‘I see them coming around’
After 7-year-old Natalia Wallace’s fatal shooting on another Fourth of July, her siblings and family still navigate grief
Denise and Nate Wallace flinched in unison, as if their small bodies were both overtaken by an electric shock.
On a recent afternoon, the two children were sitting in the back seat of their father’s car near West Madison Street and Karlov Avenue, ready to pick up T-shirts printed with their 7-year-old sister Natalia “Natalie” Wallace’s face ahead of a memorial gathering for the first anniversary of her death.
But before they could see the custom shirts, loud pops filled the air.
The bangs were sporadic, drawn out for about a minute. Denise, 13, squealed. Nate, 10, said in a quivering voice, “I want to go back in the house.”
For them, the crackle of fireworks can generate petrifying memories.
On the Fourth of July last year, the two watched three gunmen jump out of a car and fire at least 20 bullets in their direction as they played with their sister and their cousins
on the sidewalk in front of their great-grandmother’s West Side house. One bullet pierced their sister’s forehead.
The girl the family called by her nickname, Natalie, died at Stroger Hospital.
In the year since, Natalie’s surviving siblings — Denise and Nate, and 11-year-old Ashanti — have grappled with the daily terror of going on without her. They disappeared inside for months as violence raged last summer and more young children were shot in Chicago, some just infants.
This summer has brought more of the same, including over the holiday weekend that marked a year since Natalie’s death. At least 108 people were shot, 17 fatally, and two young children were struck by bullets.
The two who narrowly avoided shots on the same holiday in 2020, Denise and Nate, blamed themselves for what happened to Natalie. Ashanti, who has autism and is nonverbal, walked around the Wallaces’ home afterward as if she was searching for something.
All their grief has left the trio disoriented, with laughter returning one moment and unbearable silence from remembering Natalie’s absence the next. The rest of the family sees it, too.
“It kind of hurts me that I could never shield them from that type of pain,” said Nathan Wallace, their 30-year-old father. “They used to like fireworks. Now they hear them, it just brings them back to that same day. That’s like taking your kids’ innocence away.”
Wallace himself doesn’t know if the day will ever come when he won’t feel responsible for losing his 7-year-old girl. His final moment with her was chasing her outside that day, planting a smooch that she wiped off with a sweet smile. “Baby, I love you,” he repeated.
He left for the store, and in five minutes the gunmen had come and gone. Denise and Nate’s voices later that day, saying again and again, “Natalie got shot,” still haunt him.
Guilt and fear
Natalie was one of 13 children aged 10 or under who were shot from the start of last year up to July 5, 2020, including two others who died, according to Tribune data.
Already in the same period this year, another 13 children in that age range have been shot, including one who died, the data show.
Then there are the children left behind in the orbit of those shootings.
Experts have found what one might expect: That experiencing gun violence can shatter children’s sense of safety even if bullets never touch them. A 2019 study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence found 58% of children who had seen or heard gunshots were “very or extremely distressed,” feeling angry, sad and scared afterward.
This was more pronounced in children under 10 and in urban areas, the study found, where youth were more likely to develop defensive habits that can range from hiding until the shooting stops to acquiring a gun for protection afterward.
Research also shows that those under 18 who experience a sibling death suffer consequences that last well into adulthood. A 2017 study by the Journal of the American Medical Association, for example, found that those who lost a sibling during childhood — albeit from mostly disease and not violence — were much more likely to die in the few decades that followed, and that the highest risk was during the first year after the sibling’s death.
About a month after Natalie’s death, Wallace started sending Denise and Nate to virtual therapy three times a week with the help of a crisis responders organization for families of homicide victims. His children had grown so withdrawn that he didn’t know what they were thinking, but he knew they were in pain because nothing seemed to interest them anymore.
Oji Eggleston, the executive director of Chicago Survivors, which provides the free therapy to Denise and Nate, said his nonprofit has seen demand for its youth clinical counseling soar this year compared with 2020.
“Behind every single loss, there are family members behind that loss,” Eggleston said. “So it really increases the impact of that one loss across our Chicago communities.”
