Sun-Times Special Report: Angel's last days
'He liked his beer. He liked his music and he liked a good time.'
Angel Ramirez had Friday off, so he enjoyed a late sleep.
(John H. White/Sun-Times)
(Brian Jackson/Sun-Times)
At 10 o’clock, his mother called to make sure he was up in time to take his grandfather to the doctor as he promised. Angel jumped in the shower, had a bite for breakfast and by noon was on the way to Stroger Hospital with his grandfather in tow.
It was already a beautiful day — clear skies and bright sun that warmed the air enough to pull tulips from their beds and neighbors out on front stoops.
TV weathermen predicted Friday would be the start of a glorious weekend — perfect for throwing open upstairs windows and barbecuing in the backyard.
Angry people with scores to settle, though, had other ideas. The flurry of bullets they unleashed during a deadly 59 hours, from 12:50 p.m. on April 18 to 11:25 p.m. on April 20, sent beat cops scurrying to a blur of calls of “shots fired.”
In all, 40 people were shot. Seven died. Seven children were shot, five of them out after curfew. And by Monday, a national media spotlight focused on the blood spilled in the streets of Chicago.
Street violence usually spikes when the weather warms, so maybe we should have expected it, but nobody saw this coming. Definitely not Angel, a 26-year old muffler shop manager who still lived with family in his boyhood home.
This is the story of those three violent days, how they stole lives and made neighbors tremble while Angel went about his last weekend.
They called him “Buttercup.”
A burly guy with a thin goatee, chubby cheeks and a gentle manner, Angel Ramirez was still the first guy off his stool if a buddy got in a scuffle. He grew up in Little Village — Southwest Side gang turf that doesn’t breed pushovers.
Angel never got mixed up with the street punks who hang on the corners near his family’s yellow brick A-frame on 23rd Place. But he couldn’t avoid their violence. Nobody could.
Angel was a teenager when a stray bullet blasted through his family’s living room window as he watched TV, sending him to the floor for cover. When he was a high school senior, two men ambushed him while he delivered auto parts, shooting into his car from both directions. Bullets pierced his right arm and lower back. He drove himself to the hospital, and never really talked much about that day again.
When money got tight, Angel begged his mother to keep him enrolled at De La Salle Institute, a Catholic high school, because the public schools were thick with feuding gang-bangers. If the family couldn’t afford the tuition, Angel understood. But he told his mother he wouldn’t study anymore. What would be the point?
Mom commuted to an office job in Skokie. Dad manned a lunch truck. Between them, and with financial help from the school, they kept Angel at De La Salle — Mayor Daley’s alma mater — and he graduated in 2000. He went on to technical college, but dropped out to manage Diaz Mufflers, owned by a neighborhood family that treated him like a son.
At the muffler shop, Angel and his wide grin won over just about everybody, from working men in rusty vans to young men driving cars on 22-inch rims, and even two beat cops who became his pals. Angel made his own schedule and worked for the weekend.
“He was always happy, always laughing,’’ said his friend, Jon Medina, a Chicago Police officer who patrols the neighborhood. “He didn’t judge. He liked his beer. He liked his music and he liked a good time.’’
On his days away from the shop, Angel spent much of his time with his two younger brothers and his best friend, Temo Perez. When Temo worked late at his family’s supermercado on Kedzie, Angel often stopped by to help him close up and put down a few beers.
Friday, April 18, was no different.
Earlier that week, Angel’s grandfather had fainted after his blood sugar dropped dangerously low. Angel had agreed to take his abuelo for a checkup on Friday. They left the house at about noon for a 1:30 appointment. Anybody who goes to Stroger Hospital knows it’s best to be an hour early if you don’t want to get stuck there all day.
While they sat in the waiting room, the weekend’s coming gun violence first sparked in Marquette Park. Two people were wounded at 12:50 p.m.
At 3:20 p.m., a 15-year old girl was shot and wounded in South Chicago.
At 5:40, a 19-year-old was shot and wounded, again in Marquette Park.
Officer Medina and his partner, Gustavo Torres Jr., happened to see Angel back in Little Village at around 6 o’clock driving a white van — one of many cars Angel would “test drive” around town after the shop closed. They waved at each other.
