What Was Michelle Obama's Secret Service Name

The most dangerous cake in Chicago isn't in Englewood or on the Westward Side. It's a stretch of South King Drive where a young Michelle Obama once lived.

They call it "O Block."

On maps, it's the 6400 block of Southward Dr. Martin Luther Male monarch Jr. Bulldoze. Only it'south simply O Block to people there and in frequent references to the street in the blood-drenched lyrics of Chief Keef and other Chicago rappers.

The sprawling Parkway Gardens low-income apartment complex sits on one side of the street. A string of businesses including an Auto Zone, a food mart and the Chicago Crusader paper lines the other.

Young men in hoodies and depression-riding jeans gather in the courtyards here, staring down strangers. Mothers hurry past, holding tight to little hands as they shuttle between the neighborhood school and the condom of their apartments. Security cameras posted nearly everywhere here see information technology all.

Gang members gave O Cake the proper noun. The O was for 20-yr-old Odee Perry, a gang member gunned down just effectually the corner on a summer'south night in 2011. His killer? A 17-yr-old female gang assassin named Gakirah Barnes, police sources say. Barnes later on was shot to death not far from here.

Perry was 1 of nineteen people shot on O Cake between June 2011 and June 2014. That makes it the most dangerous block in Chicago in terms of shootings in that three-yr period, a Chicago Sun-Times assay has constitute.

Two of the victims were killed.

None of the shootings has resulted in criminal charges.

And none of the weapons has been recovered.

The number of people shot would take been even higher, the police say, if not for one shooter's bad aim. Gerald Preacely, 22, is accused of shooting at a group of people standing outdoors on O Block on June 3 — so firing at two police officers who saw him do information technology. Somehow, no ane was hit. Preacely — already on parole for illegal possession of a gun — is now charged with attempted murder.

Despite the violence, things are actually better at present effectually O Block than they've been, the police and politicians say. They bespeak to figures that show most of the shootings on O Block the past three years happened in the first ii years of that span and that no ane has been shot to death in ii years.

Shootings are also down in the general surface area. O Block sits in the midst of the Chicago Police Department'south Beat 312, which stretches east from the Dan Ryan Expressway by Cottage Grove, roughly between 63rd and 65th streets. Since 2012, the number of shootings in Beat out 312 is down by 59 percent through September, the law say.

A man walks by Parkway Super Marketplace in the 6400 block of South Dr. Martin Luther Rex Jr. Drive.

Alex Wroblewski / Sun-Times

In an effort to curb the violence, more officers take been assigned to patrol the area on foot and in cars, focusing on an "impact zone," drawn up in February 2013, of five square blocks with O Block near the centre. Ten veteran officers patrol the zone, forth with boosted officers fresh out of the police university.

"There is progress being fabricated in the trounce and the whole district," says Robert Tracy, chief of offense-control strategy for constabulary Supt. Garry McCarthy.

Ald. Willie Cochran (20th), a former constabulary sergeant whose ward includes O Block, says the police have sent a bulletin to gangs that the shooting must stop.

"The gangbangers have listened," says Cochran, whose 26 years every bit a cop included time patrolling O Block and the surrounding area. "They have cooperated."

But the shootings, while down, oasis't stopped.

Max Rust / Sun-Times

A little by ix in the morning on October. 23, young kids from the neighborhood were safe in their classrooms at Dulles simple school, a block northward. But on O Cake yellowish police force tape marked the scene of some other shooting.

It had been going on all night long, according to people at the Parkway Gardens apartments, where popular rapper Chief Keef used to hang out.

Then, at 9:xx a.thousand., a 22-twelvemonth-one-time homo was shot in the face inside the Parkway Super Market at 6435 South. Male monarch Dr. across from Parkway Gardens. He was taken to a infirmary in disquisitional condition.

James Rufus is a butcher at the Parkway Super Marketplace. Things volition have to improve a lot more before he feels safety. On Apr 14, Rufus' 23-year-one-time nephew was shot on O Cake. A human being in a hooded sweatshirt followed him out of the supermarket, pulled a gun and shot him in the head outside Parkway Gardens.

