hand-painted in three different colors along a wood fence which reads: US AS PEOPLE NEED TO BELIEVE THAT IF WE STAND TOGETHER THAT SHOOTING CAN AND WILL STOP. On the night when the shooting began, twenty-one different neighbors called 911 to report multiple shots fired. They cared. They wanted the police to protect them. They were doing what neighbors do.
On the eastern side of this narrow, tree-lined street, along with Benson’s sister’s brick house, is a row of tightly packed single-family homes, most of them wood-framed, some with small vegetable gardens. Across the street, on the western side, sits the Spiral Temple of Truth church. It looks tired, a tarp covering one corner, where the roof is damaged. The city has a propensity to name streets after famous and not-so-famous Chicagoans, and this street has been given the honorific title Rev. Gladys P. Harrell Street, named after the founder of the church and mother of the current pastor. A chain-link fence runs along the back of the church, separating it from a paved bike path which extends three miles north and three miles south. On the other side of the bike path is an eyesore, precisely what neighbors worry about: four abandoned three-story apartment buildings, the windows covered with sheets of plywood, the courtyards littered with broken beer and cognac bottles. Adjacent to the church, just to the north, is an empty lot, which at the time of Calvin’s death was overgrown with weeds, so high and so thick that it had the feel of a tropical forest.
Taking a sip of water, Benson began at the end of that evening. It just occurred to him, he told Dana, that he remembered seeing her minutes after the shooting. She lived around the corner, heard the shots, and so drove her purple van to the scene. There, Benson recalled, he saw her get out, dressed in a full-length housedress, clearly panicked. He remembered her asking the police something, and while he couldn’t quite hear her question (“What was he wearing?” she had inquired, wanting to know if the victim was her son), he clearly heard the officer’s response, a bellowing Move! Get this car out of here! Get this damn van out of the street! Move on! Benson remembered the officer had his pistol unholstered and was gripping it in his hand. He told Dana that he remembered she looked scared, and that she got back in the van and quickly turned around and took off. Dana nodded. Whooo. She let out a breath, like she had been holding it in all this time. “That’s just how it happened,” she told him. She thought to herself, He really was there. At this point, before Benson told her everything he had seen, she knew she could trust him.
Benson sensed that, and visibly relaxed. He removed his Cubs cap, placed it on the table, and leaned back in his chair, his arms still folded across his chest. Dana told him, “I appreciate you coming forward. I want these policemens off the street.”
“I want them dead,” Benson proclaimed, the words seemingly at odds with his unemotional tone. He can seem restrained at times, like he’s holding on to a lot. Dana saw that. “I don’t know how they live with themselves,” she told him. “They don’t have no heart.” Benson offered an almost imperceptible nod of agreement.
Benson has his own history with the police. He lost both his parents by the time he was twelve, and he was subsequently shuffled from one older sister to another. His mother had been a preacher, and he regularly attended church with her, but in his teens he became a part of the Black P Stones, a gang on the South Side. He doesn’t like to talk about it—“That’s a part of a chapter that’s closed”—except to say he saw a lot, too much, really, and that some of it involved untoward run-ins with the police.
“Ask me questions,” he directed Dana. “Anything.” Senetra interrupted and asked if it would be okay if she filmed him with her smartphone. She said she wanted to put this on Facebook for others to see. Benson consented, and so she filmed the exchange, her elbows planted on the table so they formed a makeshift tripod. She framed him so that you can see the jar of cookies in front of him, and on the wall behind him two flyswatters hanging from elaborate hooks resembling sunflowers.
Senetra asked the first question, really the