“There’s very strong gang overtones to this particular event,” police superintendent Garry McCarthy said at a news conference last week.
Jonathan Watkins has a long arrest record, and police maintain he’s also a Gangster Disciple. He clearly was the gunman’s target, McCarthy told reporters at the news conference last week. “This is another tragedy,” he said, “because no child, certainly not an infant, should be the victim of gang violence.”
He has two tattoos on his right arm: on the inside, “I Feel”, and on the outside, “No Pain.”
Woodlawn’s segregation wasn’t chosen by its residents; it was foisted on them in the middle of the 20th Century by the neighborhood to the north, Hyde Park, with the essential help of the University of Chicago. Assaults on the first blacks to move to Woodlawn early in the century, and the burning and bombing of their homes, only kept blacks at bay so long. Restrictive covenants then were used to try to contain blacks in certain parts of Woodlawn and keep them out of Hyde Park. The covenants forbade white property owners from selling or renting to blacks. After the covenants were declared unconstitutional in 1948, U. of C. used federal urban renewal money for projects that insulated itself from Woodlawn.
Harris, who turned 35 this week, grew up in East Garfield Park, a neighborhood much like Woodlawn. When he was born in 1978, most families there were headed by single mothers living in poverty.
On a spring afternoon in 1995, when Harris was 17, the GDs got in an argument with some Traveling Vice Lords. That evening, Harris spotted a young man wearing a T-emblazoned cap in a car parked on Western. Harris shot three times into the car. Two of the bullets struck the man, 20-year-old Bennie Williams, in the back; one of them pierced his aorta. Williams wasn’t a TVL or member of any gang; he was a Texas Rangers fan. He was home from college for the summer, staying with his parents in Oak Park. He’d come to the neighborhood to visit his baby daughter.
