Neighborhood ties still propel violence in a changing Cabrini-Green

Chicago Tribune

27-07-2025

Julia Tate was headed to bed a few weeks ago when her daughter burst into their rowhouse screaming. Tate's cousin, Devon LaSalle, had been shot.
The family had urged LaSalle to not come around the neighborhood so much, but he grew up in a now-closed part of the Cabrini-Green rowhouses. He still spent a lot of time there in spite of how much had changed since he was a kid on Mohawk Street.
At 41, LaSalle was one of many people who stuck around the rowhouses even as development exploded around the now-vacant lots where the infamous high-rises once stood.
Old relationships persisted too, for better or worse. When LaSalle and another man were killed days apart on the same block in what's left of the original public housing development, authorities said both had known their alleged shooters for years.
It's been two decades since there were slayings so close together in the Cabrini-Green rowhouses, a patch of 146 public housing units ringed by new construction in the well-heeled River North area. Chicago Police Department sources and neighborhood violence interrupters say the killings likely came from personal history and were not tied to wider gang conflicts.
And they came at a time when a leader with his own links to Cabrini-Green is seeking to run the Chicago Housing Authority. Now-former Ald. Walter Burnett Jr., who stepped down from his City Council spot while angling for the post, grew up there and has long decried people's tendency to hang out in their old neighborhoods,
Sue Popkin, a researcher who has tracked the impact of the CHA's Plan for Transformation across a number of now-demolished housing complexes, including Cabrini, said old residents and people with ties to the developments keep coming back and maintain social lives in their old neighborhoods long after they've moved away.
She offered another CHA development, the Ida B. Wells Homes, as an example. It took years for the homes to be dismantled, she said — 'but until it was entirely gone,' former residents returned.
'People go back to places after disasters,' Popkin said. 'You can't get people to move away from the edge of the ocean, even after there's a flood. There's a very powerful pull of home.'
That pull was true for Devon LaSalle, his family said.
He came back often to spend time with his girlfriend and his cousins, who are Cabrini residents. LaSalle made an excellent plate of Spanish rice, they said, and would set up in a nearby park to cook and sell plates with a few friends.
He had a lot of history on those blocks. Court records show he was arrested last year and charged with aggravated discharge of a firearm after he allegedly fired a gun down Cambridge Avenue into a group of people. That case was still pending at the time of his death.
More recently, LaSalle had started working as one of 21 peacekeepers through the organization Near North 3.6.5, and meant to use his own close street relationships around the neighborhood to prevent further violence. The group's leader, the Rev. Randall K. Blakey, said LaSalle had been considered 'one of the best and most promising' men to work with the program, which started in April of this year. He had not been on duty the night he was shot, Blakey said.
Just after midnight on July 13, Assistant State's Attorney Mike Pekara said, LaSalle spoke to a man, Maurice Timms, briefly in one of the courtyards that separate the banks of rowhouses. After LaSalle turned away, Timms allegedly shot him once before he approached and fired again.
A citizen called 911 a few hours after the shooting to report that Timms had returned to the area and he was asleep in a nearby pickup truck, Pekara said. Officers arrested Timms after a group of residents identified him as the alleged shooter, according to police records.
Eight days earlier, 46-year-old Darrin Carter was killed about 50 yards down the block, authorities said. Obbie Sanders allegedly approached Carter as he sat in his car, took out a gun and shot him multiple times. Carter then sought help from a nearby squad car before he lost consciousness, Pekara said.
Sanders — who wears leg braces and uses a cane to walk because he's been shot so many times — was allegedly captured on surveillance video fleeing the shooting scene, and police arrested him after he crashed a car near Wacker and DuSable Lake Shore drives.
Both Sanders and Timms had been in the neighborhood's social mix days or weeks before the slayings, Pekara said.
LaSalle's father, Ralph LaSalle, has been trying to think what could have pushed someone to allegedly 'execute' his son, particularly someone who they'd all known personally.
'That guy, I knew him,' he said of Timms. 'He called me 'Pops.' I wouldn't have figured he would do (anything) like that.'
Now 64, the elder LaSalle spent 10 years in prison as a young man after he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter. He has thought about the man he killed decades ago often over the last several weeks.
'The pain I'm feeling, now I know what his parents went through and how they felt,' he said.
He doesn't plan to return to Cabrini-Green ever again.
Burnett said the killings highlight issues the area has faced for years, even as the area has seen crime plummet and development take off around what's left of the rowhouses.
A native of the Cabrini-Green rowhomes, Burnett may soon assume control of the CHA this summer. He said former residents of the rowhouses often return to the area after moving away or being released from prison, reigniting old conflicts.
'All these outside folks coming to the neighborhood, I think it's a detriment to the neighborhood,' Burnett said. 'It's hard to stop those incidents when folks are drinking or getting high and they get into it.'
His comments largely echoed those he made five years ago when the killing of 9-year-old Janari Ricks jarred the city. Then, too, Burnett called for nonresidents to keep out of the rowhouses and 'do dirt' elsewhere.
Residents of Cabrini-Green were critical in helping CPD officers find a suspect in that case, too, police officials said at the time. One man was charged with murder in the boy's death, and court records show that case is still pending.
Janari's mother later filed a lawsuit against CHA, the security firm that patrolled the rowhouses and the property management company. That lawsuit, settled in 2024 for $7 million, alleged that the shooter who killed Janari was well-known in the neighborhood as a violent person, as was his intended target.
The target of the shooting, it was alleged, was included on a CHA 'exclusion list' of people who were not to be allowed within the rowhouses. Burnett said CHA could do more to ensure that only those named on a lease are residing in a unit, though he said he couldn't say whether rules related to the list need to be strengthened.