Before Natalie was even buried, Denise had curled up next to her father while they watched an action movie. The girl who usually hid her feelings behind a shy smile started crying and, after Wallace consoled her, she finally said, “I don’t want to live no more. Natalie ain’t here.”
Wallace felt the same way, but he didn’t say so. He scooped up Denise in his arms and held her as sobs racked her body. They never finished the movie.
Nate’s reaction to the shooting manifested itself in worry. In January, a staffer at his school, Crown Community Academy of Fine Arts Center, told Wallace that his son had been looking up information on Natalie’s alleged killers using his district-issued Chromebook.
When Wallace sat Nate down to talk, the son peppered his father with questions: “Will they get life? If they get life and they get out, what you gonna
do? Is somebody gonna be after me?”
Coping one breath at a time
Wallace said therapy has helped Denise laugh again and return to her outspoken self. And it has helped Nate feel safer. The two can now speak about Natalie without crying.
“With therapy, their whole mood would change,” Wallace said. “But at the end of the day, there’s only so much therapy will do for you.”
Children who survive traumatic events often remain hypervigilant long after the danger has passed, said Dr. Sonya Dinizulu, an adolescence psychologist at the University of Chicago’s Comer Children’s Hospital. The threat can color their worldview with thoughts that they and their loved ones are not safe or with behaviors such as avoiding any reminders of the event and acting out.
While acknowledging that many families from disenfranchised neighborhoods need additional social services, Dinizulu said therapy can be a key step to traumatized children understanding that the events of the past are no longer happening to them.
“Trauma disrupts the entire world,” Dinizulu said.
“It turns everything upside down. The people who have been affected the most are no longer in the driver’s seat. … So what we try to do with therapy, the first line of defense is try to establish some sense of safety.”
Before the fireworks spooked Nate last week, his cousins had gathered around the basketball hoop in front of his great-grandmother’s house in the 100 block of North Latrobe Avenue, the same place where Natalie was shot.
They hollered and tussled over a ball. But the 10-yearold did not want to play. He preferred to sit indoors before briefly coming out on the porch to eat a grape ice pop.
“I’m kind of good at basketball,” Nate said. “But I don’t really go out that much. I stay inside mostly. That’s all.”
His reluctance to leave the house used to be more severe, his father said. Nate would always turn down invitations to go to the store for a snack so he could continue lying down indoors, bound by his thoughts. Now when he feels scared or sad, he deploys a breathing exercise he learned from his therapist.
“You breathe in,” he said, taking a deep gulp of air with his nose and mouth. “And you breathe out.”
In between chewing on the plastic of the finished ice pop, Nate demonstrated how he counts as he holds his breath: “You can do one, two. … And sometimes she said I can drink water or talk to someone.”
Children at play once again
At a quiet cemetery in the western suburbs, Wallace’s gray sedan wound down a dirt road between tall trees and shaded headstones until reaching the section where young children are buried.
It was just days before the one-year mark of Natalie’s death.
After the family laid down fresh bouquets and rearranged the dusty stuffed animals crowding her grave, Wallace stood alone, with the children waiting inside the car. The tiny pinwheels next to the stone awakened, stopping and starting with the breeze.
“If I could save another child’s life, it would make me feel better because I still blame myself for this,” Wallace said, his voice cracking. “I was just there with her.”
The next day, Wallace teamed up with the activist organization Hustle Mommies to give out free food, diapers and clothes to the neighborhood in an event titled “Paint the Hood Orange,” the color for gun violence awareness. He hopes to keep giving back to the community where Natalie died in the future.
There were fireworks in the air near the memorial event as well, where family members wore the T-shirts with Natalie’s image on them, but Wallace’s children seemed more at ease that day. Though Nate did snap his head up when a firecracker went off, mostly the children were once again being children.
It was a similar scene a year ago, close-knit cousins and siblings play-fighting and running around, on the last day of Natalie’s life. That realization didn’t escape Wallace. But for at least that day, he felt that his family was going to be OK.
“It just makes me feel happy to see them smile,” Wallace said. “It’s more laughter than crying now. It’ll never be like it was, but I see them coming around.”