Nov. 23--Eight months ago, the man called Shorty was referred from his nursing home to a Southwest Side brick bungalow on Rockwell Street that houses a halfway home.
Everyone on the block got to know his face. He was the guy walking around the Chicago Lawn neighborhood looking for cigarettes, or maybe spare change to buy chips and soda.
Saturday night, days shy of his 27th birthday, he was shot in the head less than a block from his new home.
"He didn't mess with nobody," said Tony Whiteside, who manages the facility for men with mental disabilities where Shorty lived. "Just walking and asking for change."
The man was identified as Lamarr Battle, who would have turned 27 the day after Thanksgiving, according to his family.
Out on the block, he would sweep up sidewalks and pick up litter; in the house, he'd listen to music and sing.
"He'd sing and rap all day long, that's what he did," Whiteside said, then repeated: "He didn't mess with nobody."
Battle had schizophrenia, Whiteside said. All he had done that evening was head to the store with $2 from Whiteside to spend on snacks.
"He never came back," Whiteside said.
"I miss him,'' said Battle's mother, Sarah Robinson, 58, who was reached by phone Sunday afternoon at her Indianapolis home where her family gathered to break the news to her.
"He was like a jokester. He would bust out laughing all the time,'' his mother said through sobs. "Lamarr was very, very kindhearted. He was. He was.''
"Lamarr has always been a playful young man, very playful. He's a good boy.''
Battle's mother said she wasn't sure what kind of medication he took for his mental issue. But according to his older brother Donte Robinson, a 38-year-old barber from Gary, he was better off without them. Battle's aunt Annie Harmon said the assailant was the one who was sick.
"He's suffering from something himself,'' Annie Harmon said of the gunman. "He's a lost soul."
Donte Robinson described his brother as quiet, a little hard-headed, and friendly with a lot of people. But Robinson was not comfortable with him living on the South Side of Chicago because of all the "senseless crime'' and feels terribly as he remembers the last time he spoke with Battle during a phone call about four months ago. "He wanted me to come see him. I never got around to it,'' Robinson said.
Battle was found dead about 8:30 p.m. Saturday on a snowy sidewalk in the 6200 block of South Rockwell Street, less than a block from his home. He had been shot in the head; police said it may have been a drive-by.
Responding officers heard half a dozen gunshots and then spotted the victim unresponsive on the sidewalk. Police spoke to a man who told officers he believed the shots came from a gray car, which fled southeast through an alley, police said.
Whiteside heard the gunfire, and soon afterward, a girl he didn't recognize ran up to the house to say Battle had been shot.
An hour later, Whiteside was out on the porch in 20-degree weather wearing flip-flops. The adrenaline was keeping him warm, he said.
"I'm not freezing," he said. "I'm still shook up."
Battle had just been placed on a list to get low-income housing, Whiteside said. He probably could have been living on his own in three to six months.
"He was very happy," Whiteside said. "That's all we talked about every day."
Battle grew up in Gary, according to his aunt Lula Harmon.
"He was just a sweet little boy, you know, and then just was a nice young man," said Harmon, who still lives in Gary.
His nerves were bad, Harmon said. He had what she described as a nervous breakdown and had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. But he was never hard to deal with because he was so sweet-natured, and "because I loved him and he loved me," Harmon said.
"I just don't know why they would do that to my baby," she said. "I don't know what happened."
As Whiteside headed indoors about an hour after Battle's body was found, the evidence technicians arrived, driving down Rockwell Street playing John Mellencamp so loudly that everyone on the block could hear "Pink Houses."
Later, detectives gathered around the body as a technician wearing purple rubber gloves knelt to take Battle's fingerprints. The freezing air made for slow work; he had to flex the dead man's wrist back and forth, then massage the fingers, then knead them over and over into the inkpad.
After the fingerprints had been taken, they unzipped Battle's jacket and carefully pulled up his shirt. They inspected his torso by flashlight, then turned him over facedown. His body moved with stiffness, and his baseball cap tumbled into the snow.
Again, police lifted his clothing and crouched down to look at him; they adjusted his pants to shine light on his legs. They looked closely, sometimes crouching to get a better view, then replaced his clothes.
By 11:10 p.m. the technicians had finished examining the body, but there was still work to do. A technician got out of the van with three garden rakes: small, medium and large.
He started with the small one, scraping at the snow closest to the body. After a moment, he swapped it for one size larger, and went to work again. It didn't take him long to begin raking up blood. It blended into the snow as he worked, making a fluffy pink pile.
Then they found what they were looking for: a shell casing. "There you go! Bingo!"
The technician kept raking around the body, scraping against the sidewalk and pulling up long green weeds.
They dug up a second shell casing and signaled as much to the detectives, who were keeping warm in their car.
The scene was quiet and the night was cold. The detectives drove away slowly, their car still caked in snow.
Marcus Wright, who lives across the street from the crime scene, had earlier gone outside and after seeing Battle's body on the ground across the street, ran back in his house to get a bedsheet. It just wasn't decent to keep the body there uncovered, he said.
He offered the white sheet to the police. They took it but told him they couldn't cover the body yet. Except in special circumstances, bodies at crime scenes are not covered, police said. Covering the body could contaminate evidence.
Battle's death was "the sinfullest thing," Wright said.
"The worst thing he did was beg," Wright said. "Just gimme, gimme, gimme. But it wasn't no bad thing. He was begging instead of stealing."
Sarah Robinson raised Lamarr Aubry Battle and his older sister and brother in Gary. She worried that maybe he was a little too trusting and kind. Especially when he made the move to Chicago's South Side. She remembered sitting down with him for a talk when he was about 17.
"Those streets are going to chew you up and spit you out. You have to watch out,'' Robinson said she warned him.
Robinson began sobbing again. "But I don't think a child should die before the parents.''
The man's mother had a message for the assailants.
"I forgive them. Because I love my baby dearly but I'll be darned if I will let somebody steal my joy. I'm going to bless them. Maybe somewhere down the line it'll hit them.''
