A 16 year old was murdered 3 blocks away from his school. Fenger High School student, member of the Honor Roll, football player and someone’s son.
The screams of concern from Derrion’s friends as he is pummeled to death are awful. They are helpless to intervene in a brawl where gang members are pummeling each other with fists, feet and railroad ties. The culprits:
Prosecutors said Derrion, an honor roll student, was pummeled with wooden planks and kicked in the head after he found himself in the midst of a large fight on Thursday afternoon between two groups of youths a few blocks from his school, Christian Fenger Academy High School, on the South Side.
Prosecutors said the fight followed a shooting earlier in the day outside the school, involving the two groups.
Silvonus Shannon, 19; Eugene Riley, 18; Eugene Bailey, 17; and Eric Carson, 16, were charged with first-degree murder on Monday and held without bail. The police said the video helped them identify the suspects.
via 4 Teenagers Charged in Youth’s Beating Death – NYTimes.com.
The rival gangs in the video had been involved in a feud for a month straight.
The cameraman is a recent Fenger alum who went to pick up his younger sister as she finished class at his Alma Mater. She told him that a gang fight was going to occur and he resolved to film the incident because the endemic violence is never addressed. I hope Chicago PD and District Attorney do everything they can to protect the amateur cameraman and his sister. A member of either one of these gangs may want to retaliate against them for this video being recorded and released.
This is what a failed school system and community looks like. As harsh as it sounds, it just simply the truth.
A question comes to mind: when a violent gun, drug or gang related crime occurs, do any of these schools have any special protocols regarding how they deal with their students from a safety standpoint. I’m not really sure, but maybe a staggered and escorted immediate dismissal of children or mandatory parent/guardian pick up after such an incident occurs. I do not assume that all students will be met by a responsible guardian, sibling or authority. Maybe this type of proactive reaction to violence could be used by faculty to more readily identify at risk children by what help they actually receive in an emergency. It may also help identify students who would seek to be involved in such nefarious activity by randomizing the order in which students are evacuated and using the police to buffer the school premises during the hours immediately following gun violence. There aren’t any easy solutions to fixing failed school districts that exist in one of the richest countries in the world.