Stopping the Anger

By: Alysia TateEvery day for about two years, 16-year-old Darius Harris hung out with friends around an abandoned building near Marquette Road and South Parnell Avenue, a few doors north of his home. One day last summer, he recalled, a truck pulled up and a relative of Ryan Harris handed out fliers with a photograph of the missing girl. Darius had never seen her.

A few days later, on July 28, Darius walked to a candy store a block away. When he returned, a crowd had gathered near his hangout.

Please God, he thought, don’t say they found her right next to my house. But there she was, lying in the weeds, just below the railroad tracks.

That night, Darius didn’t get much sleep. He stared at the tracks from a window at the back of his house. If he had only stayed up the night before, if he had only been watching, he might have seen something—anything. He felt bad about it for weeks.

The next day, detectives showed up with a photograph of a suspect, an older man with a gray beard. Darius and about 20 friends walked through the neighborhood until they found someone who matched the description. They beat him until police came and took him away. Darius doesn’t know what happened to the man but heard police eventually let him go. Hurting him, Darius thought, seemed like the only way to make the anger stop.

"I just had to let it up off my chest," he said. He had to do something to calm down. "It’s gonna come out of you, and it’s gonna come out of you in the worst way."

Then police started coming after him and his friends, Darius recalled. Almost every hour, it seemed, they were hassling some teenager on the street. "I felt like they were trying to do that to act like they were trying to find the murderer," he said.

Word came that two boys, ages 7 and 8, had confessed to the killing. Darius knew the older brother of one of the boys. He had seen them the day Harris’s body was found, standing around the crime scene with everyone else. It didn’t make sense, he thought.

After they took the boys in, police told Darius they had questions for him. He went to the station twice. Later, detectives said the boys had told them that Darius led them to Harris’ body, Darius said. They didn’t think he did it—just that he knew who did.

On one trip to the station, Darius saw the boys’ relatives waiting outside the room where the two were being questioned. The mother of one boy looked mad. The grandmother of the other looked worried. Could she at least go in the room with her grandson? No, you may not, ma’am, Darius heard someone tell her. Just sit here and wait calmly.

Darius couldn’t hear what the officers were asking, but he heard the boys crying. They were trying to scare those boys, he thought. He imagined the interrogation: You all know who did it. You all were with him. Give us the name, we won’t hurt you.

Weeks later, prosecutors dropped the charges against the boys. The city tore down the abandoned building, so Darius doesn’t hang out there anymore. But the rapes and killings in Englewood have continued. The real murderer must still be on the loose.

"If they’d have caught the guy," he figured, "that would have ended everything right there."