March 31--A short teenager in a Batman sweater sat with his mother in their doorway under the cardboard sign bearing the address of their Logan Square home.
The building had been a tire shop some years ago, neighbors said. Now it is the Guzman family home.
Just after 2 a.m. Thursday, 17-year-old Jose Caisaguano sat with his mother on their stoop, waiting on news about the boy's uncle, who had been shot early Thursday.
Caisaguano woke to his mother's screams and found her outside with her brother -- Caisaguano's uncle -- Mario Enrique Guzman.
Guzman, 32, was on the sidewalk, bleeding from his chest through his white T-shirt. Caisaguano and his mother tried to keep him awake until paramedics arrived. They squeezed his hand. Tears welled in the wounded man's eyes.
"It was too late, he was crying," Caisaguano said. "After that, he went pale, and they took him away."
Someone shot Guzman from a white Tahoe, about 1:45 a.m., after yelling for his attention.
"Hey," and then gunfire. Guzman fell.
Caisaguano sat with his mother in their doorway as Ambulance 62 pulled away from Sacramento Avenue and George Street, lights on but no sirens, toward Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center. Guzman died there.
He had been walking back from a night out with friends when shot. Officers stretched another ring of crime scene tape around the area as the ambulance left. Caisaguano and his mother were enclosed in the scene. Guzman's bloody white shirt and black jacket were on the ground at the boy's foot.
Officers and detectives walked by, shining flashlights at the sidewalk. A detective interviewed the family.
Less than 25 minutes after the ambulance left, Caisaguano's mother screamed into her phone as she stood in the doorway.
"No, no, no, no, no, no, no."
She cried and walked inside the house for a moment before stepping back outside. She leaned against the door frame and rocked back and forth, overtaken by grief, appearing frustrated and broken and unsure what to do with the news of his death.
Guzman had a history with the Maniac Latin Disciples street gang but had stepped away in recent years, Caisaguano said. Kidney failure put him in a coma for a year; his wife left him, and he started going to church.
After that period, about two years ago, "He didn't talk to anybody. He stayed in the house," Caisaguano said. "He was really antisocial."
His closest friends were still gangbanging though, and when he was out with them, it attracted attention, Caisaguano said. They were in a car a few weeks ago when guys in an SUV tried to ram them, a common use of SUVs among Latino gang members.
Caisaguano speculated that the would-be rammers were responsible for his uncle's death.
"It's stupid they had to catch him while he was coming home," he said. "Why do his friends just let him walk like that, knowing what's going on?"
Caisaguano's eyes welled with tears as he talked about his uncle early Thursday outside the crime scene. The boy, a student at Rickover Naval Academy high school, stood in the parade-rest position taught in the military academies, with his hands at his back and feet planted firm.
He said his family lived on the block for years. Growing up in the neighborhood, violence and shootings were not uncommon for him, he said. About half a mile from this shooting, Logan Square had another fatal shooting hours earlier. The two killings were the Northwest Side neighborhood's first homicides all year.
A man in his 60s wearing a baseball cap walked out to speak with police; he had been on his way to bed when he heard the gunshots.
A young bearded man using a vaporizer walked by the crime scene, puffing enormous clouds of sweet-smelling vapor into the rain. He had just moved to the block in November, and he hadn't seen anything like this.
"I checked the crime statistics (before I moved in)," he said. "It didn't seem that bad."
The older man had lived in Logan Square most of his life and watched the onset of gentrification over the past few years.
A house by the expressway that used to be a magnet for gangs was now being renovated at great apparent expense, he said.
Down the street you could buy $12 tiki cocktails or a meal of bone marrow ("I'm not a dog!" he said. "I'm not going to gnaw on a bone."). And while he was accustomed to hearing gunfire, it used to happen much more frequently, he said.
"I thought we were through this," he said. "But nobody's through anything in this city."
The older man man in the baseball cap stood silent as Jose and his sister spoke of Cobras, Latin Kings, Maniac Latin Disciples and Simon City Royals, all of whom claim some territory in Logan Square.
The man knew there were gangs in the area, he said, but he knew no specifics. The younger generation of Logan Square natives grew up knowing all about it, he realized, and took the violence in stride.
Caisaguano nodded.
"It's Chicago. What do you expect?" the boy said. "People die in Chicago. ... After a while, it's just normal."
"It shouldn't be in your head that way. It's wrong," the older man said. "The world shouldn't be that way."
"What do you expect?" The boy asked again. "Realistically, the world is what it shouldn't be."
