Twenty-five years ago, America watched in revulsion as Chicago grappled with the murder of a baby-faced murderer. He stood 4-foot-6 and, owing to his love of cookies and Snickers bars, answered to the nickname Yummy. A synopsis of that week’s serial havoc from the Tribune’s coverage:
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Robert Sandifer’s 11-year downward spiral of family neglect and juvenile delinquency finally ended Thursday in a pool of blood in a pedestrian tunnel on the South Side. It was a descent that had accelerated viciously in the last week, sending a 6th grader on the lam, wanted for murder, only to be executed, police suspect, by the gang members whose lifestyle he embraced. And so a South Side block that had lost one child this week lost another. And it consoled no one that the second child murdered was believed to have been the killer of the first.
For three days, police had searched for Robert, a diminutive 11-year-old believed to have committed two shootings Sunday night, killing his 14-year-old neighbor, Shavon Dean, and leaving another boy with a spinal cord injury. When they found him, about 12:30 a.m., Robert was lying on dirt and bits of broken glass in the mouth of a pedestrian underpass emblazoned with gang graffiti. He had been shot twice in the back of the head, execution style.
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From that surge of slaughter in 1994, the 9 million-plus people of this metropolis learned how costly the loss of even one child can be. Chicago first lost Robert Sandifer to the vicious intersection of gangs and guns. But he was only one victim in the casualty count: In the space of five days, two siblings, a 14-year-old and a 16-year-old, were arrested for assassinating an 11-year-old who had killed a 14-year-old and wounded two 16-year-olds.
In speeches and sermons and many other cries from the heart, a despondent Chicago spoke: The damage inflicted on Robert Sandifer, and the damage he inflicted, should haunt all of us. Should inspire us to rescue, to engage, each boy or girl disconnected from the secure and encouraging childhood every youth should experience.
America’s, and Chicago’s, spasm of homicide
The United States, like Chicago, then was at peak carnage — one crest of frightful murder trends intensifying since the 1960s. Then as now, the gunplay most savaged poor and minority families consigned to neighborhoods short of good schools, good jobs, good services for those living on the margins.
Responding to the desperate public demand for a safer America, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, originally authored by then-Sen. Joe Biden. It provided for 100,000 new police officers, billions of federal dollars for prisons and crime prevention programs, and a 10-year ban on the manufacture for civilian use of semi-automatic firearms defined as assault weapons.
‘So young to kill, so young to die’
The Chicago Police Department counted 931 killings in 1994, one of the highest tolls ever. During that especially homicidal passage in Chicago history, the murder rate here — 30 slayings per 100,000 residents — tripled the rate of 10.6 per 100,000 at the height of the Roaring ’20s, with Al Capone’s enforcers on the prowl.
Each of the 931 murders was its own Chicago agony. The most notorious of those cases landed a photo of Yummy Sandifer on the cover of Time magazine, above the terse headline “So young to kill, so young to die.”
If you were here, you recall that Chicago sought to explain more than to blame. We reported in an editorial — an epitaph, essentially ? that Yummy’s first family burned him and beat him; his second family, a street gang, apparently had killed him. Why would he take direction from no one ? not his mother, his grandmother, his probation officer, his counselors ? until he was directed by gang members to go on a shooting spree?
Probably because a boy who had been the victim of violence so many times appreciated someone telling him that he could dish it out too. So he did.
‘Cry if you will, but …’
The mayhem began in Chicago’s Roseland neighborhood on Aug. 28, a Sunday. Witnesses told police that, about 6 p.m., they saw Robert Sandifer shoot a 16-year-old boy, injuring his spinal cord. Three hours later, Robert sprayed shots from a 9 mm pistol at some boys playing football. A bullet to the head killed Shavon Dean, 14, who had been walking a girlfriend home to be sure she got there safely. Another bullet wounded a second 16-year-old boy in the hand. Yummy then vanished.
Police frantically scoured Chicago — a city in an uproar — until they found him early Thursday, Sept. 1, face down beneath a viaduct at 108th Street and Dauphin Avenue. He wore a T-shirt imprinted with the cartoon likeness of a Tasmanian Devil and had taken two .25-caliber rounds to the back of his skull. One of the brothers who would be convicted of the rub-out said later that a senior gang member had given the order to get rid of Yummy. Why? He was cop bait. “Yummy knew too much about the gang,” the 14-year-old boy explained to a Cook County prosecutor, “and if he would get caught by the police, he probably would have told and had all the high authority members locked up.”
Yummy wore a baggy tan suit to his funeral. A white pocket handkerchief covered his heart, and smiling stuffed animals crowded around his scrawny shoulders. Other children craned to see the mortician’s stitches that marked the exit wounds on his face. The photo on his funeral program was a mug shot from one of his arrests. His rap sheet included 28 charges, 23 of them serious. “Take a good look,” the minister preached to the other kids. “Cry if you will, but make up your mind that you will never let your life end like this.”
Young Chicago lives by the thousands
Yet in the quarter-century since, thousands of young Chicago lives have ended much as Yummy’s did. No matter how energetically and earnestly Chicagoans of all stripes rail at the futility of it all — most recently Mayor Lori Lightfoot and her police superintendent, Eddie Johnson — children and adolescents still get disconnected from stable society and wind up dead. The force vectors that end those young lives typically include bullets from firearms and so much more.
Were he alive today, Robert Sandifer would be 36 years old, approaching middle age. If he offers a lesson from the grave, it’s that Chicago cannot overestimate the potential costs of losing even one child to the nexus of gangs and guns that rules too many neighborhoods and exterminates too many lives.
Shavon’s fancy curl — the way she liked it
And Shavon Dean, the murdered innocent, the 14-year-old making sure her girlfriend got home safely? Chicago gave Shavon a splendid funeral — some 850 family members, friends, politicians, ministers, civil rights figures and community leaders. Five white limousines sat in front of Gatling’s Chapel on South Halsted Street. Shavon lay in a white casket, wearing her white dress. The Tribune noted that her silky black hair was styled in a fancy curl, the way she always liked it.
Her loved ones reacted with grace to the news of Yummy’s death. “That little boy was a victim too,” said Shavon’s aunt. “My niece was just a victim of him being victimized.”
One homage we can pay to these thousands of young people is to keep looking for some way out of metropolitan Chicago’s chronic violence. The more children all of us can mentor, the more kids we can welcome into reliable foster care, the more resources we can donate to those who work with youngsters on the edge. … The more of all that, the better.
Our alternative is to keep losing Chicago’s children.
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