‘MY BABY DIDN’T COME HOME’
Chicago mothers share pain and join hands in a collective effort to halt gun violence as another summer ensues
“I never thought it would happen to me. Go out and sit with people this has happened to because some Chicagoans don’t understand. I’ve already been gotten. It can happen to you. It happened to my family.” — Nyisha Beemon, a registered nurse, whose daughter Jaya was killed in 2020
More than 100 victims being shot over the July Fourth holiday in Chicago makes people look past the city’s beautiful skyline and the majestic shores of Lake Michigan. This is especially true for the mothers whose children fell victim to this city’s streets.
These women will forever have an empty space in the pit of their stomachs, and with every mention of gunfire, their hearts flutter with panic as Chicago reminds them of a nightmare their children couldn’t escape.
“Its ugly to me and will always be,” said Shirley Moten, who has lost three sons to t he city’s gun violence. “Eventually I want to leave. I don’t see it getting better. Day after day, it’s more killings and more families missing someone.”
This year, on Mother’s Day, several moms who lost children gathered on the South Side for brunch — to cry, hug and grieve their dead children. One of the event’s organizers, Octavia Mitchell, has in recent years been a constant presence at the Chicago Police Department’s monthly board meetings, seeking proof that her son Izael Jackson, then 18, was firing at police when he was fatally wounded by officers on April 24, 2010.
In a letter to the Chicago Tribune, Mitchell wrote: “If the parents of the deceased children can show some effort to say enough
is enough and try to embrace each other regardless of who murdered who, maybe the surviving family and friends will not want to retaliate. If the grieving mothers, who know each other’s pain can come together and cry with each other, while crying out please don’t make someone else feel like us. Please stop the crime, I don’t want revenge for my child’s death, I want peace so that I can live in peace and maybe we can make some difference if not all.”
Recently, Mitchell held the annual party honoring her slain son’s birthday at Dunbar Park, where hundreds showed. Izael would have turned 30 on July 19, Mitchell said.
“People ate, celebrated Izael and released balloons in his honor,” she said.
Also that afternoon, Mitchell announced the Izael Traffic Stop Transportation Service she is opening in his memory, to provide safe travel for youth to prevent them from possibly getting killed during traffic stops.
Mitchell has raised money along with other Warrior Moms in an effort to fund a trip to Six Flags Great America, so that youth affected by violence can enjoy an outing away from their neighborhoods. She is planning for at least four buses that will take some 160 young people to the amusement park in Gurnee, where they will receive admission and a buffet at the park. So far Mitchell has raised about $2,400 through the Heal Your Heart Foundation, with more donations still coming in from sources including the Warrior Moms, a group of Chicago mothers grieving due to Chicago gun violence.
Ultimately, Mitchell and the other moms want to start a mentorship program for youth on the Low End, an area on Chicago’s South Side.
Here are some edited excerpts from conversations with these mothers:
Octavia Mitchell
“My baby didn’t come home one day, I don’t know what happened after that,” Mitchell said. “That is what I am trying to find out.”
The Civilian Office of Police Accountability denied her request to reopen her son’s case after officers shot him during a traffic stop in the Woodlawn neighborhood.
Once COPA denied her request and COVID-19 hindered her fight to clear her son’s name, she decided to shift her energies into helping other mothers who lost their children to gun violence.
More than 11 years later, Mitchell has decided to take her battle against city officials to federal court, looking for answers to what happened around 10:15 p.m. on April 24, 2010, during a traffic stop near Parkway Gardens.
COPA called Jackson’s death justified, saying the officers’ versions of events were consistent, though Jackson’s fingerprints were not found on the gun and DNA evidence from the weapon was not tested until years later.
Mitchell said that all she wanted was proof. Once the city delivered that proof, then she would accept it. But after years of waiting, she’s headed in a different direction that she expects will prove more difficult as she petitions the federal court system to review her son’s case.
In the meantime she is looking to run a nonprofit, the Heal Your Heart Foundation, to give young people a chance to view the world outside red and yellow tape, Mitchell said.
