My Children Were Killed in Different Neighborhoods. Only One of Their Deaths Seemed to Matter.

Before my children were killed, I wasn’t able to fall asleep until they came home. Now I can’t sleep at all.

On January 17, 1992, my daughter Tyesa was the unintended victim of a gang-involved shooting in the Gold Coast neighborhood, just a few blocks from one of Oprah Winfrey’s houses. The murderer, a 14-year-old boy, was caught and sentenced to 50 years. Tyesa died instantly, but the story of her death lived on in the news for months. 

I’ll never forget how the state’s attorney said he thought she would be white because of where she lived. 

Twenty years later, on December 22, 2012, my son Tyler was beaten and shot before he could make it out of our driveway in the South suburb of Hazel Crest. No ambulance came. The police treated us like criminals. At the hospital they made him wait. He died of blood loss. His murder remains unsolved. 

The differences in how my kids’ shootings were handled made me think about the ways the systems that we are supposed to trust to protect and help us continue to fail Black and brown communities. Murders involving men of color, especially Black men, are cleared at a much lower rate than those of any other racial group, according to an analysis of annual reports from the Chicago Police Department.

Even as I advocate in Springfield to pass bills that could change things for the better, I still feel stuck. Knowing that no one tried to save my son, that his murder is still unsolved, haunts me ‘til today. 

A tale of two murders 

Tyesa had just left the Chestnut Station movie theater with her friends when rival gang members began shooting at each other. 

During the commotion, Tyesa looked back for one second and was shot, detectives told me. 

News outlets and justice system officials assumed she was a white girl because she was from Alsip, but when I went to see her body at the hospital and they saw that she and I were Black, an officer approached me and said, “What kind of gang was she in?” 

“Gang?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

Tyesa was on a slab. She was still fully dressed, and I could feel the bullet hole in her temple. I passed out. 

Tyesa was 16 years old and in high school. She was about to graduate and lost her life in a majority white neighborhood. She wanted to be a nurse. Her killer served 20 years of a 50-year sentence, and was released in 2012. Tyesa’s case was very public, leaving me with plenty of articles on her.  

When Tyesa died, I was one month pregnant with Tyler. 

20 years later, that baby was killed, too. It barely made the news. The media and the justice system treated him like just another Black boy who lost his life to gun violence.

A year earlier, Tyler had been arrested and charged with being an accessory to a robbery. A friend had called to ask for a ride, but Tyler didn’t know that the friend had just robbed someone. Tyler was arrested and kept in jail over the New Year holiday. 

Tyler told police he was not involved, and because they confiscated his phone, they were able to find his friend. Eventually, Tyler was released, but I often wonder if he was killed because people thought he was a snitch.  

About a month before he was killed, he kneeled down on my bed, worried, though he didn’t say why. I told him: “You don’t ever have to worry about somebody coming in here. You know, we’re covered.” 

I didn’t see the beef in the street. I didn’t see my son was in danger.

The Saturday he was murdered, my plan was to take him to get a new car. I should have been looking for somewhere to move. 

I don’t know exactly what happened that day, but he was in the driveway – maybe coming home, maybe leaving – when someone beat him and shot him. 

Later, I learned frustrating details about what happened. A neighbor called the ambulance, but it never came. My son ran to his friend’s house and his friend called 911 again, but still no one came. So he put Tyler in his car and took him to the emergency room at South Suburban Hospital. Even after he told hospital staff that he’d been shot, Tyler sat there waiting for I don’t know how long before they examined him.

He was taken to the trauma center at Advocate Christ, but it was too late. My son bled out. His murder is still unsolved. I know that someone saw something, but no one will talk. 

Tyler was killed in December, two months after Tyesa’s killer was released. Tyler was 20 years old. He loved music. He wanted to be an occupational therapist.

The pain was the same, but I was different

When my daughter died, my sister told me, “you can’t fix this.” 

In my family, I’m the fixer, so if anything went wrong, I was on it. When Tyesa died, I sat by the cemetery, and I just cried my heart out because I couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t get her back. 

I wanted to die. I wanted to not be here. 

With my faith, I knew I couldn’t kill myself. So I wanted somebody else to do it. 

On her anniversary, I left my children with their dad, and I set out in Chicago to the worst places in the world. To get ran over by a bus, to get shot, to get robbed, anything. None of that happened. 

For six months after Tyler was killed, I couldn’t get out of bed. I went from a size 10 to a size 2. 

The pain was the same, but I was different. 

I wanted vengeance. I bought guns. I learned everything I could about how people get guns illegally. It’s so easy. 

I kept track of the people who might have had something to do with Tyler’s murder. I investigated. I tried to get documents. I was so angry. 

Every system failed Tyler. The police. The ambulance. The hospital. The detectives. 

When the detective assigned to Tyler’s case retired, he told me that his department told him not to investigate the incident. 

I realized I had to do this on my own, so I started fighting. 

I’m still angry, but now I’m fighting with a pencil and paper.

Fighting with a pencil and paper 

Writing saved me. When Tyesa died, someone gave me a journal and told me to write down the responding police officer’s name, police report number, and to start documenting my journey.

Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night to write because I have a thought about the case. Sometimes Tyler would come to me in my dreams and give me names or faces. 

When I decided to try to help people like me who’ve lost children, I started with journals. 

I started the TY (Tender Youth) Foundation, using the first two letters of my children’s names. Our youth are tender and they need special guidance and better communities. 

I give survivors journals and tell them to write everything down. “Everyone has a story,” I say. “Tell yours.” Tyler wrote music and Tyesa wrote poetry. I think I learned it from them. 

I started to speak, too. 

Fighting with my voice

I joined Brady Illinois and One Aim (Illinois Council Against Handguns) to advocate to change gun laws. Those two organizations taught me to fight with my voice. They gave me the tools to go to Springfield and Washington and speak on behalf of my children to get legislation passed. And now I’m on the board of both organizations to help others do the same. 

On Jan. 17, 2019, exactly 27 years to the day after Tyesa was killed, I shook hands with Governor Pritzker as he signed a bill requiring gun stores to get state licenses. That moment of triumph came after so much trauma as I told my story over and over to convince legislators to pass the measure. 

Since then, more bills have been passed, most recently a ban on assault weapons in Illinois. Now, we’re working on three bills that touch on rights for homicide victims’ families, access to firearms for people who have orders of protection filed against them, and police transparency.  

Even with all that progress, I feel stuck, frozen in time, because my son’s case remains unsolved. 

I haven’t moved out of the house where he was killed. Tyler’s bedroom is still the same as when he left it. His car is in the garage. 

My kids say I’m stuck in that moment. My daughter Traci tells me, “You won’t move forward until you actually clean out the room.”

I am stuck. 

But I can still fight from here. I’m pushing for a bill that would establish an office of accountability that works specifically on unsolved cases. 

I’m also fighting for investment in Black and brown communities. Until we address mental health and community safety and poverty in Black and brown communities, violence and accountability will always be problems. 

Black and brown kids are treated unfairly by the systems outside the home, and parents need to prepare them for that. But if we invest in impoverished communities, parents can focus on raising their children into responsible adults instead of just scraping by.

The boy who murdered my daughter was 14; his mother was on drugs, and he grew up on the streets in Cabrini-Green. 

He was in the affluent Gold Coast neighborhood when he killed Tyesa. Tyesa is proof that gun violence anywhere affects everyone everywhere. 

In a 1992 article, I said, “I wish this gun violence would come to an end.” Now it’s 2024, and in some neighborhoods, it hasn’t gotten better. It keeps me up every night. So, what are we going to do?