Medina and Torres had a lot in common with Angel. They were all Mexican Americans with deep ties to family, some still south of the border. Their parents had all sent them to Catholic schools and had high expectations. Over the years, Angel and Medina had become good friends who shared each other’s big moments — weddings, baptisms and a funeral.
On that Friday, a rare early morning earthquake jiggled the city. The Cubs beat the Pirates. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra played an afternoon concert.
And that evening, while Angel relaxed at home with his family, the shootings rattled on.
At 6:30 p.m., a man in Gage Park was shot in the stomach and chest, but lived.
At 6:35 p.m., a plumbing contractor, Marcus Hendricks of Flossmoor, was shot and killed in his Roseland office — the first murder of the weekend.
Hendricks, the 31-year old owner of Hendricks Plumbing and Sewers, had left for work late that morning so he could have breakfast with his daughter and stepson before helping the nanny send them off to school. He had visited a few job sites and promised his wife, Desiree, that he’d be home early.
Hendricks had grown up in Washington Heights, just a neighborhood away from his shop. He was well-aware of the gangs, guns, drugs and overwhelming poverty all around him. He gave jobs to guys looking to turn their lives around. Guys like his alleged killer, Bennie Teague, a convicted armed robber who had been found not guilty of murder in 2004.
Teague, the police say, walked into the shop at 115th and Halsted, covered his face with a T-shirt and shot his boss in the stomach with an AK-47 assault rifle.
A woman who worked at a beauty parlor next door came running. She found Hendricks struggling for breath. When the paramedics came, he asked them to call his new bride of six months. But by the time Desiree arrived at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, her husband was gone.
Teague led police on a chase. He allegedly shot at and missed three officers. The cops caught Teague about 7:30 p.m. at a house near 113th and Union. They found an assault rifle under the porch.
About 45 minutes later, two men were shot and wounded in South Chicago.
All the while, Angel hung out at home, killing time before meeting up with Temo Perez, his best pal.
On New Year’s Eve last year, Temo rode shotgun with Angel on the way to a party. Temo had a ring in his pocket and a plan to ask his best girl to marry him.
“What’s your Plan B?” Angel kidded him.
It’s the kind of thing you can say to your best friend since preschool, the friend you’ve spent so many great times with — Mexican Independence Day on 26th Street, rodeos in the south suburbs and long road trips to Mexico.
After Temo popped the question, Angel just had to know: “What did she say? What did she say?”
“Yes” was the answer, which made it immediately clear that “Plan B” — selling the ring and partying in Cancun together — was no longer an option.
Temo will always remember that day — the day his girl said yes — just as he will never forget, for other reasons, Sunday, April 20.
Angel showed up at the grocery store around 9 p.m. to help Temo close up. They talked outside in the cool night air, staring at the girls outside Volkan, a Latino disco across the street.
Across town, at about 9:30, shots rang out in South Shore. Melvin Thomas and his distant cousin, Rhonell Savala, both just 18, were found lying in a parkway near 76th and Phillips, in front of the Free Salvation M.B. Church.
The weekend body count had just hit three.
Thomas had been visiting from Downstate Galesburg. His family had moved to Galesburg after his release from a Vermillion County juvenile detention center, having gotten into some trouble while living in Danville. The Thomas family, ironically, had moved to Danville in 2006 to put a little distance between Melvin and a notorious stretch of Washington Street in suburban Harvey where he had grown up — Gangster Disciple turf. Thomas’ only run-in with police had been in Danville, and his time in the juvenile lockup had changed him, his sister, Ashlee Thomas, said. He wanted to get a job, a better life.
Thomas had been in Chicago for about a month, and spent a lot of time with Savala, who was awaiting trial on 12 felony counts of unlawful use of a weapon. Friends say Savala liked to wear a black glove on his shooting hand.
The two teens spent a few days helping Savala’s mother move to a new apartment. At night, they hung out with a couple of girls, which led to an argument with some guys from “Terrortown,” a gang ’hood controlled by the Black P Stone Rangers.