'We need to check these places,' Burnett said. 'We've got a lot of folks harboring in apartments that (aren't) supposed to be there.'
The CHA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Burnett told the Tribune that fostering a sense of community and respect for current residents would help deter behavior that can lead to violence.
'So I think the challenge is, one, the people in the neighborhood who may be related to these folks don't demand respect for their houses,' Burnett said. 'Your cousins, your brother, your baby's daddy, you don't demand that they respect your neighborhood.'
In a statement, a CHA spokesperson said that all public housing residents needed to adhere to the rules laid out in their leases. According to the statement, the agency 'works hard not to perpetuate stigma for past, present, or future public housing residents' and is making it a priority to offer public gathering spaces where people with ties to the area can return and celebrate their history there.
The intersection of Cleveland and Oak streets is known as Dantrell Davis Way, in memory of the 7-year-old boy slain by a sniper's bullet in 1992 as he walked to school through the high-rises with his mother.
Scores of children were shot within the Cabrini-Green high-rises, and Dantrell's death catalyzed momentum for the structures' eventual demolition, which researchers like Popkin found led to dramatic dips in violent crime.
Along the west side of Cleveland is a vacant lot, still owned by the CHA, where Dantrell's former school once stood. To the north, a new apartment building is under construction.
A set of cubic gray and white rowhomes stand on the east side of the street behind a black fence, where people on a recent morning were watering their lawns and walking their dogs. South of Oak Street stand blocks of boarded-up rowhomes and the 800 block of North Cambridge Avenue.
People lined the street on a recent afternoon, chatting in twos and threes as they leaned on cars and against fences. A teenage boy rode a motorbike up and down the block, revving the engine every time he turned around.
Rodnell Dennis stood at the far end of her block with his arms folded. A group of kids rounding the corner stopped for hugs and fist bumps before scattering into several rowhouses up and down Cambridge. Others dressed in swim gear waited on the steps or hurtled back and forth across the street, where a fence blocked off more boarded-up units.
Dennis, 46, grew up in the high-rises and spent 20 years behind bars before he was paroled in 2012. He recalled finding a dramatically different Cabrini-Green upon his return — 146 of the original rowhouses surrounded by new construction. A CHA spokesperson said the agency had erected 4,000 units of public housing around the neighborhood since 2000.
Another 4,000 units still planned for around the area will house people with a range of incomes, as part of the CHA's 'Cabrini Now' plan. The agency's ombudsman lets residents living in mixed-income communities offer feedback and voice concerns with community-building, a spokesperson said, and CHA works with several organizations in the Near North Side area on events where residents can get to know one another.
But for Dennis, who now works as a peacekeeper through Near North 3.6.5, the distance between the old neighbors and the new feels vast.
'They don't know us,' he said. 'They just know the stories they've heard about us. They form opinions that have no relevance to who we are.'
Dennis, who pleaded guilty to the murder of a 9-year-old boy when he was just 13, said he had come a long way from contributing to the violence that gave Cabrini-Green its notoriety.
'It goes to show you a level of growth from then to now,' he said. But he said it's hard to impress that on people who avoid the rowhouses despite living so close by.
'How do you communicate with people who live 15 feet from your front door but don't want to walk through your neighborhood?' he asked.
Just behind Dennis, Julia Tate's rowhouse still had stuffed animals and a wilted flower from LaSalle's memorial gathering next to the front door. He left behind 14 children and had just welcomed his first grandchild, relatives said.
On Wednesday afternoon, Tate's air conditioning was blasting and the blinds were drawn to keep out the start of the latest heat wave. Her phone rang every few minutes with relatives calling about funeral arrangements.
Now 56, Tate has lived in the rowhouses all her life, on Iowa and Mohawk streets and now in a unit on the southern edge of the neighborhood. She remembers her mom growing cucumbers and cantaloupe out front, trips to Rainbo Roller Rink in the Uptown neighborhood and singing in the Sunshine Gospel Choir.
Tate mentioned the 1970 murders of two police officers in nearby Seward Park as an example of the kind of violence that gave the housing projects their notoriety. Cabrini-Green 'had its day,' in her words. But the rowhouses had been another story.
'This area was always a safe haven for people,' she said. 'We had a childhood life, even though things might have been happening during the time when we were growing up.'
People come back to the rowhomes because that's what's left, but also because they were considered a less risky place to be, she said.
'The people that come down here now are the people that used to be in the high-rises,' Tate said.
And while crime has dropped sharply in the area since those towers were demolished, Tate feels that kids growing up in the last of the rowhouses today don't have as much access to the kind of programs that sprang up to help kids who lived in the high-rises.
Some anti-violence workers said the new development in the area has actually made it harder to secure funding. City and state dollars often are allocated based on median-income in a particular ZIP code, making kids from struggling families less likely to stand out on paper in a wealthier zone.
A CHA spokesperson said in a statement that the agency was always looking for ways to offer more options for youth activities. Currently, organizations like After School Matters and By the Hand Club for Kids run no- or low-cost programming for families in the area along with the Chicago Park District.
Stacie Wade, LaSalle's second cousin who pounded up the stairs screaming the night he was killed, remembers programs from her youth in the rowhouses. Now 31, Wade doesn't recall worrying about shootings growing up.
'I used to like it down here,' she said.
But LaSalle was like an older brother to her, and his death has made her reconsider the neighborhood where he spent so much time and she's lived most of her life.
He was with people he trusted when he came back, she said. And still he was taken away.