The nephew survived but was left paralyzed. He got out of the hospital in September and now needs a wheelchair to get around.

Rufus says he thinks a gang member from Woodlawn, east of Male monarch Drive, shot his nephew, mistaking him for a rival.

"Information technology could be meliorate, much improve, around hither," says Rufus. "I see more kids during school hours than after school. They're just hanging out. Things notwithstanding need to change."

When Michelle Obama was a baby, her family unit lived on O Block, in Parkway Gardens, the circuitous of 35 buildings that stretches from 63rd to 66th along Rex Drive. She wasn't fifty-fifty 2 when her parents moved the family from Parkway Gardens to a home on Euclid Avenue, closer to the lake, in 1965.

Her childhood memories of the apartment complex where she once lived are of "a wonderful, small apartment building," the first lady told Time mag in 2009. "Just now when I pass it, information technology'south — I was, like, God, I never saw that apartment in the way that I'm seeing it now."

When first lady Michelle Obama was a baby, her family lived on O Block.

Getty Images

Over the years, Parkway Gardens became a haven for gangs. These days, the police say, the Black Disciples command both sides of King Drive and Parkway Gardens, and the rival Gangster Disciples claim the neighborhood of single-family homes to the east.

The gangs fuel their antagonism online in 140-character bursts on Twitter and in rap songs uploaded to YouTube. Often, it carries over into existent life.

That's what gives the area its other name: "Wiiic City" — for Wild, Insane, Crazy.

"You tin catch a shooting in the pelting, the snowfall or the dominicus," says i cop who works the cake. "The GDs won't go in to the McDonald's or the drive-through because that'due south BD. It'due south all near territory."

The dismantling of a nearby Chicago Housing Authority high-rise circuitous likewise figures into the calculus of crime on the block. Randolph Towers — 144 apartments spread across xvi buildings in the 6200 cake of S Calumet — had been the hub of operations for the Blackness Disciples until information technology was razed in 2007 equally part of the CHA'southward Program for Transformation, the police say.

Many of those gang members moved about three blocks away, to the low-rise Parkway Gardens apartments, which are privately managed and cater to low-income tenants.

E'er since, there'southward been friction betwixt BDs and GDs outside the complex.

Around O Block, people fear the gangs.

"It's rough," one woman says. "A lot of shootings happen."

A woman who'south lived in Parkway Gardens for a quarter century says: "Information technology was nicer back then, flowers planted in the beds, the grass kept up, less violence in and effectually the complex. You have to watch yourself more these days."

Another, the female parent of a young daughter, says that when she wants the girl to be able to play outdoors, she takes her to a park on the Southwest Side because of the frequent gunfire exterior her apartment in Parkway Gardens.

Yet some other immature mom, Stacey Griffin, echoes that: "I have to lookout my back, always watching over your shoulder. The law do be around, but, I mean, offense however goes on. I blitz my son in to the house because you never know what's going to happen. I don't let my son to play in the playground, either. I would accept him to a far-out, better neighborhood to let him play."

A young man offers a alarm to anyone unfamiliar with the area: "It'south dangerous out here. If you ain't from here, don't come here, please don't. It'south real, it'due south hectic."

Sheroid Liggins, a reputed gang member shot and killed in Feb 2012 when he walked out of a store on O Cake.

In "52 Bars (Part iv)," Chicago rapper Lil Durk lamented the violence and gave a nod to Sheroid Liggins, a reputed gang member shot and killed in February 2012 when he walked out of a store on O Block: "Askin' why they took Sheroid. Gave an inch they took a yard."

In the winter of 2011, the Rev. Corey Brooks became famous as the pastor on the roof when he camped out for months on top of a boarded-up cabin nearby, in the 6600 cake of South Rex Drive, to draw national attention to the rampant gunfire in the neighborhood. Brooks says things aren't as bad today. Only gang factions proceed to battle there, he says, with homemade rap videos posted online frequently fueling the violence.

Gang members from the Parkway Gardens side of King Bulldoze still take a chance getting shot if they cross Vernon Avenue two blocks to the east or venture northward by 63rd, says Brooks, who raised more than $450,000 with his rooftop campaign, bought and demolished the motel and plans to build a community center in its place.

