‘ ... FOR HIM TO BE HERE’
As he preps for high school four years after he was shot, Tavon Tanner’s family is grateful for his life
In this violent pandemic summer, Tavon Tanner has spent many days at home with his twin sister and mother watching the Chicago news. Shooting after shooting, death after death, child after child.
A 3-year-old killed. A 7-year-old. A baby who wasn’t quite 2. Children memorialized by the age at which they died. Sitting in front of the TV, watching the parade of grief, Tavon and his family feel both sad and lucky.
“It’s sad,” says Tavon, “because they ain’t giving those kids a chance to live.”
“The one that really set me off,” says his mother, Mellanie Washington, “was the 9-year-old. That story took me back to when Tavon was shot. That boy was 9, Tavon was 10. That boy was just outside playing and then” — she snaps her fingers —”gone like that. I think about his mother.”
It’s a bright August morning on the Northwest Side, with the birds chirping and the flowers in bloom, as Tavon and his mother say
“I look at it as fate. That my son goes there, that they moved four blocks away, that Detective Lynn and myself just happened to be up for that job that night when Tavon came in.” — Patrick Munyon, Chicago Police Department detective
these things. They’re on folding chairs on the otherwise vacant wooden porch, wearing blue surgical masks as a defense against their biggest current threat, COVID-19.
Four years have passed since the August evening when Tavon was sitting on his West Side porch gazing at the moon and a shooter sprayed the house with bullets. For a day or two afterward, the story of his shooting, and how his twin sister, Taniyah, stood over his bloody body crying, “Twin, don’t leave me!” seized Chicago’s imagination.
But news tends to be like a firecracker. A loud pop, then it vanishes.
That’s why in 2016 my colleague Jason Wambsgans and I began meeting with Tavon and his family. Washington wanted the world to understand how long a shooting really lasts, even if the victim survives, and how far its consequences travel. After our original 2016 story, we’ve followed up with the family every August.
Here in the summer of 2020, Tavon is on the verge of high school, with his mother hoping she can afford the one she wants for him. He’s 14, taller than his mom, and on this morning wearing skinny black jeans and a “Never Broke Again” T-shirt from the clothing line of rapper NBA YoungBoy. The shirt covers the long abdominal scar that endures as the exterior record of the internal damage done by a single bullet. He sometimes shows other kids the scar. A couple of girls have told him it’s pretty.
The shooting turned Tavon into a quieter child than he once was, and lately, though he’s friendly, he’s even quieter than before.
“It’s like he’s shut down more, now that he’s a teenager,” Washington says. She gives him a fond look. He returns a look that seems to say, “Mom, stop.”
“I just don’t like talking that much,” he says. They laugh.
Tavon’s back still aches from the bullet that entered near his lower spine then traveled up and ravaged his organs. He still has pain where a hospital IV tube dug into his chest in the weeks when it looked like he might die.
“It’s like somebody stabbing me,” he says. He looks down at his folded arms. “Nothing I can do about it.”
Watching the news of other children who have been shot, however, always reminds Tavon and his family of their good luck.
How lucky that Tavon’s alive. Lucky that with the help of a Denver real estate agent who heard about them on the news, they found this rental house in a peaceful, racially mixed neighborhood, where the new white neighbors have planted “Black Lives Matter” signs on their front lawns.
Lucky that Washington has held on to her job serving food in a nursing home, even though it exposes her to COVID-19, and even though she just spent a few days in the hospital after an asthma attack.
And this year, as Tavon prepares for high school, they feel especially lucky that on the night he was shot, they met two Chicago Police Department detectives, Patrick Munyon and Kevin Lynn.
“That night, I remember it,” Munyon says, thinking back to Aug. 8, 2016. “There was shooting after shooting that day. Detective Lynn and myself were at Mount Sinai Hospital helping out on a murder when one of us got a phone call from our sergeant.”
“There’s a 10-year-old shot,” the sergeant said. “You guys are taking that one.”
“Oh, man,” Munyon remembers thinking. “Here we go.”
In the chaos after the ambulance arrived, the detectives tried to figure out who the boy’s mother was. Would she be angry? Hysterical? Uncooperative?
“You never know,” he says. When they found Mellanie Washington, they found that, despite her obvious shock, she was calm and eager to help.
During Tavon’s weeks in the hospital, the detectives often dropped by. Tavon, they learned, was quiet, but also smart, observant and radiant whenever he laughed. They got to know the bevy of relatives who crowded around his bed.
After his release, the detectives stayed in touch, supplying updates on the investigation but also gifts on holidays and birthdays. When Tavon turned 14, they gave him four tickets to a Chicago Bulls game.
“We look past their being police,” Washington says. “They’re like family now.”
Through the years, the detectives have often asked Washington, “Do you need anything?” When Tavon was in seventh grade, they began asking about his plans for high school, a pivotal choice, especially for a boy who in the wrong school might be lured into a gang.
One day last spring, Munyon asked if she’d considered St. Patrick High School, a Roman Catholic school close enough to her home that Tavon could walk. Coincidentally, his son was a student there.
Washington had thought about it. She’s not Catholic, but she went to Catholic schools and valued the discipline.
“If I had my way,” she says, “all my children would have gone to a Catholic school. I can’t afford that. But Tavon, that’s what he needs after everything he’s been through.”
So Munyon arranged for Washington and Tavon to attend an open house for a tour. After that, Tavon shadowed Munyon’s son for a day. He’d never been in a school so racially diverse, but he liked it. He liked the food and the prospect of a weight room. His mother liked the prospect of structure and safety and the thought that maybe he could learn to play the drums.
The school offered him admission, and recently he attended its summer program. He learned to do schoolwork on an iPad since pens, pencils and notebooks are rarely used.
The school also offered financial aid, but not enough to make it affordable for Washington on her nursing home salary. So now the detectives are looking for ways to help her out. They haven’t figured out how, but they’re hopeful.
“I look at it as fate,” Munyon says. “That my son goes there, that they moved four blocks away, that Detective Lynn and myself just happened to be up for that job that night when Tavon came in.”
Munyon says they’re virtually certain who shot Tavon, and why. The man was arrested but it was determined they didn’t have sufficient evidence to prosecute. Still, he credits Washington and Tavon for communicating with them along the way.
“So many times, victims tell me, ‘We’re going to proceed with this,’ but a week later they stop answering my calls,” he says. “Mellanie and Tavon have been the best.”
While Tavon and his family wait to see whether they’ll be able to afford St. Patrick, they try to trust that fate will again be on their side. If he does wind up at the school, which is all male, his twin sister will be glad for him, though she’ll probably cry. It will be the first time they haven’t gone to school together.
A shooting changes not just its victim, but a family and a community. The shooting has shaped Taniyah’s life, too, and she knows Tavon better than anyone. During this pandemic summer, they’ve spent a lot of time in her bedroom, playing games and talking, and even if they don’t talk about the shooting, she feels its spell.
“It put a lot on him,” she says. “I think he’s still affected by it. He only sees the bad out of it.”
What’s the good out of it? “Him,” she says. “For him to be here.”