Surviving a shooting as a child, Joliet woman is making a difference
By Cindy Wojdyla Cain Sun-Times Media ccain@suntimes.com October 6, 2011 5:20PM
Amy Sanchez, president of the Collins Street Neighborhood Council, talks Thursday, Sept. 29, 2011, at a Joliet, Ill., restaurant. She keeps a book of clippings about her life after she was shot in the head by a stray bullet at age 9. | Matt Marton~Sun-Ti
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Updated: October 8, 2011 4:19PM
Amy Sanchez was lying on a couch watching TV in 1989 when a bullet tore through her family’s home and lodged in her brain above her right ear.
The bullet dramatically changed the 9-year-old’s life. Doctors thought she would never live through surgery, but she survived and became a symbol of the city’s violence. As a teen she vowed to make a difference, but after graduating from high school, Sanchez fell out of the spotlight.
Now Sanchez, 32, is back making headlines as she fights to improve the city’s East Side.
Life’s detour
Sanchez was in a drug-induced coma for 11 days after the May 7, 1989, shooting in her family’s home on the 500 block of Irving Street. Doctors said if she survived the surgery, she would probably be paralyzed on her right side, have difficulty talking and perhaps be brain damaged.
Six weeks in the hospital and six weeks of rehab proved them wrong. Other than a limp, she was well enough to return to school the next fall as a fifth-grader.
Later she would attend every day of the trial for the gang member accused of firing the shot that strayed into her family’s home.
Sanchez has a scrapbook filled with articles about her injury, her recovery, the awards she won, her appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and the anti-gang march she led.
City manager Tom Thanas, who was city attorney at the time, remembers Sanchez coming to city council meetings with her father.
“It helped raise the profile of the (gang) problem because it actually personalized it,” he said. “We had heard about it, we had read about it, but we didn’t see it up close and personal.”
As a high school student, Sanchez said she wanted to join the military, run for office and work on ending gang violence. But her life took a detour when she got pregnant with twins. She quit the Joliet Police Department’s cadet program as a result.
“I made a mistake,” she said. “I got pregnant, I wasn’t married and I was ashamed a little bit.”
But she didn’t want to give up her babies.
It was a tough, high-risk pregnancy and she was confined to bed before the twins were born three months early in 1999. She dropped out of criminal justice classes at Joliet Junior College, eventually got married and had two more boys.
Back in the game
Sanchez raised her sons, worked and moved to Indianapolis to manage apartment complexes. But she missed her family so much she moved back to the Collins Street neighborhood in 2009.
While trying to find after-school programs for her sons, she discovered Unity Community Development Corporation. The group formed in 2007 to improve the quality of life on the city’s East Side and Near West Side.
Sanchez noticed several neighborhood councils were part of Unity CDC, but none represented the Collins Street area specifically. She helped form one in 2010 and became its president. She also was named chairwoman of an East Side cleanup day held May 7, the 22nd anniversary of the day she was shot.
More recently, state Sen. A.J. Wilhelmi, D-Joliet, appointed Sanchez to his Collins Street Task Force, which is looking for new uses for the 270 acres no longer in use by the Joliet Correctional Center and U.S. Steel.
The Collins Street group and other neighborhood councils recently banded together to keep a pawn shop and gold-buying store from locating on Collins Street.
Neither business would improve the economic climate, Sanchez said. And both could be a detriment to luring bigger businesses targeted by Wilhelmi’s group.
The city’s zoning board voted against the gold-buying store, and the pawn shop pulled its plan to locate on Collins Street — small victories in what Sanchez hopes is a long quest to improve the quality of life where she was raised.
“I feel good because we did it as a community,” she said. “We all did it together.”
Thanas said Sanchez is becoming a spokeswoman for the Collins Street neighborhood.
“She grew up faster than the average kid because of her situation,” he said. “She’s come back, and she’s not a person who sits on the sidelines. She wants to be in the game.”
Making up for lost time
By improving her community, Sanchez hopes her sons never have to know the violence she experienced.
“I think there is definitely a reason for everything,” she said. “I was called to stand up for things at a young age. I think it kind of made me stronger. I know I can’t sit on my hands. I have to use the fight in me to move the community forward.”
And as she works to improve her neighborhood, there’s something else she keeps in mind. It’s the memory of her friend Denny Reyes, 10, who also was caught in gang crossfire nine months after Sanchez was shot. He died instantly, never getting a second chance. Sanchez did, and she said she’s going to make the most of it.
“I think I’m headed back on a path I should have been on before,” she said. “It’s about making up for lost time.”
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