Article Source: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-chicago-homicide-responders-met-20151015-story.html
Dawn Valenti can still hear the pain in the voice of a Roseland mother the moment the woman learned she had lost a second son to gun violence within a year.
"What can you possibly tell me?" a sobbing Stephanie Franklin asked Valenti as she dropped to her knees at the crime scene.
Franklin stared into the headlights of her bullet-pocked Pontiac Bonneville, which her son Shamari Salter, 20, had driven to Champaign to enroll in Parkland College that day in late spring. He and two friends were sitting in the car when they were ambushed shortly after he returned to the neighborhood. All three died from their injuries.
Valenti, a member of a crisis response team, called a Naperville-based company that specializes in crime scene cleanups. After hearing the woman's story from Valenti, Bio-One Chicago owner Bill Muir said he told his workers, "I don't want to see one drop of blood in there." His employees worked through the night to clean the car for free. The next day, Valenti drove the car, fixed with duct tape covering the bullet holes, back to Franklin. The two began planning the funeral.
Valenti has an uneasy familiarity with the chaos of the crime scene and the aftermath of violence. She is one of four crisis responders with Chicago Survivors, a city program that was expanded in September to reach out to the families of every Chicago homicide victim.
The initiative, funded by a $2 million
U.S. Department of Justice grant and charitable donations, provides crisis intervention services that can range from candlelight vigils to grieving workshops to navigating police procedures.
"We're a city of walking wounded families," Valenti said. "The police go away, and there's no one there to help them. There's no one to guide them to the medical examiner's office, funeral planning or even to tell them why their loved one's body was in the street so long."
Program officials hope their compassionate response will be a small step toward curbing Chicago's problems with violence. In September, Chicago recorded 56 homicides, the city's deadliest September since 2002. Through the end of the month there were at least 383 homicides in Chicago, 56 more than last year at this time and 42 more than in 2013.
As distrust of police has grown in high-crime areas across the country, Chicago Survivors and other programs like it try to foster better relationships between communities and law enforcement. Crisis responders can act as a bridge, calming distraught families at crime scenes, providing police detectives sensitivity training and, sometimes, gleaning pertinent information to help solve cases, advocates said.
"We're hoping it will help in certain areas to get a better understanding and build a bit more trust," said John Escalante, the
Chicago Police Department's chief of detectives. "It's not that we're immune to what they're going through, but our role is to investigate the murder and arrest the person who committed the murder, and sometimes our detectives don't have time to tell them about that process."
Other major cities have similar programs, including Los Angeles, where police credit an initiative involving community groups, former gang members and specialized patrol officers with helping reduce that city's violence by connecting with the community.
Roseanna Ander, executive director of University of Chicago Crime Lab, a university-funded think tank that attempts to develop new approaches to reducing violence, said Chicago Survivors could prevent violence on two fronts: curtailing retaliatory violence and raising police case clearance rates.
The program gives "the family an opportunity to get the help they need, give that sibling other avenues to handle that pain and grief so that they don't further the cycle of violence and try to settle the score themselves," Ander said. "They're also helping the family work within the system to solve the crime. When you bring families, witnesses and communities together to help police get information to get crimes solved, it has the potential to restore confidence in the system."
Chicago Survivors was launched as a city pilot program in November 2014 by Chicago Citizens for Change, a nonprofit that attempts to combat violence through community action. At the request of the city, the program began covering all of Chicago last month, Escalante said.
The expedited rollout, which includes about a dozen support staff members and volunteers, follows months of encouraging signs, city officials said. From late May through September, the program has provided support for 80 families; only one family has refused services.
"Through this partnership with the Department of Justice, for the first time, Chicago will have comprehensive crisis response for families who are victims of homicide so that we can stick by them and provide longer-term services," Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in a statement Sept. 30. "Violence prevention is not just the job of CPD. It's the job of every city department and our communities. This is a great example of how our city departments are coming together to work with community partners to strengthen our response to violence."
The program started with two crisis responders assigned to homicides in the violence-plagued Calumet District on the city's Far South Side. Today, when a homicide is reported, the Police Department calls one of four crisis responders, who work rotating schedules, to provide information about the incident and where to meet detectives.
On a recent Wednesday, a crisis responder who was stuck in traffic called Valenti to fill in for her at the scene of a fatal shooting on the city's Southeast Side. The sun had just begun to peek over houses in the 9100 block of South Yates Boulevard, where 17-year-old Armonni Nelson had been shot answering a knock on the back door of the family's one-story bungalow.
As Valenti pulled up to the house, which was wrapped with a ribbon of yellow police tape, the shock that initially paralyzed the teen's relatives had turned to palpable agony.
The soft sobs of Nelson's mother, Angela Nelson, who sat with her head bowed in the back of a parked car, turned to emotional cries of the boy's name. Older brother D.J. Nelson, who held the teen during his last moments, changed out of his bloodstained T-shirt and held up the bottom of a fresh one to dry his tears as he anxiously paced the street.
