{UAH} THE GRAVES DEMOCRATS HAVE PAID FOR THE BLACK VOTES

A Mother Tried to Escape Gangs. Bullets Found Her Daughter.

After Veronica Lopez was fatally shot on the Chicago lakefront, her mother, Diana Mercado, and other relatives visited her grave in August, a few weeks before she would have turned 16.Credit...Sam Hodgson for The New York Times

By Julie Bosman and Catrin Einhorn

 

CHICAGO — At Veronica Lopez’s Sweet 16 party, children played among the headstones. Aunts, uncles and cousins sat on lawn chairs and striped blankets on the grass. A few feet away from Veronica’s grave, her four older sisters pressed candles into a red velvet cake and carefully lit them.

Veronica’s mother watched them and waited for a sign from the gentle wind. “Let her blow out her own candles,” she directed her daughters, her voice hopeful.

Veronica, called Dayday by her family, was buried in this cemetery west of Chicago in June after being shot to death at age 15. She was a friendly girl who loved swimming, labored over science projects and wanted to move away from Chicago’s violence, toward a better life. Instead, she was caught in an onslaught of gunfire here that no one has been able to stop — not the police, not the mayor, not parents or preachers.

She was one of six people killed in gunfire in Chicago over Memorial Day weekend. Altogether, 64 people were shot during those three days, which started a summer of bloodshed that has continued into autumn. That weekend, The New York Times tracked the shootings to chronicle the surge in violence that has taken 654 lives in Chicago so far this year.

Veronica stood out among those killed. She was the youngest, a spunky ninth grader. She was shot in an affluent lakefront neighborhood that is largely free of Chicago’s gang violence. And she was the only female victim killed by gunfire that weekend.

Her death was both mysterious and predictable. She was not in a gang, the police and her family said, but gangs were a part of her life. In Chicago, that is not unusual. Many people are intimately connected to gangs over generations, with allegiances woven through families and friendships the way loyalties to sports teams or alma maters are passed down in the wealthier neighborhoods across town.

Young women can be drawn in to the world of gangs because of their brothers or where they live — or by falling in love with the wrong person. They are often more than bystanders, but less than participants.

Veronica was one of six people killed in Chicago over Memorial Day weekend.

Veronica came from a family of women, the youngest of five daughters, a loyal and loving band of sisters raised by a single working mother. Time and again, they fell into relationships with men in gangs.

Veronica tried to be vigilant. She avoided walking down the street with gang members, including friends she had known since elementary school. She rarely went to parties, because she worried about fights and gunfire.

But those measures could not stop the barrage of violence that struck close to her again and again in her last year. Tensions from gang rivalries and at least three shootings of people she knew intruded on her teenage life, leading her to dwell on the possibility of dying.

Her mother, Diana Mercado, was asleep at 2 a.m. on May 28 when she awoke to her dog barking, then persistent knocking on her apartment door. She opened it to find a cluster of police officers.

“Do you know a Veronica Lopez?” an officer asked, sounding to Ms. Mercado as though he delivered such news all day long. “She may have been shot.”

A First Flight

The first time Veronica’s mother fled gang violence, she did so in the dead of night. In February 2001, she packed a few belongings, jammed them in the trunk of her small white sedan, gathered her five girls and drove them away from Cicero, a suburb on the western edge of Chicago. Veronica was 5 months old.

Ms. Mercado had to get her oldest daughter, Samantha, away from the gang she was falling into. She had to leave Veronica’s father, Ricardo, who was being threatened by gang members.

“We packed whatever we could in the car,” she said. “I just wanted to get my kids away from there.”

She drove a mere six miles, to Belmont Cragin, a neighborhood on the Northwest Side of Chicago, but it felt like a world away.

Violence in Chicago was difficult to dodge, except for those with the means to live in the city’s wealthier neighborhoods. But Belmont Cragin was affordable and felt safe, a working-class enclave of Latino families, some young professionals and older Polish residents.

Ms. Mercado soon had a steady job at an auto-parts store. Samantha, then 16, chose not to return to school, instead helping her mother by caring for her siblings: Amanda, Destiny, Miranda and Veronica.

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Ms. Mercado, right, in August with her daughter Miranda, who started college this fall. Veronica was one of five sisters.Credit...Sam Hodgson for The New York Times

They remember Veronica as a bubbly toddler with a head of dark, springy curls, who would sit in a car seat on the living room floor and fall asleep to Disney movies on the VCR: “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Lion King” and her favorite, “The Aristocats.”

In elementary school, she made friends easily and was the stage manager for a school play. “She liked bossing people around,” one longtime friend, Selena Herrera, said with a smile.

Even before joining the cheerleading squad in middle school, she led her nephew and cousins through routines in the backyard. In the summer, she swam in public pools, expertly diving into the deep end.

In her class picture from eighth grade, she smiled into the camera, eyes bright, arms folded, fingernails gleaming with red polish. Stephanie Mota, 16, a middle school friend, recalled stuttering nervously during a class presentation that she and Veronica had prepared on how a microwave works.

