CHICAGO
— At Veronica Lopez’s Sweet 16 party, children played among the
headstones. Aunts, uncles and cousins sat on lawn chairs and striped
blankets on the grass. A few feet away from Veronica’s grave, her four
older sisters pressed candles into a red velvet cake and carefully lit
them.
Veronica’s
mother watched them and waited for a sign from the gentle wind. “Let
her blow out her own candles,” she directed her daughters, her voice
hopeful.
Veronica,
called Dayday by her family, was buried in this cemetery west of
Chicago in June after being shot to death at age 15. She was a friendly
girl who loved swimming, labored over science projects and wanted to
move away from Chicago’s violence, toward a better life. Instead, she
was caught in an onslaught of gunfire here that no one has been able to
stop — not the police, not the mayor, not parents or preachers.
She was one of six people killed in gunfire in Chicago over Memorial Day weekend. Altogether, 64 people were shot during those three days, which started a summer of bloodshed that has continued into autumn. That weekend, The New York Times tracked the shootings to chronicle the surge in violence that has taken 654 lives in Chicago so far this year.
Veronica
stood out among those killed. She was the youngest, a spunky ninth
grader. She was shot in an affluent lakefront neighborhood that is
largely free of Chicago’s gang violence. And she was the only female
victim killed by gunfire that weekend.
Her
death was both mysterious and predictable. She was not in a gang, the
police and her family said, but gangs were a part of her life. In
Chicago, that is not unusual. Many people are intimately connected to
gangs over generations, with allegiances woven through families and
friendships the way loyalties to sports teams or alma maters are passed
down in the wealthier neighborhoods across town.
Young
women can be drawn in to the world of gangs because of their brothers
or where they live — or by falling in love with the wrong person. They
are often more than bystanders, but less than participants.
Veronica
came from a family of women, the youngest of five daughters, a loyal
and loving band of sisters raised by a single working mother. Time and
again, they fell into relationships with men in gangs.
Veronica
tried to be vigilant. She avoided walking down the street with gang
members, including friends she had known since elementary school. She
rarely went to parties, because she worried about fights and gunfire.
But
those measures could not stop the barrage of violence that struck close
to her again and again in her last year. Tensions from gang rivalries
and at least three shootings of people she knew intruded on her teenage
life, leading her to dwell on the possibility of dying.
Her
mother, Diana Mercado, was asleep at 2 a.m. on May 28 when she awoke to
her dog barking, then persistent knocking on her apartment door. She
opened it to find a cluster of police officers.
“Do
you know a Veronica Lopez?” an officer asked, sounding to Ms. Mercado
as though he delivered such news all day long. “She may have been shot.”
A First Flight
The
first time Veronica’s mother fled gang violence, she did so in the dead
of night. In February 2001, she packed a few belongings, jammed them in
the trunk of her small white sedan, gathered her five girls and drove
them away from Cicero, a suburb on the western edge of Chicago. Veronica
was 5 months old.
Ms.
Mercado had to get her oldest daughter, Samantha, away from the gang
she was falling into. She had to leave Veronica’s father, Ricardo, who
was being threatened by gang members.
“We packed whatever we could in the car,” she said. “I just wanted to get my kids away from there.”
She drove a mere six miles, to Belmont Cragin, a neighborhood on the Northwest Side of Chicago, but it felt like a world away.
Violence
in Chicago was difficult to dodge, except for those with the means to
live in the city’s wealthier neighborhoods. But Belmont Cragin was
affordable and felt safe, a working-class enclave of Latino families,
some young professionals and older Polish residents.
Ms.
Mercado soon had a steady job at an auto-parts store. Samantha, then
16, chose not to return to school, instead helping her mother by caring
for her siblings: Amanda, Destiny, Miranda and Veronica.
They
remember Veronica as a bubbly toddler with a head of dark, springy
curls, who would sit in a car seat on the living room floor and fall
asleep to Disney movies on the VCR: “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Lion
King” and her favorite, “The Aristocats.”
In
elementary school, she made friends easily and was the stage manager
for a school play. “She liked bossing people around,” one longtime
friend, Selena Herrera, said with a smile.
Even
before joining the cheerleading squad in middle school, she led her
nephew and cousins through routines in the backyard. In the summer, she
swam in public pools, expertly diving into the deep end.
In
her class picture from eighth grade, she smiled into the camera, eyes
bright, arms folded, fingernails gleaming with red polish. Stephanie
Mota, 16, a middle school friend, recalled stuttering nervously during a
class presentation that she and Veronica had prepared on how a
microwave works.
“She
ended up doing the whole thing,” Ms. Mota said. “She was smart. She
really put her mind to it. She’d goof around, but when it was time to
work, she got it done.”
In
the summer of 2015, before entering ninth grade, Veronica met Jalid
Alcocer, a teenager known as JoJo. On weekends, they would take walks on
the 606, an elevated park on an old Northwest Side railroad track.
