By John W. Fountain
One. One bullet. One
gun. One hot summer's night. One death. One city. One
dream.
One funeral. One
father's grief.
One community's
scourge. One mother's tears. One child's fears. One. One last kiss. One pastor's plight. One hope. One fight.
This is the first
in an occasional, yearlong series that looks intimately behind the numbers of
murders in Chicago, which in 2012 totaled 506—more than one a day,
nearly 10 a week, about 42 a month.
The numbers tell only
part of the story in a city with a deadly brew of guns, gangs, and brazen
gunmen with a seemingly insatiable thirst for blood. For lost in the number of
homicides each year, in this city, now dubbed by many here as “Chi-raq,” is the
number of recorded shooting incidents last year. That number, according to
police: 2,460.
So the death bell
tolls, here in a town where hundreds are shot down in bloodstained streets, and
where murder on the city's West and South Sides has become as commonplace as
the rickety rumble of a downtown elevated train—momentarily interrupting time
and space, then passing benignly.
So the body count
mounts: No. 1… No. 13… No. 21…
And yet, the most
significant number somehow slips through the cracks.
That number?
It isn't the
hundreds of young people or the number of innocent little school-age girls and
boys caught in the crossfire of gangs in the light of day, even while at play. It’s
not the number of times the agony and wail of loved ones rises after the gun smoke
has cleared and another soul lay fatally wounded, like road kill.
It isn't the year-end
tally. Not the more than 500 people murdered last year that ought to be
sufficient enough for one city to find some way to at last make the shooting
stop.
The most
important number: One. And the most significant story: The story of one.
For lost in the
bean count, in the routine tallying of murder is the individual toll, the human
faces, the names and souls behind the numbers, the real costs and loss. Eroded
is our sensitivity to even one life extinguished by murder, let alone hundreds—moreover,
hundreds of thousands in America over just the last 35 years. Lost amid the
notion that a murder victim may have “got what was coming to him” is the incalculable
value of human life.
In losing sight
of the significance of “one,” we slip slowly into the callous complacency of
accepting what we once deemed unacceptable, damnable, horrific. And this can be
the first misstep down the slippery slope to genocide, Maafa, Holocaust. They
all begin with one.
One.
One father’s kiss.
Leaning into a bronze-colored coffin last Thursday night, Esteban Dorantes lovingly
kissed his son Rey goodbye as mourners, most of them young, sniffled, wept
aloud or tearfully hugged.
Rey should have
turned 15 just two days earlier. Except, by then, he had already been dead for four
days.
He was standing
on his porch in the West Side’s Humboldt Park about 10 minutes before midnight
Friday Jan. 11, when two gunmen emerged.
They walked up,
police say, opened fire, leaving behind nine shell casings. Bullets found their
mark, piercing the teenager’s flesh, carving a deadly path.
Rey was not the
city’s first slaying. And it doesn’t matter much to his family which number is
his to claim in this year’s official murder tally. Dead is dead.
One
murdered son. One grieving father.
One kiss goodbye
and enough heartache for a lifetime, caused by the murder of just one.