On Mother’s Day, a group of mothers dressed in all white prayed and fellowshipped before sharing stories about their children. Mitchell presented the mothers with “Warrior Mom” T-shirts, and had a banner made with names of those killed on Chicago streets. It read in part: “in honor of our angels.”
“We are warriors because we fight every day just to go outside. We fight everyday just to stay sane,” Mitchell said. “Some of these mothers lost three to five children. Can you imagine that? Three children to a shooter,” Mitchell asked. “Some of these mothers wouldn’t have the strength to talk to you. “
One of the mothers who lost five in total and two to gun violence did talk, and she had a great deal to say.
LaSheena Weekly
Weekly is mother to both Carlton Weekly, the Chicago rapper known as FBG Duck, and Jermaine Robinson, whose rap name was FBG Brick.
Weekly, often called MaMa Duck, first experienced a prenatal death, then had another child, an infant, die after being rolled over on in a sleeping accident. Her 3-year-old daughter died in an apartment fire in the Rogers Park neighborhood where the family moved after the city tore down the Ida B. Wells housing project where she grew up, near 39th Street on the South Side.
Weekly’s family was one of many relocated to unfamiliar neighborhoods such as Austin, Englewood, South Shore and Lawndale. Weekly landed in a community bordering the northern suburb of Evanston.
Already bound with grief, she was unprepared for the next double blow — losing two sons after their choice to pursue rap music careers to help their family escape poverty. It would put them in danger.
“I wouldn’t wish it on nobody,” Weekly explained, her voice cracking. “Everyone is not built for this,” which are the exact words Dedra Morris, mother of Leonard Anderson Jr., slain Chicago rapper L’A Capone, would say during a separate conversation.
Mitchell and Morris wanted all the mothers to come together, to not care about who was beefing with who or whose rap lyric upset who. A few of the mothers grew up in the same neighborhood, were in the same circles — and on this special day all that mattered was that their children were gone, both said.
But Weekly didn’t know what to expect — if she would even feel welcome at the event — because she knew some of her sons’ rivals’ mothers might also be attending. But she was indeed welcomed because all that mattered was she was a member of the same club, one she never sought to join.
Weekly recounted the day her first son was gunned down: July 17, 2017. She vividly remembers seeing her son Jermaine lying near the courtway.
“I fell out, and Duck kneeled down beside me and I said in his ear, ‘Don’t do anything stupid, I need you with me,’ ” Weekly said.
Her conversations with Duck continued, and she said he put all his pain in his music. When she first discovered how talented Duck was, she recalled telling him, “Music is your life, anything quick is gonna leave as quick as you got it.”
Her son Duck would be gunned down just over three years later, on Aug. 4, 2020, on Oak Street in front of Dolce & Gabbana in broad daylight. Weekly said he was there getting his son a T-shirt and a pair of socks for his birthday.
“I cry every day, over again,” Weekly said. “We need to embrace each other. I apologized to the whole room on Mother’s Day for my son. Everything he did was for me and his kids.”
Weekly shared her distaste over Mayor Lori Lightfoot for publicly calling her son a gangbanger.
“My son was shot multiple times in a plush part of Chicago where he thought he would be safe. I am hoping the people in that area are outraged that happened where it
“Everybody ain’t built for this, and they can’t handle it or recover from it. You are here and your child isn’t, and you feel guilty celebrating anything and your child cannot. But you got to get through it. I had a newborn baby and for two years I couldn’t take care of her. I had to send her away. I couldn’t tend to my kids. I’m there but one of my kids is missing.”
— Dedra Morris
did and how it did,” she said. “He was a victim.”
Dedra Morris
“I remember like it was yesterday,” Morris said, explaining how on the morning of Sept. 26, 2013, she drove her son Leonard Anderson Jr., the rapper known as L’A Capone, to a friend’s house in preparation for a court appearance.
“He wanted me to drop him off at the corner but his friend yelled, ‘What are you doing, come to the house. Somebody trying to kill you or something,’ ” Morris said.
