-19. But it has been through tough times before. When Professor Julie Globokar first discovered it, in fact, it was “basically a...
Playing to a Tough Crowd: READI Chicago
They’re playing to a tough crowd: 96% have prior arrests, 64% served time behind bars and 80% have been victims of violent crime themselves. READI Chicago, the Rapid Employment And Development Initiative, serves a hardened clientele that many wouldn’t attempt to...
When My Son Was Killed
This is the story Bertha Purnell told me: When my son Maurice was killed, I went a little bit crazy. It started when I got the call and rushed to where he’d been shot, on Laramie Avenue in my neighborhood, Austin. Everything was like a blur and later I remembered I...
Mothers On A Mission
It was what they call an “Angelversary” – the day Maurice Purnell became an angel, the date he was killed, June 24th. Just six weeks earlier there had been another, that one in honor of Trevon Jeffries, shot down on May 12th. Yet another came six weeks before that,...
Burying Our Young
Leak & Sons Funeral Home doesn’t need the extra business; plenty of people die, you can count on that. But on Chicago’s South Side, they’re dying much too often – and much too soon. Homicide adds to the bottom line, but those are profits owner Spencer Leak Sr....
Mothers and Men Against Senseless Killings
Tamar Manasseh lays out a recipe for Chicago’s violence. “If you bake a cake, you need many things,” said the founder of Mothers/Men Against Senseless Killings (MASK). “If you remove the baking soda or the eggs or something else, it won’t be a cake.” Likewise, she...
Friends of the Children
Friends of the Children stresses “the power of one” – one person, that is, who can rescue a kid from violence. “Our model is distinct, courageous and proven,” the organization’s website states. It is based on studies that show a caring, consistent adult is the one...
Healing Hurt People
It’s not what a typical medical student thinks of when they choose pediatrics as their field. But it’s now part of Dr. Bradley Stolbach’s career in children’s health care: gunshot wounds. Also stabbings and blunt force trauma inflicted by bricks, baseball bats and...
GoodKids MadCity
When a horrific school shooting in 2018 left 17 dead in affluent Parkland, Florida, nationwide headlines screamed and students received counseling and therapy dogs. When violent death hits students in Chicago’s poorer, high-crime neighborhoods, “we just get harsher...
