36 Chicago area students killed sets record

Chicago - busy putting on its best face to garner a 2016 Olympics bid and basking in the afterglow of President Obama’s election - has become the nation’s most violent city for youths.

With three weeks left before summer break, a record 36 Chicago Public Schools students have been killed this school year, marking the third straight year that youth homicides have climbed into double digits. Chicago has surpassed New York City and Los Angeles for having the highest youth homicide rate in the nation.

“I think people in Chicago have almost gotten numb to the statistics,” said Dexter Voisin, a researcher at the University of Chicago who studies the impact of violence on adolescents.

The latest victim in Chicago’s long year of student killings is 15-year-old Alex Arellano. On May 1, he was chased, beaten with baseball bats, run over by a car, shot and burned. His body was found days after he disappeared from his family’s home on the city’s South Side.

Police continue to investigate the killing; gang activity has been suggested. His grieving family members have denied any gang connections and continue to look for answers.

“The homicide rate is just the tip of the iceberg,” Mr. Voisin said. “Those with nonfatal injuries are almost 100 times that of our homicide rates. You think for about every one kid who is murdered, 100 kids witness the murder or are victims of nonfatal injuries, of robberies, muggings and gang-related incidents. A lot of times, this exposure goes undocumented or unreported.”

Black youths, he said, are two times more likely than white youths to fail or drop out of school, and at the same time they are also eight to 10 times more likely to be victims of homicide than whites.

“It’s difficult for young people to focus in school if they are traumatized by the stress in these communities,” Mr. Voisin said.

The death toll exasperates those offering hope to troubled neighborhood children in Chicago - an increasingly tall task in impoverished areas where gangs, drugs and guns are right outside their doors.

“I don’t even know where to begin,” said Diane Latiker, who runs a program for at-risk youths out of her home in the city’s Roseland neighborhood. “There aren’t any words for what I feel for what is going on for our youth.”

Ms. Latiker uses three rooms of her six-room apartment to run a nonprofit program called Kids Off the Block. She offers tutoring, mentoring and travel opportunities designed to show Chicago youths who want successful futures that the violent culture they see daily is not the norm.

The local drug dealer in a big car with flashy rims, wearing cool sneakers, appears to many to be the model of success, Ms. Latiker said.

“The A and B students, they have family and community support,” she said. “What about the kid who is struggling, hanging out there on the street corner and joining that gang because he feels hopeless? That’s what I’m hearing from our youth. They feel they have nothing to live for.”

Chicago Police Department spokesman Roderick Drew said youth violence remains a top priority.

“Even one murder is one too many,” he said.

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