By Lamar Colyer III
It was Wednesday at 1 p.m., and time for bible study at a South Side
church. Those gathered inside smiled or joked and talked about football and
apple pie at New Bethlehem No. 4 Missionary Baptist Church. Five months earlier, it was a different scene inside this medium-sized, redbrick church. It was more filled with
grief than with laughter, more with pain than with joy over the murder of
fellow member Robert Munn who was eulogized here.
Munn, 29, had been involved
within his church since he was a little boy, a junior deacon for Rev. Louis
Montgomery Sr., founder and senior pastor of New Bethlehem, located at 8850 S.
Cottage Grove Ave. He had sung in the choir. He was a DJ and had become a
soundman who ran the church’s PA system. And he even helped put together the church’s
banquet facility in its basement better known as the Louis Montgomery room.
“We used to call him New
Bethlehem. That’s how much he used to do,” said community activist Pamela
Bosley.
Rev. Montgomery, Bosley’s father,
agreed. “He was mostly here all the
time, around here doing something,” Montgomery said on a Tuesday afternoon. “Whatever needed to be
done, he was around here doing it.”
But
that’s not all that Munn was known for. For
those who knew him as well as Bosley did, they often saw him hanging around a
young man named Terrell Bosley. That was her son, and Pastor Montgomery’s
grandson.
But
that’s not all that Munn was known for. For
those who knew him as well as Bosley did, they often saw him hanging around a
young man named Terrell Bosley. That was her son, and Pastor Montgomery’s
grandson.
Like Munn, Bosley was also involved
in the church. He played bass guitar. And both were murdered. A further irony
is that the murders of both young men remain unsolved. And yet their cases
highlight one of the realities of murder in the city of Chicago, where last
year 506 people became homicide victims, most of them black males and most of
them felled by gunshot.
Contacted
several times, Chicago police would not confirm the number of murder cases it
solved last year. But according to published reports, the police clearance rate
for the 506 homicides in 2012 was 25 percent.
This much
is also clear from a review of Chicago police homicide data from 2000 through
2010. There were 5,758 murders in that
time period, 3,183 or 55.28 percent that remain unsolved—among them, the cases of
Munn and Bosley. With
thousands of murder cases unsolved, it means potentially that killers are free
to kill and kill again. It is a sobering and yet somber fact for community
activists, for police, for those communities besieged by murder and gun violence.
And for families of slain loved ones, there is the absence of any
resolution.
Munn and Bosley, friends and
family say, became good friends the more they were in each other’s presence at
New Bethlehem. They hung out and even came up with nicknames for each other.
Bosley would call Munn “Black Rob” and Munn called Bosley “Rello.” And it is for some around
here an almost unbelievable irony that the two friends—likeable, faithful to
their church, good, solid young men with a bright future—would suffer the same tragic
fate.
Bosley, 18, was shot and
killed on April 4, 2006 outside of Lights of Zion Missionary Bible Church on
116th and Halsted Streets while going to choir practice. Munn was shot and killed in Sept. 24, 2012,
across the street from the church, leaving his grandmother’s house in the 8800
block of South Cottage Grove Avenue.
“I relived Terrell’s death when this happened
to Robert,” Pamela Bosley said.
After her
son’s death, Munn would help her family as much as he could. He would be the
one passing out flyers, trying to find some way to solve the case. She knew
what she must do after his death.
“That
same week, when it happened, I was like, OK; I gotta pass out flyers for
Robert, cause Robert always that with me,” she said.
Munn was
a helper. Bosley mentioned an older woman’s reaction when she found out of his
passing. She would say, “They killed Robert? He was helping me; he always
helped me.”
Leon
Hosley, deacon and owner/barber of Leon‘s Barbershop, didn’t know much about
the young man. But what he did know is that he would come in and get a haircut,
speak to him, and go about his business. If anything, Bosley knew him as a
“church boy.”
Pamela Bosley says she still cannot fathom why Munn or her son was killed. There’s no one in custody,
and she’s craving to know what happened to trigger such an act of violence.
“I would
love to know who shot Terrell and who shot Robert, so we can know what
happened,” Bosley said. “It’s gon’ bring justice, but it’s not going to give me
no closure. I do want that person, those individuals, off the street for this.”