Even some editors less zealous than Shine agree that newspapers, in these murderous times, must take extraordinary steps. Washington Post ombudsman Joann Byrd recently called for the Post to wage a crusade. Readers would get front-page summaries of homicide statistics and reporters would pester “all people in sight” for good ideas. “Don’t the stakes require everybody to try everything?” asked Byrd.
The Chicago Tribune, in effect, anticipated Byrd’s idea and pledged last January to “not let the murder of a single child in our metropolitan area go unnoticed” during 1993. The promise was prompted by the death of Dantrell Davis, a 7-year-old who was shot while walking to school. The Chicago media made Davis into a symbol of innocence lost. In an angry front-page letter, Chicago Sun-Times editor Dennis Britton noted that Davis was the third child from the same school to be murdered in the past several months. “Dantrell Davis was our child, Chicago,” Britton wrote. “We let him down.”
His motivation, Britton later said, was his own sense of disappointment. After the shooting, he had waited for Chicago’s “worthy leaders” to rise in outrage; but “not a peep” was heard. So the Sun-Times roared.
Though upstaged by the Sun-Times’s passionate prose, the Tribune resolved not to be outdone. Chronicling the experiences of other murdered Chicago-area children struck Tribune editors as a good device for getting to the broader story. The victims, the Tribune quickly found, were not all troubled inner-city youths killed by thugs. Some were battered children who were shaken to death or, in one case, flung into a wall. The Tribune sought to not only document the children’s deaths but to illuminate their lives, while highlighting promising antiviolence projects.
Though linked together in a common cause, the Chicago papers have not ended their traditional rivalry. To some on the Sun-Times, the Tribune series is a massive “awards hunt,” while some on the Tribune think that the Sun-Times is laying claim to a story no one paper can own. ‘This is not the Sun-Times’s story. This is not the Chicago Tribune’s story. This is an ongoing tragedy that is everyone’s story," declares Tribune reporter Frank James.
Last month the SunTimes offered a one-year retrospective on events since Davis’s death. Chicago’s children were dying at a faster rate than in 1992, noted the Sun-Times. Yet, crime had plummeted in the neighborhood where Davis lived. “At ground zero, where a sniper’s bullet ended Dantrell’s life, there has been progress. Now we must spread that hope of peace throughout the community,” wrote Britton.
Inevitably’ the mixed results of the media crusade raise questions about how effective such campaigns can be. Some critics think massive publicity can even make things worse. After the press leapt on the story of a mother charged with hanging her 3-year-old son, Illinois lawmakers rushed through legislation making it easier to take children away from abusive parents. It was modified under pressure from the governor, who thought the bill too broad. Bad bills, says Illinois ACLU lawyer Ben Wolf, can be “one of the dangers of whipping up a lot of public sentiment.”
Indeed, for all the good intentions, it is not at all clear how much good the press can do when it comes to something as massive and convoluted as urban violence. At best, newspapers can raise a little money, highlight some promising programs. focus on symbolic individuals, push for legislation and, mostly, raise holy hell about the problem in the hope that the public will decide it is worth solving.
title: “Death At An Early Age” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-16” author: “James Roades”
In searching their deaths for meaning, for something beyond voyeurism, there was little that wouldn’t fit in a police report. Premed biology majors at Harvard, roommates for two years, Ho, a refugee from Vietnam, and Tadesse, a foreign student from Ethiopia, saw their relationship deteriorate. Ho asked other gifts to be her roommate next fall. Tadesse was hurt. Over Memorial Day weekend, Tadesse exploded, stabbing Ho 45 times, then rushing to their bathroom, where she hanged herself. The campus was stunned; fortunately most students had already left for the school year. The questions were endless. Could Harvard have intervened? Why did Tadesse snap? Were there unseen warning signs? Why does evil exist?
There were no satisfactory answers, and by last Thursday the friends of both girls had had enough of recriminations and murder and inquiring reporters. It was time, they said, to talk about the young women they knew, lest their final ghastly moments become all that was left of their lives. So about 350 people gathered in a campus auditorium to speak well of the dead.
As a child, Ho was a boat person. She fled Vietnam with her father and one sister, leaving her mother and another sister behind. She wouldn’t see them again for seven years, when they appeared, nearly miraculously, on the eve of her valedictory address at a Boston high school. At Harvard, Ho worked 18 hours a week to help support her family. Most weekends she went home, to translate for her mother and guide her sister through homework assignments. She tutored, did extra research and was starting work this summer on her biology honors thesis. And always, a friend recalled, it was with a smile. “She said she would have felt guilty not using her time productively,” said Tuan Doan, a speaker at Thursday’s memorial. Ho wanted to be a pediatrician.
All this was, if anything, harder on the friends of Tadesse. She was their lost mate, but she was the killer, too. Three friends described a vivacious, understanding young woman who never signaled her distress. “She was always there for everyone,” said Adey Fisseha, another Ethiopian student. “She’d sit there and she’d listen and she’d calm you down.” Tadesse had adjusted well to Harvard; she didn’t seem stressed by the rush to the semester’s end. “But we’re all busy,” Fisseha said with regret. “We’re not in each other’s lives that much.”
That night in nearby Watertown, Mass., about 50 friends and Ethiopian expatriates gathered to mourn Tadesse. The service was conducted in Amharic, Tadesse’s native language, but the tears and wails were universal. A few relatives were there. With any luck, they will never read Tadesse’s last letter to Ho, reported last week in The Boston Globe. “I thought we were going to do stuff together,” she wrote. “You’ll always have a family to go to and I am going to have no one.” Her body was shipped home to Addis Ababa.
In Medford, another Boston suburb, 150 people wept through the chants of a Vietnamese Buddhist service. Ho’s coffin was guarded by elaborate flower displays. Later she was buried in Cambridge. But her words live on. “We need more people to go out there and do something–make a change,” Ho told Boston Magazine in 1993, after she was named one of 25 people who could “save” the city. “Because if people don’t do something, things are going to get worse, and then they’re going to blame it on each other. You have to be more optimistic than pessimistic, because pessimism doesn’t change the world.”
