10-year-old, a bullet, and what happened on Chicago streets
Boy was one of 24 children age 12 or younger shot in the Windy City this year
He wanted to see the bullet. For weeks, he had felt it, a bump and an ache, lodged just below his left shoulder. Sometimes other kids asked if they could touch it, and he’d say yes, but not too hard.
If asked, he might pull up his shirt and show the long, fresh scar that snaked from his breastbone to below his navel.
“Thirty staples,” he might say, shyly, wondrously, but even the staples in his tender skin didn’t grip his mind the way the bullet did.
He had carried the bullet in his small body since the August night it pierced his back near the base of his spinal cord and ripped upward, ravaging his pancreas, his stomach, his spleen, a kidney, his left lung. He sometimes texted his mother in the middle of the night to tell her that it hurt.
Now, on a gray October day, a doctor is about to cut the bullet out, and he’s hoping for the chance to inspect the little metal invader.
In a surgery prep room at Lurie Children’s Hospital, he sits in a chair, leaning on his mother’s arm, while doctors and nurses bustle around.
“How do you prefer to be called?” a doctor asks.
“Tavon,” he said. Not Tayvon. Tuh-von.
He isn’t eager to get back into a hospital bed. He spent most of August and September in one, stretched out on his back for so long that he still has a bald spot where his head chafed against the pillow.
But he lies there wide-eyed and quiet as relatives pray over him, whisper in his ear, promise him hot wings when the surgery is over. Then it’s time. “Ready to go, kiddo?” a specialist in children’s fears asks, and with barely a movement or a sound, Tavon begins to cry.
From the first day of January through the middle of December this year, 24 children 12 or younger were shot in Chicago.
Shot stepping out of a car. Playing in the street. In front of a home.
They were shot in the jaw, the chest, the face, the arm, the groin, the back, the foot, the leg, the abdomen, the head.
There are many reasons the parents of a child who has been shot might prefer not to talk in public about what happened.
But Mellanie Washington was different.
Washington, 39, was hesitant at first, but she and Tavon came to believe that telling their story might matter. Let people see the damage. Let them know how the shooting of a child changes everything, and what it takes to recover.
“I want everybody to know what he’s been through,” she said.
She wants everybody to know one other thing as well.
“He’s still here. He’s still here.”
Even in the daily chronicle of this year’s Chicago violence, Monday, Aug. 8, stood out: the city’s deadliest day in 13 years. Nineteen people were shot, nine of them killed. Among the wounded was a 10-year-old boy who had been playing on his porch on West Polk Street in the Lawndale neighborhood.
Tavon Tanner. He was staring at the moon. That’s what Tavon remembers about the moment before the bullet hit, how he was studying that bright light in the sky.
From the front steps of Tavon’s home, it was possible to glimpse the commotion at the end of the block, down by the basketball court, a swirl of police lights, yellow tape, officers and gawkers. Early that evening, someone had shot a man dead, in the head.
Acouple of hours later, a new set of sirens launched into the night. Another block, another victim. From the back of his apartment, Tavon had heard gunfire and come to the front porch to ask his mother if she’d heard, too.
Tavon sat near his mother, gazing at the moon.
The bullets, when they came, seemed to come from nowhere, like the crack of thunder.
Tavon doesn’t remember much of what happened after the shooting, but his mother does.
She can still see Tavon’s bloated abdomen as he lay on a hospital gurney, feel herself pacing and pacing, smoking cigarette after cigarette, outside the emergency room, which was packed with relatives and friends.
She remembers Tavon’s sister asking, “Is my twin going to live?”
Yes, she told her daughter. No matter how many dead children she’d seen on TV, her child would not be one.
“I never once planned a funeral,” she says. “I knew I wasn’t going to sit in no front row at a funeral.”
A small bullet travels through a small body with giant force. Tavon weighed 70 pounds.
“It would be like me being shot with a small cannonball,” says Dr. Ryan Sullivan, a trauma surgeon on call the night Tavon was rushed into Mount Sinai Hospital.
Tavon lost his spleen that night, and with it his ability to fight infection. The abdominal surgery would leave him at permanent risk of internal obstructions. For the rest of his life, a long scar on his torso would look back at him from the mirror.
Leaving the bullet for the time being seemed like a wise choice, doctors thought, and so it stayed.
Talik, who is 7, seems lonely. He and Tavon used to play basketball and football together, ride bikes, chase each other around. Now, running and jumping are painful for Tavon, and so Talik plays alone.
But Tavon promised his little brother that they’d play again after the bullet was out. And on that October day, a week after his 11th birthday, he is rolled into an operating room at Lurie Children’s Hospital.
He is still sedated when the doctor, dressed in blue scrubs, walks into the waiting room where a dozen or so family members have congregated.
“The bullet is out,” the doctor says.
But Tavon wouldn’t get to see it after all. Police procedure. The doctor had passed it to a scrub nurse, who slipped it into an evidence envelope.
Tavon’s case remains under investigation.
While Washington was working, she seldom took her family to church. But Tavon started pestering her to go.
Church, like the hospital, gives him something he craves: a sense of safety.
“When I go to church,” he says, “like for the whole week, I can sleep.”
Toward the end of the service on a snowy December Sunday at the Greater Way Missionary Baptist Church, the preacher names him, mentions that he was shot, waves his arm. “Amen!” the crowd calls. “The reason why we clapping,” the minister calls, “is you’re still here.” “Amen!” the crowd cries. When the preacher tells them that Tavon has another surgery coming soon, Mellanie Washington speaks up.
No, she says. The surgery was last Tuesday.
Surgery number eight. To remove the stent. The last surgery, if he’s lucky.
The church fills again with shouts and applause for the boy who was shot.
Awhile later, Tavon walks out into the falling snow. He skids around the parking lot as if it were a skating rink, laughing.
Still here.