Lavontay White Jr. and Takiya Holmes are just names now, at least on this plane. They’re angels elsewhere, I’m certain, but only names here, destined to be forgotten by most.
Lavontay, a 2-year-old, was shot in the head Tuesday when a gunman opened fire on the car he was in with his mother and her boyfriend. He died soon after.
Tayika died Tuesday as well. She was shot over the weekend. Eleven years old.
They’re just names now, as far as most are concerned.
This city’s murder factory churns out names, nothing else. Those names turn up in the newspaper and on TV, in sympathetic or outraged social media posts and on the tongues of politicians.
And they mean nothing. If they did — if all the names over all these years ever meant anything — Takiya might still be an 11-year-old girl playing with friends. Lavontay might still be breathing and bringing the kind of joy to the world that a 2-year-old can, with only a laugh.
And Kanari Gentry Bowers, another young girl shot over the weekend, might not be on life support, fighting to remain a 12-year-old girl and not another in an agonizingly long list of names.
A toddler gunned down in the middle of the day. Two girls shot a half-hour apart. Name after name after name.
It should lead to change, but Chicago has no tipping point.
Lavontay White Jr., Takiya Holmes Family photos
Lavontay White Jr., 2, left, and Takiya Holmes, 11, right, both died Feb. 14, 2017, after being shot in seperate attacks.
Lavontay White Jr., 2, left, and Takiya Holmes, 11, right, both died Feb. 14, 2017, after being shot in seperate attacks.
(Family photos)
That became obvious hundreds and hundreds of names ago.
Nobody cares. At least not really. Not enough to actually push and fight for change.
There are two simple reasons for that:
1) Those names are never attached to human beings that people in positions of power know or care about.
2) Caring costs money.
Every time I write about violence in Chicago, someone emails and says, "Oh yeah, I don’t hear you coming up with any solutions."
Right. Comprehensive urban crime deterrence is slightly above my pay grade.
But years of reporting on these issues and spending time with people in these communities — the people who did know and love the souls behind the names, the ones whose hearts broke and families shattered, the ones who never recovered because there is no recovering — led me to believe in a complex solution: Care.
Sounds easy, but it’s not.
Caring means acknowledging there is no one solution. It means accepting there is nothing simple about an environment so broken that murder becomes commonplace.
Caring means ignoring politicians who think calling in the National Guard or sending in "the Feds" will fix things. It means recognizing that relying solely on the police is unfair to law enforcement, and to everyone else.
Caring about Lavontay White Jr. and Takiya Holmes and Kanari Gentry Bowers and the hundreds and hundreds of other names means this: more police officers; more teachers and better school facilities; economic development in neighborhoods wrecked by poverty; job training programs; family counseling; pathways to employment for ex-offenders; after-school programs; and drug rehabilitation services.
Shooting victim vigil Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune
Naikeeia Williams gathers with other family members at a vigil for her daughter Takiya Holmes, 11, who was shot over the weekend and died on Feb. 14, 2017 in the 6500 block of South King Drive in Parkway Gardens.
Naikeeia Williams gathers with other family members at a vigil for her daughter Takiya Holmes, 11, who was shot over the weekend and died on Feb. 14, 2017 in the 6500 block of South King Drive in Parkway Gardens.
(Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)
It means, as my colleague John Kass explained in his Tuesday column, passing legislation that creates tougher sentencing for convicted felons caught illegally toting guns.
Caring means stopping the flow of guns into the city. It means better communication between police and residents in violent neighborhoods, communication that works both ways.
It means funding programs that work, like Cure Violence — formerly known as Cease Fire — the only program I’ve seen with qualitative and quantitative proof of its lifesaving effectiveness.
Any proposed solution that isn’t comprehensive — boosting the police force but nothing more, holding vigils, funding one program in one neighborhood — is a Band-Aid over a bullet wound. It will fail, as every partial solution that has come before has failed.
That’s the reality. The solution is caring, and caring is costly and complicated.
As far as I can tell, Mayor Rahm Emanuel doesn’t care. Gov. Bruce Rauner doesn’t care. No president has cared. The City Council doesn’t care. The rich and powerful of Chicago don’t care.
And they don’t care, I’d bet, because Lavontay White Jr. and Takiya Holmes are, in the end, just names. And names can be forgotten.
Even the names of angels.
rhuppke@chicagotribune.com
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