Later Morris would ponder how eerie that question was.
That evening, Morris’ 4-yearold daughter would ask her if they could walk to a neighborhood restaurant to buy cheese fries. But as they neared 70th Street and Stony Island Avenue, they saw flashing police lights and paramedics working on someone, she recounted.
She later would discover missed phone calls from a friend who’d heard that Anderson was shot on his way to a recording studio in the neighborhood, and was following the ambulance to Northwestern Memorial.
The trauma center at the University of Chicago Medical Center had not yet opened, as other victims’ mothers pointed out, suggesting this may have been a factor in their children not surviving their wounds.
“That whole day was weird,” said Morris, now 45.
Later she would receive a package — a sweater her son, then 17, was waiting for. It took her months to open it. A cake celebrating his 17th birthday was left sitting on a kitchen counter, Morris recalled, as he had only nibbled at it.
He never got a driver’s license, never graduated from the alternative high school Sullivan House, never experienced going to prom, she said. The school did place a gown and diploma at his chair during graduation because he already met the credit requirements, Morris said.
A year before his death, in 2012, Anderson had suffered a gunshot wound to his left leg. He was shot in the same leg in 2013, Morris said.
“Everybody ain’t built for this, and they can’t handle it or recover from it,” Morris said. “You are here and your child isn’t, and you feel guilty celebrating anything and
your child cannot. But you got to get through it. I had a newborn baby and for two years I couldn’t take care of her. I had to send her away. I couldn’t tend to my kids. I’m there but one of my kids is missing.
“Even in that misery, I had to be thankful because I know someone who lost her only child. I had to tell her, ‘It becomes bearable but you will never forget that pain.’ ”
Nyisha Beemon
The Chicago police have charged a juvenile with the fatal 2020 shooting of Nyisha Beemon’s daughter, Jaya. The then-freshman at Malcolm X College was enrolled in its nursing program, her mother said.
Jaya had returned from a date at the Shedd Aquarium when she decided to stop for snacks at a store where she was gunned down with four other people. Jaya died.
“I turned my pain into purpose,” Beemon said. “I am working on a teen summit, and lining youth up with an organization to help them plan careers that will help them financially to prevent being burdened with loans.”
Malcolm X College has a nursing scholarship in Jaya’s name. Beemon is working with a shelter to provide housing to the homeless during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I tell the youth to strive for peace,” she said. “But we must address poverty. Violence follows being poor and uneducated, (a poor uneducated person) doesn’t make sound decisions, and if we truly want change we have to address it.”
She said when other mothers lose their children to gun violence they sometimes “retreat to hide in a hole because they feel alone.”
“They don’t know they can get involved. I get a call when it happens to a mother and I stop everything to talk them off a ledge,” Beemon said. “I am thankful I survived this madness so I want to be a resource to help heal the hearts of these moms.”
Beemon said she wants potential shooters to know when you shoot blindly into a crowd, that bullet hurts deeper than you know.
“I never thought it would happen to me,” Beemon, a registered nurse, said. “Go out and sit with people this has happened to because some Chicagoans don’t understand. I’ve already been gotten. It can happen to you. It happened to my family.”
Shirley Moten
Moten said she would never deny that her son, Troy, 23, was in the streets. He knew people were after him when he chose to walk to the store. He was from Parkway Gardens and his mistake of walking in the South Shore neighborhood proved to be fatal. He was killed on Feb, 14, 2017, at 71st Street and Jeffery Boulevard. His mother and his only sister attended the Mother’s Day brunch, Moten said. She added that his sister knew he planned on going to the store, and while at work received a call that her brother had been shot and died on the way to Northwestern.
When Moten saw the other mothers at the brunch and heard their stories, it lightened her up. “I’ve lost two other sons at ages 20 and 34,” she said. “I don’t know much about these rap songs or what is fueling the beef,” she said. “All I know is they need to put these guns down, it’s nothing in the streets but death or everybody going to jail. It needs to stop.”