At 9:30 that night, Thomas and Savala left a corner store with the two girls. They spotted a car creeping down the street.
The girls ran one way. Thomas and Savala ran the other. Somebody jumped from the car, opened fire and jumped back in, and the car sped off.
After a few minutes, when Thomas didn’t answer his cell phone, the girls ran back to find him.
Savala was dead, but Thomas was still alive. He reached out to one of the girls. Blood spilled from his mouth, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he died.
At 10:30 p.m., Temo and Angel locked up the store and went down to the basement to get in a workout — bench press. They pumped out reps with 165 pounds on the bar.
At about that time in South Chicago, Ricardo Sanchez stepped out on his front porch for a smoke and a chat on the phone with his sister in California.
Sanchez had lived in South Chicago for 45 years, and had lived in that white house with the mint-green trim at 83rd and Exchange for nearly a decade.
He was pacing back and forth on the stoop when a man in his early 20s, wearing a black jacket with a black hood that hung over a black ball cap, climbed the steps and demanded money.
Sanchez, a 65-year-old retired steelworker who did odd jobs for extra cash, had $900 on him — the down payment for an upholstery side job. He wouldn’t give it up.
There was a scuffle. Then . . . POP.
The shooter ran north on Exchange, disappearing into the shadows. Sanchez struggled in the door, holding his chest.
He made it to the dining room and sat at the head of the table. “I’ve been shot,” he said. “Call an ambulance.”
His shirt was soaked in blood. His live-in girlfriend of three years, Maria Camarena, whom he had met when she was a waitress at TNT Restaurant a few blocks away, was in shock. But her son, Emmanuel Hernandez, called 911.
Emmanuel laid Sanchez on the floor and held his hand to the wound, keeping pressure on it, while Camarena rubbed alcohol on her love’s forehead. It might keep him awake, and the 911 dispatcher had said he must stay awake. The bullet had torn through his chest and out his back.
But even as they waited for paramedics — and even as Angel and Temo talked outside a grocery store — shootings raged on in other parts of town.
At 10:45 p.m., a man was shot and wounded in the arm while driving through Gage Park.
Sanchez was rushed to Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn.
At 11:35 p.m., a man was shot and wounded in Uptown.
Ten minutes later, two kids out after curfew were shot and wounded in Englewood.
Sanchez died in surgery.
And days later, Camarena would find an engagement ring that Sanchez had hidden in the bottom of a drawer.
But now, at midnight on this Friday in April, Angel and Temo sat in the office of the grocery store, sipping beers and watching celebrity gossip shows on TV.
Since Angel had woken up that day, 15 people had been shot in Chicago, and four had died.
And hardly anyone had noticed.
Angel returned home and went to bed, but not before five more people were shot.
At 12:51 a.m., a man was shot and wounded in the back in Chicago Lawn.
About 40 minutes later, a man was shot and wounded in Chatham.
An hour later, a man was shot and wounded in Humboldt Park.
At 2:15 a.m., a 31-year-old man was shot and wounded in the neck in Englewood.
Twenty minutes after that, a man was shot and wounded in a drive-by in West Garfield Park.
While Angel slept, a paroled felon who neighbors said had recently started running a dope house in the 300 block of North Avers Street in Garfield Park was murdered — the weekend’s fifth killing.
And that one, at 5:50 a.m., really woke up the neighborhood.
Michael Giles had moved to the house on Avers about a month ago. He had been released on parole six months into a two-year drug sentence. He lived with a woman and six kids.
“We were outside, and all of a sudden, we heard pow, pow, pow — gunshots,” said 14-year-old neighbor Monique Elam. “Then we see some men running out the building. We all ran. Next thing you know, the police came. Then they brought the body out.”
It was Giles, 26, a career criminal with a long arrest record for weapons and drugs.
With a rap sheet like that, Giles matched the profile of most shooting victims in Chicago, about 70 percent of whom have criminal records.
An hour later, Giles was pronounced dead at Mount Sinai Hospital, which the gang-bangers and cops in that part of town call “Mt. Die-ni.”
