As I wrote last March, 14-year-old Gregory Robinson sounds like someone you would have admired.
Hearing gunshots, Robinson tried to protect a 10-month-old and a 4-year-old, and was shot dead. His murder remains unsolved, along with many others.
The murder of 14-year-old Gregory Robinson, a Simeon Career Academy student who died shielding two younger children from bullets last March, remains unsolved.
This saddens the Rev. Don Smith of Holy Jerusalem Church, who doesn’t live far from where the murder took place, in the 1100 block of West 110th Place.
"I think some of these kids are so engrossed in video games, they don’t know reality," Smith said. "They think shooting is like a video game — [that] they shoot you, and three seconds later you get back up. It don’t work that way."
The murder of the Chicago Public Schools student — and many other homicides in the city that remain unsolved — was the reason Smith and a cadre of ministers and community groups hit the streets Saturday morning, ringing doorbells and passing out pamphlets asking for neighbors’ help in solving them.
Chicago Police spokesman Roderick Drew on Saturday could not immediately provide the number of unsolved murders in the city.
The South Side of Chicago is too dangerous still. There are about 100 community groups working in tandem with the Chicago Police Department to solve these murders. Dubbed Chain of Change, the project "organizes youth activists to individually and collectively strategize how to end violence by exposing its roots through the creation of media. Beyond media distributes video cameras to youth groups, who create short videos that challenge individuals to think about their own roles in this struggle."
Here is one of their video projects:
It’s a start. Another start.
And still the bullets fly.