JoJo,
now 16, said he was drawn to her warmth, her confidence, her determined
optimism. On a walk one day, he went in for a kiss. “She just started
calling me her man,” he said.
A Stream of Men and Problems
The
men in the lives of the Mercado women tended to bring trouble. For
Veronica’s mother, there was Miguel, her first real boyfriend, whom she
admired for his fearlessness. Guy, her next serious boyfriend, had a
sweet way with her. And Jose was smart and attentive. “I loved the way
he danced,” she said. “He was real romantic. I used to love being in his
arms.”
But each was also involved in a gang. Or, as Ms. Mercado put it, “Who wasn’t in a gang?”
Each
relationship brought another daughter, and usually ended when the man
went to jail. But even when relationships fizzle, the children resulting
from them can knit gang affiliations deeper into families.
A Weekend in Chicago
Three days, 64 people shot, six of them dead: Memorial
Day on the streets, and the violence that has engulfed families and
neighborhoods.
Ms.
Mercado tried to warn her daughters. “Didn’t you learn from me?” she
asked them. “You can’t walk the streets with these guys. You can’t go to
the movies. It’s too dangerous.”
“Be careful,” she would tell Veronica. “Bullets have no names.”
There
was a time when Ms. Mercado was relieved that all her children were
girls. It made them less likely to be recruited by gangs, to get into
trouble, to end up in prison, she thought.
But all four of Veronica’s sisters ended up dating men who were affiliated with gangs, and three had children with them.
Veronica’s boyfriend, JoJo, also described loose gang ties.
“I don’t gangbang,” he said in August. “I chill with them.”
In
truth, there is a wide spectrum of gang involvement. While some are
members who have joined through formal rituals, others are affiliated
because of where they live or the people they spend time with.
Trouble
escalated for the Mercado family when one sister’s boyfriend defected
to a different gang. Remaining in the original gang was another sister’s
boyfriend.
“Now it’s like a war because they left,” Ms. Mercado said. “They put us in the middle of it.”
Violence Closes In
In
the last year of Veronica’s life, danger grew steadily closer to the
Mercados and their two-bedroom apartment above a cellphone store.
But,
like any young teenager about to start high school, Veronica was
focused on her freshman year. She would be a freshman at North-Grand
High School, a gleaming building on the site of an old Schwinn factory.
It is considered one of the better, and safer, schools in the area.
And
she had a new “brother,” as she lovingly called him: Orlando Calderon,
known as Rico, a teenager her mother had taken in when he was kicked out
of his own home. Yes, he was in a gang, but Ms. Mercado saw him as a
sweet-natured and vulnerable young man, a victim of peer pressure. She
was tickled when he cooked dinner for the family and took out the
garbage without being asked. For a time, he dated one of Veronica’s
sisters, Miranda.
But
one week before classes were to start, Veronica’s mother called with
heartbreaking news: Rico had been fatally shot in a neighborhood park.
Veronica took it hard. “She went crazy,” Ms. Mercado said.
Suddenly,
friends and family began seeing a despairing side to her. She seemed to
fixate on death, telling friends she envisioned being reincarnated as a
butterfly.
“She’d
always talk about, ‘I really want to see Rico, I just want to go with
him to heaven,’” Gisele Vides, a friend from school, said. “It worried
me when she said that.”
The
violence around Veronica continued. In March, the ex-boyfriend of
another sister was killed in gang violence. And in April, Veronica was
caught up in a shooting herself.
She,
her sister Destiny and Destiny’s baby were riding in a car with a close
family friend when they stopped for gas and were confronted by two men
in another car who flashed gang signs.
Veronica jumped out of the car. “He’s not part of that life!” she screamed, ordering the men to leave her friend alone.
But one of the men opened fire. Veronica was standing right next to her friend, who was shot. She escaped injury.
The police soon made an arrest, and Ms. Mercado was told that prosecutors needed Veronica to testify before a grand jury.
She
resisted, worried that it would make her daughter a target. “‘I don’t
want my child testifying,’” Ms. Mercado said she told the police. “And
they said the state will subpoena her if they have to.”
Veronica, 15, was soon telling the story to grand jurors.
Life
at school became shaky. Veronica was failing classes. Sometimes she
skipped school. On more than one occasion, she was sent home for
fighting, skirmishes that her mother said were provoked by other girls.
Friends said that she sometimes burst into tears and had to be comforted
by teachers.
“I know she was angry,” Ms. Mercado said. “She was like, ‘Why do they have to keep killing people I love?’”
Ms.
Mercado was growing more worried by the day. But she had always seen
herself as a supportive mother, a friend to her girls, and she was
reluctant to put too many restrictions on Veronica.
More
and more, Veronica told friends that she wanted to get out of Chicago.
She pressed her mother to let her move to California to live with Ms.
Mercado’s brother, a Marine. Then she abandoned that plan and started
daydreaming with her mother about the two of them making a new life in
Florida.