At 7:09 a.m., the first report of the rash of shootings appeared on the Sun-Times wire service under the headline, “Weekend gets off to violent start.”
Local TV stations followed up. Mayor Daley and Police Supt. Jody Weis called a press conference. Soon the dramatic start to Chicago’s spring spike in shootings was national news, making CNN and Fox.
At 10 on that Saturday morning, Angel awoke to the smell of his grandmother’s home cooking. She liked to spoil him that way.
After breakfast, he slipped out to the garage — a favorite hang where friends always knew they could find him — to tinker with a car he’d been working on.
While Angel turned wrenches in Little Village, Raul Lemus in Chicago Lawn dropped off his Chevy Astro van at Omar’s Auto Repair.
Lemus had a headache, so he went to Family Dollar to get Advil and a bag of chips. At 11:17 a.m., someone pulled up in a Volvo and shot him twice in the abdomen outside Omar’s.
Family Dollar manager Simeon Wilson heard a sound like a car running over a pop bottle, then sirens. As Lemus bled, as Wilson remembers it, paramedics argued about his injuries. “The ambulance people said, ‘You’re not shot, get up.’ He said, ‘I am shot.’ They made him stand up. He said, ‘I can’t breathe. I am shot.’ He kept saying, ‘I can’t breathe.’ Then they believed.”
Of all the murders in 2006 for which Chicago detectives determined a motive, about half were blamed on gang violence.
Lemus’ friends say people should forget the “45 Saints” tattoo on his right hand. He was turning his life around, they say, and spent so much time with his 5-year-old daughter that people called him “Mr. Mom.”
Mr. Mom died at Stroger Hospital the next morning.
The weekend body count bumped up to six.
At about 5:45 on Saturday evening, Angel’s mother asked him to keep an eye on his brothers while she went to a baby shower.
For Angel, hanging out with his brothers — Gonzalo, 18, and Roberto, 13 — wasn’t a chore.
“What I ask him, what I need, he never says no — no matter what,” his mother said.
Anything his brothers wanted — movies, clothes, a little extra cash — Angel got for them. He kept them in line, too. Don’t hang with gang-bangers, he said. Don’t be stupid and flunk out of school.
Have big dreams, he told Roberto, an eighth-grader who wants to play college football. “He was like my second dad,” Roberto says.
That evening, the two younger boys ran a few errands with Angel, who had promised to deliver cases of Corona and Modelo to a friend’s 21st birthday party in Old Town.
On the ride over, Roberto and Angel talked about cars and how if they were lucky one day maybe they could buy one of those fancy condos near North and Ashland.
When they returned home, Gonzalo and Roberto ate pizza and watched the post-apocalyptic thriller “I Am Legend,” which Angel had rented for them at Blockbuster.
And over the next few hours, while Angel waited for his mother to return home, eight more people were shot and wounded in Chicago.
A 34-year-old man was shot in his backyard on the East Side. A 20-year-old man was hit in Englewood. In Austin, starting at 10:30 p.m., six people were shot. The victims included three kids out after curfew.
Angel’s mother, Felipa, arrived home around midnight. Angel’s friends were waiting in the alley.
It’s too late to go out, Felipa told him. But he assured her he would be OK.
“Remember,’’ his mother said, “we are going to church tomorrow.’’
With that, Angel was out the door. He texted Temo at midnight and made plans to meet up later.
Meanwhile, another teenager was shot and and wounded in Englewood.
By 2:30 a.m., Angel had made his way to Fiesta Cantina in Wrigleyville
Four minutes later, a 24-year-old man was shot and wounded in Rogers Park.
At 3 a.m., Angel was sitting with Temo and his fiancee in a booth at Temo’s family store. They ate pizza and talked about their night on the town.
Eight minutes later, a 26-year-old man was shot and wounded in the leg in South Shore.
But by the time Angel finally went to bed that morning, the shooting had stopped, taking a breather.
Angel got up late for church at St. Roman’s on Sunday morning, and his mother left without him. But about midway through mass, she looked over her shoulder and spotted her son near the back door, standing in his usual spot.
