Murders in Chicago can easily be overlooked on an individual basis, unless of course its circumstances fill a certain narrative one is using to rail against the system, or the community where this is happening (see screen shot below). However the motives and the lives that it touches aren’t always going to follow the script so many claim it does.
Take for example the double murder of Jeremy Hunter & Steve Tate. Both in their mid twenties living in an apartment building right down my block. While I may have passed by them several times I never knew who they were until the day the street was filled with Police vehicles on the morning of Valentines Day 2016.
I’ll admit it, as I walked down the block to photograph the scene the normal narrative slips through your mind. Drug deal gone bad. Gang dispute. Maybe even a lovers quarrel, but what really happened was a bit weirder.
The Story in the press
You can read story covered in the Chicago Tribune, or I can shorten it for you. A man named Marquise Hollerway (22), who was on parole for a Valentines day robbery he committed in 2013, when he was 19, murdered both Tate & Hunter in their apartment at roughly the same day and time he had robbed another apartment just 3 years before. In 2013 Hollerway, had lived just 3 blocks away from where Tate & Hunter lived 2016, but the 2013 robbery happened in a different neighborhood.
Of course after the initial murder, you never really hear this part of the story. Heck I didn’t until this morning when I started doing some searching.
What the story doesn’t say
The story has no information on whether Hollerway knew either man before hand, or if the 2016 incident was a robbery attempt. What it does say without saying it is that crimes that may have seemed unsolvable are being solved and that the murders in this city aren’t always what people on different sides think they are. Despite what’s in the news in the days after, it is not always everything that is known.
Behind the names & balloons
I think when we hear the names of those killed, or see the cross & balloons marking a murder, it doesn’t have the same effect unless your connected. So here’s what I want you to visualize. Most of us have been close to tragedy; a small child drowning at a local lake, a car accident taking a parent away from your child’s friend, the list goes on. When you see that white cross on the highway for someone you knew, or go to that candle light vigil, try hard to remember that emotion and when you see that makeshift memorial on the news, remember that emotion and imagine those grieving and imagine how hurtful it would be if someone politicized the death of someone you knew.
Despite police finding the suspected murderer and no clear evidence of illegal activity by the deceased, almost all of the 20 comments on the Tribune article have nothing to say about how justice might have been served in this tragic loss of live.