“After
Rico died, she realized that this was a dangerous city,” said Gisele,
her school friend. “She wanted to get away from here and have a good
life.”
The Last Drive
Friday night of Memorial Day
weekend was hot and humid, with a threat of rain. That spring, Veronica
had come to enjoy rides along Lake Shore Drive as a passenger in a car
driven by a friend, Jose Alvarez, the 28-year-old uncle of a high school
classmate.
That night, she was again in his Jeep, the windows rolled down to catch the breeze.
On
their way to Lake Shore Drive, they stopped at a gas station, where Mr.
Alvarez exchanged taunts with a couple of strangers. But the carload of
people — four in the back seat, Veronica and Mr. Alvarez in the front —
laughed it off and kept driving.
At one point, Mr. Alvarez posted a video on Snapchat, flashing signs disrespecting another gang.
A recording of a Snapchat video made by Jose
Alvarez, the driver of the car Veronica Lopez was riding in when she was
killed, shortly before the shooting.
Veronica
sent a text to her boyfriend, JoJo, wishing him good night. When he
didn’t respond, she wrote: “Can you say it back at least. What if I die
tonight.”
The
beaches alongside the eight-lane Lake Shore Drive are largely empty
after midnight. Lake Michigan is an endless, inky expanse. Few lights
shine from the stately prewar apartment buildings that line the curving
drive north of downtown.
Veronica’s
friend Jacqui, who asked to be identified only by her first name
because she fears retaliation, was in the back seat. She remembers
looking out her window and watching the city fly by.
As Jacqui recalled, the Jeep reached Lake Shore Drive, and Veronica’s favorite song by Duke Da Beast was playing.
I’m riding down Lake Shore Drive / getting high, out of my mind
Boy ya blind / so put your feelings to the side / while we ride down Lake Shore Drive
Then Jacqui heard a sudden, sharp sound: glass breaking.
At
first, she thought another car had crashed into them. Then she realized
it was gunshots. Shards of glass flew everywhere. She screamed and
ducked.
Mr.
Alvarez said later that he couldn’t see much of the attack. “We were
innocently driving,” he said. “I’m smiling, she’s smiling. I hear boom
and another boom, and I see the windshield come in, and bullet holes.
They pull right alongside and start shooting, at least 15 shots.”
One
bullet struck Mr. Alvarez in his left arm. Another grazed his forehead.
Veronica was hit over and over: three times in her left arm, once in
her shoulder, once in her torso.
As
they raced to a hospital, Veronica was bleeding heavily and drifting in
and out of consciousness. Jacqui remembers her saying one thing: “I
love you guys.”
Few Answers
The
walls of the waiting room at Presence Saint Joseph Hospital on the
North Side seemed to be closing in on Ms. Mercado. When news came that
Veronica was dead, she vomited into a trash can.
The
police had little to say that morning. She has talked to them only a
few times since. “They don’t know anything,” she said. “They told me
that I’ll hear something before they do.”
Ms.
Mercado said she had heard rumors about who was following the Jeep that
night and who was the target. A stranger sent her a tip through
Facebook, which she passed along to the police.
But
more than five months later, Veronica’s death is a mystery. Was she
killed because she was in a car with targeted gang members, the working
theory of the Chicago Police Department? Was it because of her grand
jury testimony, a rumor at school? Or could her death have had nothing
to do with gangs — perhaps a road rage crime carried out by strangers?
Her mother does not believe Veronica was the intended target, and she has little hope that the police will arrest someone.
The
Chicago police’s clearance rate for murders committed this year is just
20 percent. In the 64 shootings over Memorial Day weekend, they have
made two arrests.
An Endless Grief
Ms.
Mercado has at times appeared paralyzed by grief. “Most of the time,”
she said, “I go to sleep and hope I never wake up again.” She thought
about seeing a therapist, but even with insurance, the cost was too
high. Amanda, one of Veronica’s older siblings, said she felt she had
lost not just her sister, but her mother as well.
Since
Memorial Day weekend, Ms. Mercado has found comfort sitting at
Veronica’s grave at Queen of Heaven Cemetery. It is adorned with pink
flowers and balloons, a black-and-white portrait and a plastic stake
with “Sister” in cursive lettering.
This
is where Ms. Mercado spends her days off from the auto-parts store. In
the quiet of the cemetery, she thinks about “the what ifs,” as she calls
them. What if Veronica had never met Mr. Alvarez? What if Veronica had
moved to California to live with Ms. Mercado’s brother?
What if Veronica were still alive, and the two were preparing to move to Florida, finally escaping Chicago’s violence?
Ms.
Mercado is free to leave Chicago behind. Her four other daughters are
all grown. Miranda, the sister Veronica most admired, started classes
this fall at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The others have jobs
and children to keep them busy.
But
Ms. Mercado says she will stay. “No, I’m not going now,” she said,
stroking the grass that has sprung up over her daughter’s grave. “I’m
not leaving my baby.”
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