“She ended up doing the whole thing,” Ms. Mota said. “She was smart. She really put her mind to it. She’d goof around, but when it was time to work, she got it done.”

In the summer of 2015, before entering ninth grade, Veronica met Jalid Alcocer, a teenager known as JoJo. On weekends, they would take walks on the 606, an elevated park on an old Northwest Side railroad track.

JoJo, now 16, said he was drawn to her warmth, her confidence, her determined optimism. On a walk one day, he went in for a kiss. “She just started calling me her man,” he said.

A Stream of Men and Problems

The men in the lives of the Mercado women tended to bring trouble. For Veronica’s mother, there was Miguel, her first real boyfriend, whom she admired for his fearlessness. Guy, her next serious boyfriend, had a sweet way with her. And Jose was smart and attentive. “I loved the way he danced,” she said. “He was real romantic. I used to love being in his arms.”

But each was also involved in a gang. Or, as Ms. Mercado put it, “Who wasn’t in a gang?”

Each relationship brought another daughter, and usually ended when the man went to jail. But even when relationships fizzle, the children resulting from them can knit gang affiliations deeper into families.

Three days, 64 people shot, six of them dead: Memorial Day on the streets, and the violence that has engulfed families and neighborhoods.

 

Ms. Mercado tried to warn her daughters. “Didn’t you learn from me?” she asked them. “You can’t walk the streets with these guys. You can’t go to the movies. It’s too dangerous.”

“Be careful,” she would tell Veronica. “Bullets have no names.”

There was a time when Ms. Mercado was relieved that all her children were girls. It made them less likely to be recruited by gangs, to get into trouble, to end up in prison, she thought.

But all four of Veronica’s sisters ended up dating men who were affiliated with gangs, and three had children with them.

Veronica’s boyfriend, JoJo, also described loose gang ties.

“I don’t gangbang,” he said in August. “I chill with them.”

In truth, there is a wide spectrum of gang involvement. While some are members who have joined through formal rituals, others are affiliated because of where they live or the people they spend time with.

Trouble escalated for the Mercado family when one sister’s boyfriend defected to a different gang. Remaining in the original gang was another sister’s boyfriend.

“Now it’s like a war because they left,” Ms. Mercado said. “They put us in the middle of it.”

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A photo of Veronica printed on her cousin’s jeans.Credit...Sam Hodgson for The New York Times

Violence Closes In

In the last year of Veronica’s life, danger grew steadily closer to the Mercados and their two-bedroom apartment above a cellphone store.

But, like any young teenager about to start high school, Veronica was focused on her freshman year. She would be a freshman at North-Grand High School, a gleaming building on the site of an old Schwinn factory. It is considered one of the better, and safer, schools in the area.

And she had a new “brother,” as she lovingly called him: Orlando Calderon, known as Rico, a teenager her mother had taken in when he was kicked out of his own home. Yes, he was in a gang, but Ms. Mercado saw him as a sweet-natured and vulnerable young man, a victim of peer pressure. She was tickled when he cooked dinner for the family and took out the garbage without being asked. For a time, he dated one of Veronica’s sisters, Miranda.

But one week before classes were to start, Veronica’s mother called with heartbreaking news: Rico had been fatally shot in a neighborhood park.

Veronica took it hard. “She went crazy,” Ms. Mercado said.

Suddenly, friends and family began seeing a despairing side to her. She seemed to fixate on death, telling friends she envisioned being reincarnated as a butterfly.

“She’d always talk about, ‘I really want to see Rico, I just want to go with him to heaven,’” Gisele Vides, a friend from school, said. “It worried me when she said that.”

The violence around Veronica continued. In March, the ex-boyfriend of another sister was killed in gang violence. And in April, Veronica was caught up in a shooting herself.

She, her sister Destiny and Destiny’s baby were riding in a car with a close family friend when they stopped for gas and were confronted by two men in another car who flashed gang signs.

Veronica jumped out of the car. “He’s not part of that life!” she screamed, ordering the men to leave her friend alone.

But one of the men opened fire. Veronica was standing right next to her friend, who was shot. She escaped injury.

The police soon made an arrest, and Ms. Mercado was told that prosecutors needed Veronica to testify before a grand jury.

She resisted, worried that it would make her daughter a target. “‘I don’t want my child testifying,’” Ms. Mercado said she told the police. “And they said the state will subpoena her if they have to.”

Veronica, 15, was soon telling the story to grand jurors.

Life at school became shaky. Veronica was failing classes. Sometimes she skipped school. On more than one occasion, she was sent home for fighting, skirmishes that her mother said were provoked by other girls. Friends said that she sometimes burst into tears and had to be comforted by teachers.

“I know she was angry,” Ms. Mercado said. “She was like, ‘Why do they have to keep killing people I love?’”

Ms. Mercado was growing more worried by the day. But she had always seen herself as a supportive mother, a friend to her girls, and she was reluctant to put too many restrictions on Veronica.

More and more, Veronica told friends that she wanted to get out of Chicago. She pressed her mother to let her move to California to live with Ms. Mercado’s brother, a Marine. Then she abandoned that plan and started daydreaming with her mother about the two of them making a new life in Florida.

