by Linnet Burden | Nov 24, 2021 | Spotlight
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 the...
by Linnet Burden | Nov 24, 2021 | Spotlight
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...
by Linnet Burden | Jun 27, 2021 | Spotlight
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...
by Linnet Burden | Jun 26, 2021 | Spotlight
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,...
by Linnet Burden | Jun 20, 2021 | Spotlight
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....
