back to their neighborhood, they stopped at a traffic light. An unmarked police car cut them off, and two plainclothes officers ordered them out of the car. They were quickly surrounded by half a dozen squad cars. Marcelo, who had removed his shirt because of the heat, sagged into the car seat, one hand tightly clutching his T-shirt. The police arrested the four friends and charged them each with two counts of robbery, one count of attempted robbery, and one count of aggravated battery.
The next day in bond court, in a hearing that took no more than a few minutes, a judge set Marcelo’s bond at $300,000, which meant that his family needed to come up with $30,000 to get him released. That was an impossible amount for his mother, who worked at a Styrofoam cup factory, and so it appeared that Marcelo had hit a dead end, that he would sit in jail until his case came to trial, which, given the way things moved in the county courts, could be anywhere from a year to two in the future. Marcelo thought to himself, I’ve been leading a double life. It’s over. I fucked up.
Chapter 2
Mother’s Day
MAY 11…MAY 12…MAY 13…
On July 24 of last year, the Southtown Star, a suburban newspaper, ran a short seventeen-sentence story with the headline: “Man Shot to Death in Park Forest Had Drug, Weapons Convictions.” The article went on to rattle off the background of the murder victim, Darren Easterling. It read, in part:
A man who was shot to death Sunday on the street in Park Forest was a felon who in the past two years had multiple convictions on drug and weapons charges, according to officials and court records….
As of late Monday afternoon, Park Forest police had no suspects in custody in connection with the shooting, in which at least one other man was injured….
According to court records, Easterling pleaded guilty to felony possession of a controlled substance and possession of marijuana in January 2010. He also pleaded guilty to unlawful use of a weapon in April 2011 and was sentenced to three years in prison. Easterling was released on parole in November 2011, according to Illinois Department of Corrections records….
Darren Easterling, who was 25 and shot multiple times, died at the scene.
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Lisa Daniels is long-bodied, willowy, and tall, with a handsome, stoic face atop a long, slender neck. She wears hoop earrings, which sway as she walks, her strides purposeful and quick. She works as an administrative assistant to a vice president at the Museum of Science and Industry. She’s thoughtful and preternaturally poised, but on this Sunday morning, this Mother’s Day, she lay in bed wracked with self-doubt. Her bedroom sat in the rear of her newly renovated second-floor apartment in Englewood, on the city’s South Side. She had closed the blinds to block the sunlight and pulled the covers over her, creating a protective cocoon, all in an effort to keep everything and everyone at bay. A few months earlier she and her husband, to whom she’d been married for fourteen months, had finalized their divorce, and just two days ago a friend had called to tell Lisa that her ex now had a girlfriend. Lisa already knew about the girlfriend, since that was in part the reason for their split, but she was distressed that it was now public knowledge. It stung. She wanted to disappear. She couldn’t bear explaining herself to friends or family. She felt like a failure. She had failed her marriage. And she had failed her son.
This was the first Mother’s Day since she’d lost her son, Darren Easterling (he had his father’s name), ten months earlier, and she thought she had been managing reasonably well. But in the wake of her broken marriage, she felt deep shame. Her husband had left her. So had her son, which is at least how it felt. She had raised him with love and a strong moral compass, but he had wandered. “I just didn’t want to get up,” she told me. “I didn’t want to face anything. That’s always been my coping mechanism. When I’m feeling really bad, I close myself off.” It was, she said, the darkest she’d felt since the funeral. But it was also a moment when her life began to take another turn.
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I met Lisa Daniels through a friend, Kathryn Bocanegra, who’s a social worker and who’s married to someone you’ll meet later. Kathryn, who