Deborah Dean rubs her arms for warmth and shakes her head. The gunshots still echo; the memory of panicked footsteps raises the hair on her arms. "Deborah, call an ambulance!" her nephew had cried. And then she saw her husband standing over the body of her daughter Shavon, 14. "My 12-year-old had to call the ambulance. I just collapsed." The family had been in the middle of an evening barbecue at their home in the Roseland section of Chicago when gunfire from what was believed to be a gang-initiation rite sent the fatal bullet into Shavon. "There's no word to say how I feel," says Dean. "Whatever I say, it's not going to bring my daughter back."
Deborah Dean knew her daughter's alleged killer well. Garbage cans decorated with gang-designed graffiti separate her backyard from the three-bedroom bungalow where 11-year-old Robert Sandifer grew up with his grandmother, 10 aunts and uncles and at least 20 other children. "I used to carry him as a young boy to church," says Dean. "He sang in the choir with my daughter. He was a baby, just like my daughter was a baby."
Few others in the crime-ridden, gang-infested Roseland community would have called Robert ("Yummy") Sandifer a baby. The 4-ft., 8-in., 68-lb. runt of a child, whose nickname came from his love of cookies and junk food, ran with a gang called the Black Disciples. Pedaling through the streets on his seatless black bike, in high-price tennis shoes and big, baggy clothes, Sandifer -- coiffed in what neighbors described as his "nappy" hairstyle -- intimidated the neighborhood with his use of knives, fire and guns. Often accompanied by four other youths just as small, he would steal, sell drugs, set fires. He had been barred from local stores because of his thievery. The manager of the local Gallery corner market says, "He had a 11-year-old body, but he was 29 or 30 in the head. He was a slick con artist. They should have hung him in the middle of the street."
But Yummy Sandifer was found under a South Side train viaduct last Thursday, shot to death "execution style." He had two .22-cal. bullet wounds in the back of his head. Gang members had hidden Sandifer in various locations for three days, then, fearing the boy would crumble under police pressure, told him they were driving him out of town. Instead they killed him under the viaduct. "He never knew what hit him," said police spokesman William Davis. On Friday Chicago police charged two brothers, ages 14 and 16, with Sandifer's death. Police say the 14-year-old confessed to involvement in the shooting and 16-year-old Cragg Hardaway admitted having been at the crime scene. Police suspect involvement by other gang members and are continuing their investigation. Said Chicago police superintendent Matt L. Rodriguez: "Here is a perfect example of someone doing the bidding of gangs and becoming a victim himself."