SITO: An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him, by Laurence Ralph
The afternoon in 2014 when I drove around Englewood, on Chicago’s South Side, with a group of “violence interrupters” — former gang members and ex-offenders from the community — there were bodies on the ground. Nine people had been shot the previous afternoon; the interrupters’ challenge was to tour the neighborhood, from emergency rooms to street corners, and intervene before vengeance took over and the violence escalated.
“We need to interrupt the spread, change the script, change the behavior and change the norms,” said Gary Slutkin, the physician who founded Cure Violence, the organization that employed the interrupters. Slutkin, who once worked for the World Health Organization, specializes in infectious disease control and reversing epidemics. In his office he pointed to a map of Chicago, on which small red dots marked the site of each shooting. The West and South Sides, including Englewood, were covered in dots; the more affluent North was relatively clear. “It’s the same pattern on a map showing the incidence of cholera in Bangladesh,” he told me. “It’s an infective process.”
When it comes to youth violence, one of the principal challenges for the writer, judge, academic, police officer, surgeon or activist is to restore the humanity to each dot: to rescue from statistical anonymity and tragic metaphor the sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, lovers and scoundrels that they were. Luis Alberto Quiñonez, known as Sito; Rashawn Williams; Julius Williams, Rashawn’s little brother; and Miguel Alvarez are four such dots on a map of San Francisco. And in his new book, “Sito,” about a murder in which they are all directly or indirectly implicated, Laurence Ralph aspires to give their story human form.
On Sept. 2, 2014, a couple of months after I toured Englewood, Sito and Miguel, both 14, knowingly strayed beyond enemy lines into the territory of a rival gang where they happened upon Rashawn, Sito’s adversary from middle school, and Julius. When Rashawn, also 14, confronted them, Miguel attacked him as Sito and Julius, who was just 12, looked on. The fight was over within moments, and Miguel and Sito fled. Only later, on Facebook, did Sito discover that Miguel had fatally stabbed Rashawn.
