5: Collateral Damage

Motive

WBEZ Chicago

Society & Culture

4.7 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2023

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A 14-year-old boy whose father was wounded in a gang shooting faces down threats of violence and the temptations of joining a gang. Meanwhile, a person who killed one woman and wounded another will avoid criminal charges.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Sessie makes crosses. Wooden painted white about two feet high. Many of them wobble when they stand.
0:06.9	August of wind can knock them down. She pays for the wood herself, of course. She buys long,
0:12.6	unfinished pieces because it's cheaper than her teenage son Michael, the one who was mowing
0:17.6	lawns to help with the family finances, cuts them in the front yard. The result is a pile of uneven
0:24.1	and jagged pieces. On a hot afternoon five women sit around a table in Sessie's front yard,
0:31.1	they pull the uneven pieces of wood from the pile Sessie's son is made and paint them white.
0:35.6	And it's hot outside so that we could start painting and then hammering them together.
0:39.9	After the wood is painted, they lay the pieces out on a sheet of plastic stretched across Sessie's
0:44.5	lawn to dry in the sun. The women are from a support group
0:54.0	called Family's Seeking Justice. Sessie founded it to bring together family members who have
0:58.8	lost loved ones to Chicago violence. Sessie has cultivated a tight-knit family of grieving mothers.
1:13.0	From what I've observed, they make up the majority of her social circle.
1:17.2	The moms meet regularly at the support group meetings and then add hawk and all the time around
1:22.2	Sessie's kitchen table. One of the moms here helping today is Patricia Deats. Patricia
1:28.8	joined the group the year before. After her 13-year-old son, Eric Crawford was murdered.
1:33.8	He was loving, he loved riding his bike, loved playing his video games, you know, just 13 years old.
1:41.2	13, yeah. What happened? Well, he left the house around 755 to go ride his bike. He only made it
1:47.2	two blocks when somebody was following him and shot him three times. Twice in a neck-end once in
1:53.6	the head. I mean, I'm being strong. I got family, I got Sessie, I got a lot of support. So just
2:02.6	hanging in there and fighting. And I go to support group every Monday. I was there for a while and then
2:08.5	I kind of like fell back because you know, depression does. It gets to you. So I kind of fell back and
2:13.6	then Sessie got me back in and got me going and I've been close with her ever since. I love her
	...

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