As mass let out and Angel caught up with friends on the block, Chicago’s weekend shootings resumed — this time on the Near South Side, where a man was shot and wounded at 27th and Prairie.
Angel spent the early afternoon on Sunday back in his garage, which was equipped with a TV and a giant cooler. That’s where his “adopted brother” from the muffler shop, Armando Diaz, picked him up at about 5.
They drove to Home Depot, picked up a few tools, and were back in the garage by 6:30 or so.
At about that time in nearby Douglas Park, a young man, just 19, was shot and wounded.
Police scanners were quiet after that — for about four hours. Then one last young man would die.
At 7 o’clock, Angel went to a buddy’s birthday party on 21st Street just west of California — Latin King gang turf so notoriously violent that a police surveillance camera had kept watch for more than a year.
At 9:57 p.m., Angel called Temo. He was going home to get a coat — the weather had changed — and then to Mi Tierra to watch a mariachi band play.
Angel walked out front to wait with the birthday boy, who doesn’t want to be identified, for more people to arrive. He sat on the stoop next door to make a phone call.
It was 10:25 p.m.
Just as friends arrived in one car, a second car — this one filled with gang members— pulled up and unloaded a flurry of shots.
Officer Jon Medina was on patrol that night when a call came — shots fired on 21st Street. People down.
Medina’s cell phone rang. Angel was shot. Caught in the crossfire.
The birthday boy was grazed by two bullets.
“I ducked down. I felt burning in my leg. I checked to see if I was shot and I saw Angel,” he said. “He fell down the stairs and was bleeding a lot.”
One bullet ripped through a red pickup truck and blasted Angel in the face. A neighbor grabbed him as he lay bleeding.
“I just waited there with him,” the neighbor said.
When Medina roared up, Angel was in horrible condition.
“I got down by him,’’ Medina said. “I kept telling him, ‘Jon’s here. Jon’s here.’ ’’
An ambulance rushed Angel to Mount Sinai. Temo called Angel’s mother.
Something, he told her, happened on 21st Street.
“What is Angel doing on 21st Street?” she thought, never thinking how bad it could be. “Maybe there was a fight.”
But when Felipa Ramirez arrived at Mount Sinai, the waiting room was crowded with cops and Angel’s friends. She spotted Medina walking out of the emergency room, struggling for breath, leaning on two other officers.
“When I saw him, I thought the worst,’’ she said. “I thought that’s it.”
Security guards wouldn’t let her see her boy, but she recognized his brown dress shoes on the floor near a gurney. She leaned on a wall, slumped down and prayed aloud in Spanish: “If you take him, God, take him completely.”
Two miles away at 11:19 p.m., even as a mother at Mount Sinai prayed for her angel, two final people were shot on this bloody weekend. They were a man and a woman and they managed to live.
But Angel died, six minutes later. Felipa Ramirez spent a quiet moment with her son.
"I touched his hair," she said. "It was still warm."
Soft Mexican music played as folks gathered at the funeral home in Stickney.
They looked at photos of a burly, smiling young man. Angel in kindergarten. Angel in a cap and gown. Angel in a tuxedo at prom. Angel on vacation in Mexico.
The Diaz family from the muffler shop was there, making sure things went smoothly. Roberto and Gonzalo stood together; whispering to a friend.
Felipa Ramirez wept on a couch. A band formed a semicircle around Angel's casket and played traditional songs. Horns, guitars and sad voices filled the packed room.
Jon Medina was there, haunted by a memory.
"He looked like he recognized me," Medina said, remembering how Angel had died. "I know he saw me. It makes me feel a little better."
As the mariachi music played, Temo got lost in his thoughts. "I didn't think I'd be hearing mariachi until my wedding," he told himself. "It shouldn't be this way."
For weeks after Angel's murder, Felipa Ramirez remiained in her home, surrounded by family. She built a shrine to Angel in the living room. She suffered through Mother's Day -- a day on which Angel always gave her flowers.
"It's so hard for a family that member is gone," she said recently, sitting in her living room.
She looked up at a water stain on the pink-papered wall. It had appeared and grown in the days after Angel was shot -- two thin streaks stretched half way down the wall.
"Even the house cried," she said.
