‘The devil took her,’ mother says as gunned-down Clemente student is laid to rest
BY TINA SFONDELES Staff Reporter/tsfondeles@suntimes.com March 2, 2013 1:24PM
Frances Conlon's mother Dorothy Payton, center, is comforted by Nicole Calyen-Payton, her niece, during the funeral for Clemente High School student Frances Colon at Bethesda Church in Chicago, Ill., on Saturday, March 2, 2013. Frances Colon, 18, was fatally shot on February 15. | Andrew A. Nelles~Sun-Times Media
Updated: April 4, 2013 6:53AM
There was no choir, no call for hallelujah.
Dorothy Payton, the mother of 18-year-old Frances Colon — the third student from Clemente High School gunned down this school year — was filled with anger as she stood Saturday in front of her daughter’s white casket.
“She should not be here, getting buried in her graduation cap and gown,” Payton told mourners at Bethesda Christian Church. “She should be walking in that ceremony with her friends.”Colon’s casket was
adorned with white and yellow flowers, her school’s colors and the color of the gown she was buried in.
She dreamed of being a lawyer or a nurse, like her mother — she hadn’t decided yet. She loved cooking for her seven siblings and her parents. She loved fashion. Her 16-year-old sister, Selena Colon, often reminded her: Be careful on the streets. The older girl would nod and smile and say, “I’m good, I’m good.” Just hours after Frances Colon saw President Barack Obama’s Air Force One fly over the city in a visit prompted by the killing of another high school girl, Hadiya Pendleton, Selena Colon braided her sister’s hair and sent her on her way to a visit a friend on the West Side on Feb. 15. “The last thing I said to her was, ‘I’ll see you later,’ ” Selena Colon said during the service Saturday. Payton and Jose Colon, the slain teen’s father, weren’t planning to speak at Saturday’s service. Instead, they asked Victor Wood, a former member of the Gangster Disciples turned anti-violence advocate, to speak on behalf of the family. But they decided there was too much to say to keep quiet.
The mother of eight stood surrounded by her family, raising her voice against the violence affecting the city’s youth.
“No parent should be asking their kids: If you go before me, how would you want your funeral to be? But those are the questions I ask my kids because I know the world we live in,” Payton said. “So don’t think because of your color that it won’t reach your kids. . . . Don’t think because of your neighborhood it won’t reach your neighborhood. It will.”
Wood called Frances Colon’s death “a national tragedy and an outrage.”“We have failed to deal with this problem in this city. We don’t want to deal with the truth. You can’t call the children gangbangers and thugs. These are children. They come from our houses,” Wood said. “We got some crazies out there, but some of these kids, most, can be helped.”