"You have kids on both sides who are fenced in because of their conflicts with each other," he says of O Block.

He points to Parkway Gardens and says the difference betwixt the mid-1960s, when the first lady's family lived in that location, and today is drastic.

"The surroundings was family-focused," he says. "People were working. When you eliminate all those things from a customs — men not in the household and instruction failing — information technology will exist a desperate difference than what the first lady of the United States and her family unit experienced."

Tracy, the police crime-control strategy chief, says O Block remains i of his major challenges.

"We have to stay ahead of it," he says of the violence there.

The police accept tried to do that by pouring officers into the "touch zone" around Parkway Gardens. They're also putting to apply strategies, suggested by a Yale sociologist who's studied criminal offence in Chicago, that aim to identify potential troublemakers and terminate them from shooting.

They've washed a "gang audit" to place gang members in the area. Now, after a shooting, constabulary officials say they can use this list to go to gang members and get in clear they're watching them and won't tolerate retaliation.

Also, they say they are monitoring social media for threats between gang members.

And they are now targeting gang members accounted likely, on the basis of the circles they travel in, to commit violent acts — or to become a victim of violence — by warning them they're at risk and ietting them know they're being watched.

These tactics, based on the research of Yale sociologist Andrew Papachristos, accept been constructive elsewhere around the metropolis, the police say.

In the 20 months before the police drew up the five-square-block impact zone that includes O Block and started putting extra officers on patrol, there were 32 shootings. In the kickoff 20 months after, in that location were 10 shootings — a sign, the police say, of progress.

Officers in marked and unmarked cars regularly can be seen driving along O Block and through the Parkway Gardens complex. On several afternoons in recent weeks, an officer was parked the entire time in a marked team car in the complex on side streets off King Drive, and private security guards could exist seen walking through the courtyards.

Ald. Willie Cochran.

Brian Jackson / Sunday-Times

"They put in new security and removed people who weren't supposed to be living there," says Cochran, who says he pushed for a modify at Parkway Gardens that saw Related Companies accept over the complex's management in tardily 2012.

Before that, Cochran says, "You had a lot of people who were non on the lease in places where guns, drugs and gang members were being harbored."

Related has put in a $350,000 artificial turf field at Dulles elementary school, side by side to Parkway Gardens, hoping to requite kids and teens a identify to play.

"The presence and quick response of officers has deterred criminal offence recently," the alderman says. "We take not solved it 100 percent. Merely there has been a host of deportment that have been taken."

On a recent afternoon, dozens of young men lingered in the courtyards at Parkway Gardens. "Perhaps you shouldn't exist here anymore," one warned.

Yvonne Gayden has felt the violence — and says it still hangs over O Block and Parkway Gardens. Her son, Edward Riley, 20, was shot to death as he walked with his girlfriend on O Block on October. 19, 2011. The two gunmen also shot and wounded a fifteen-year-onetime male child.

Riley had attended Dulles unproblematic when the family unit lived in the neighborhood, almost 63rd and Eberhart. Afterwards, they moved n to 53rd and Wallace, but Parkway Gardens was his world, his mother says.

Gayden says her son was a "kindhearted swain" despite having a rap canvas with arrests for drug possession and gambling and having been convicted for possessing a handgun with a defaced serial number.

"He was no angel," she says. "But I will not blame my son for hanging out at Parkway with his friends. He grew up with those guys."

Nevertheless, she says she warned him nearly going at that place.

"That place is a decease trap," she says.

Contributing: Art Golab

A mother walks with a young child to the Parkway Gardens apartments in the 6400 block of South Dr. Martin Luther Male monarch Drive. One mother said, "I rush my son in to the house considering you never know what's going to happen."

Jessica Koscielniak / Sun-Times

What Was Michelle Obama's Secret Service Name,

Source: https://chicago.suntimes.com/2014/11/2/18458059/o-block-most-dangerous-block-in-chicago-michelle-obama-chief-keef-parkway-gardens-south-king-drive

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