“After Rico died, she realized that this was a dangerous city,” said Gisele, her school friend. “She wanted to get away from here and have a good life.”

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The bullet-pierced Jeep in which Veronica was shot.Credit...Alex Wroblewski for The New York Times

The Last Drive

Friday night of Memorial Day weekend was hot and humid, with a threat of rain. That spring, Veronica had come to enjoy rides along Lake Shore Drive as a passenger in a car driven by a friend, Jose Alvarez, the 28-year-old uncle of a high school classmate.

That night, she was again in his Jeep, the windows rolled down to catch the breeze.

On their way to Lake Shore Drive, they stopped at a gas station, where Mr. Alvarez exchanged taunts with a couple of strangers. But the carload of people — four in the back seat, Veronica and Mr. Alvarez in the front — laughed it off and kept driving.

At one point, Mr. Alvarez posted a video on Snapchat, flashing signs disrespecting another gang.

Veronica sent a text to her boyfriend, JoJo, wishing him good night. When he didn’t respond, she wrote: “Can you say it back at least. What if I die tonight.”

The beaches alongside the eight-lane Lake Shore Drive are largely empty after midnight. Lake Michigan is an endless, inky expanse. Few lights shine from the stately prewar apartment buildings that line the curving drive north of downtown.

Veronica’s friend Jacqui, who asked to be identified only by her first name because she fears retaliation, was in the back seat. She remembers looking out her window and watching the city fly by.

As Jacqui recalled, the Jeep reached Lake Shore Drive, and Veronica’s favorite song by Duke Da Beast was playing.

I’m riding down Lake Shore Drive / getting high, out of my mind

Boy ya blind / so put your feelings to the side / while we ride down Lake Shore Drive

Then Jacqui heard a sudden, sharp sound: glass breaking.

At first, she thought another car had crashed into them. Then she realized it was gunshots. Shards of glass flew everywhere. She screamed and ducked.

Mr. Alvarez said later that he couldn’t see much of the attack. “We were innocently driving,” he said. “I’m smiling, she’s smiling. I hear boom and another boom, and I see the windshield come in, and bullet holes. They pull right alongside and start shooting, at least 15 shots.”

One bullet struck Mr. Alvarez in his left arm. Another grazed his forehead. Veronica was hit over and over: three times in her left arm, once in her shoulder, once in her torso.

As they raced to a hospital, Veronica was bleeding heavily and drifting in and out of consciousness. Jacqui remembers her saying one thing: “I love you guys.”

Few Answers

The walls of the waiting room at Presence Saint Joseph Hospital on the North Side seemed to be closing in on Ms. Mercado. When news came that Veronica was dead, she vomited into a trash can.

The police had little to say that morning. She has talked to them only a few times since. “They don’t know anything,” she said. “They told me that I’ll hear something before they do.”

Ms. Mercado said she had heard rumors about who was following the Jeep that night and who was the target. A stranger sent her a tip through Facebook, which she passed along to the police.

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Ms. Mercado, right, mourned with Veronica’s friends during a memorial at North-Grand High School on May 31, days after the shooting.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

But more than five months later, Veronica’s death is a mystery. Was she killed because she was in a car with targeted gang members, the working theory of the Chicago Police Department? Was it because of her grand jury testimony, a rumor at school? Or could her death have had nothing to do with gangs — perhaps a road rage crime carried out by strangers?

Her mother does not believe Veronica was the intended target, and she has little hope that the police will arrest someone.

The Chicago police’s clearance rate for murders committed this year is just 20 percent. In the 64 shootings over Memorial Day weekend, they have made two arrests.

An Endless Grief

Ms. Mercado has at times appeared paralyzed by grief. “Most of the time,” she said, “I go to sleep and hope I never wake up again.” She thought about seeing a therapist, but even with insurance, the cost was too high. Amanda, one of Veronica’s older siblings, said she felt she had lost not just her sister, but her mother as well.

Since Memorial Day weekend, Ms. Mercado has found comfort sitting at Veronica’s grave at Queen of Heaven Cemetery. It is adorned with pink flowers and balloons, a black-and-white portrait and a plastic stake with “Sister” in cursive lettering.

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Almost half a year later, the police have not made any arrests in Veronica’s case.Credit...Sam Hodgson for The New York Times

This is where Ms. Mercado spends her days off from the auto-parts store. In the quiet of the cemetery, she thinks about “the what ifs,” as she calls them. What if Veronica had never met Mr. Alvarez? What if Veronica had moved to California to live with Ms. Mercado’s brother?

What if Veronica were still alive, and the two were preparing to move to Florida, finally escaping Chicago’s violence?

Ms. Mercado is free to leave Chicago behind. Her four other daughters are all grown. Miranda, the sister Veronica most admired, started classes this fall at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The others have jobs and children to keep them busy.

But Ms. Mercado says she will stay. “No, I’m not going now,” she said, stroking the grass that has sprung up over her daughter’s grave. “I’m not leaving my baby.”

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