Meanwhile, as detectives and evidence technicians shuffled in and out of her home, Armonni Nelson's grandmother, Alice Johnson, sat stoically on a neighbor's porch, recollecting the moment she found her grandson in a pool of blood.
"I tried to talk to him, and he just closed his eyes," Johnson said. "I said, 'Stay with me, Armonni. Stay with me. Help is on the way.' ... He was breathing really hard and that was it."
In his final days, Nelson was afraid because he had been threatened by men in the neighborhood, Johnson said. He didn't dare go toward 93rd Street, where he'd been robbed recently. The teen was so crippled by fear that he had stopped going to school and enrolled in online college courses.
He loved music and aspired to be a hip-hop artist. The teen, whose rap name was Faizon, had recently shot his first music video, although it hadn't been released.
As the reality of his death sank in, Valenti diverted relatives' attention while authorities moved his body from the rear of the home. After learning Nelson's mother and grandmother have diabetes, Valenti ran around the corner to grab them food before walking them through the next steps, which included the dreaded trip to the Cook County medical examiner's office, where relatives typically are shown a postmortem photo of the victim's face to confirm his or her identity.
"I went with another family to ID their son, and the mother told me, 'I thought giving birth was hard. This was the hardest thing I've ever had to do,' " Valenti said.
For Valenti, though the families are different, the fallout from the violence is the same. A mother who wants to see the body of her child. A house filled with relatives in the days leading to a funeral. And then an awkward loneliness as others return to their normal lives.
"It's not ever easy," said Valenti, a self-described "street soldier" with tattoo sleeves. "It's times when it hits me, and it hits me really hard. I am human. I have an 18-year-old son and this kid was 17, and so many of the homicides we're dealing with are under 26 years old.
"It's hard at times, but to give them strength when they don't have the strength, that's what I'm there to do."
Valenti, a former delivery driver, stumbled into her role as an advocate for victims' families when her best friend's son died along with 20 others in the infamous E2 nightclub stampede in 2003. A year after the tragedy, Valenti found herself puzzled at the lack of support for victims' families. So she took it upon herself to lead a vigil outside the South Loop venue — a memorial she still holds each year.
"My heart and my spirit said, 'This is where you need to be. ... This is the work you should be doing,'" Valenti said.
Others with the Chicago Survivors are driven by that same passion. Joy McCormick founded Chicago Citizens for Change after her son Frankie Valencia, a 21-year-old
DePaul University honors student, died from a gunshot outside a Humboldt Park party in 2009.
Many times, having families interact with other "survivors" helps them through their grieving process, said Susan Johnson, executive director of Chicago Survivors. Last month the group held its first workshop for victims' families in hopes of expanding that approach.
The class, called I Can't Sleep, aimed to help victims' relatives who suffer from insomnia. The free class filled up within days, prompting the group to hold another session.
It's not unusual for people to have pathological insomnia, fits of rage or depression after experiencing the kind of loss D.J. Nelson went through with his brother, advocates said.
The night before Armonni Nelson's death, D.J. Nelson had trouble sleeping. His friend had an altercation with some men earlier in the day, and the friend's mother was shot around 11 p.m. while taking out the trash. Hours later, D.J. Nelson fell asleep only to be awakened by a knock at the back door, the sound of gunshots and his brother telling him not to answer the door.
He found his brother bleeding in the hallway.
"He was a good student," D.J. Nelson said. "He was artistic, smart, one of those guys who'd get into an argument about anything because he was a know-it-all, but he was good guy. My little brother was gonna be a nice young man."
In this case, as in many, Valenti worried there might be retaliation, which might lead to further bloodshed in the neighborhood. One relative remarked, "I hope police get these guys before they do."
Around the same time, Valenti spotted a friend bringing Nelson a bottle of liquor. Before she left, Valenti warned the older brother against acting on raw emotion.
"Will he?" Valenti asked. "I don't know. But what he said to me was: 'I promise I'm going to do nothing.' I explained to him what comes behind those thoughts. I mean, he has the right to feel that way. Someone just knocked on his door and shot his little brother. He was feeling guilty ... he was blaming himself, and I told him, 'It's not your fault.' And it's not his fault, because he didn't pull the trigger."
As officers took down police tape, family members noticed that the hallway of the family home where Armonni Nelson had collapsed was clean. Valenti had called her partners at Bio-One, and they had moved in behind detectives and soaked up the blood. Typically the company works with families' home insurance carriers and, in some cases a deductible may apply.
Before he left, Muir gave one of Armonni Nelson's cousins a stone he'd found from a recent cleanup, dark and jagged on one side and "a gorgeous blue" quartz on the other.
"I told him, 'Squeeze this when you're angry to calm you down,'" Muir said. "It was kind of a yin and yang thing, you know, for every dark side, a bright side."
