Cynthia Green lost two sons to gun violence. A third was left paralyzed. She thinks she knows when detectives are doing their jobs.
“I do think it makes a difference who you are or who they think you are and if they think it is worth it,” Green says. “And that’s not how it should be.”
Six months after her son Antonio Brown was shot and paralyzed in 2020, the Chicago Police Department made two arrests.
When her son Shawn Brown was killed in 2022, a suspect was in custody in three months.
The 2018 killing of another son, Nathaniel Durr, remains unsolved.
The officers who worked Shawn Brown’s and Antonio Brown’s cases were “wonderful,” Green says. They helped her connect with resources to pay for Brown’s funeral expenses and raised money for a wheelchair for Antonio Brown.
But she tells a different story about the handling of the investigation into Nathaniel Durr’s killing.
“The police were at the funeral,” Green says. “I don’t know if they were looking for someone or trying to keep things quiet. But that was it.”
Durr was a gang member and a rapper with a following on YouTube under the name “G Nasty Nate” whose lyrics included boasts of violence against rivals. He had been arrested with a gun and on drug charges as a teenager.
“Police knew who he was,” Green says. “It seemed like, once they got wind he had a background, it seems like they didn’t even make an effort. I had a police officer tell me, ‘You live by the sword, you die by the sword.’
“It would mean a lot for them to catch the people that did it,” she says. “That he didn’t just get killed like a piece of trash, and nobody cared, like he wasn’t even worth an investigation.”
Police records show the last time officers updated the file in Durr’s case was about a month after the shooting.
For months, Green says, she asked the police for updates on the investigation.
She says a relative who worked at the Calumet police district was the only one who kept her up to date on the investigation. And that was only to tell her it was going nowhere. No one was talking to the police. There was video of the shooting — but it showed only muzzle flashes and the license plate of the stolen car used by the gunmen.
Four years later, her son Shawn Brown was killed.
It wasn’t long after he’d finished a program offered by the anti-violence organization Chicago CRED, an anti-violence organization founded in 2016 by former U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs. The aim of the program he went through was to help young men seen as being at risk to become perpetrators of violence crimes or victims.
Green says she doesn’t remember whether the police showed up at his funeral but that she did see Duncan, the Chicago CRED CEO who also formerly was the Chicago Public Schools chief executive.
“I think, knowing he was there, the police might have looked at the case a little more,” Green says.
At the time Antonio Brown was shot in the fall of 2020, he’d been working two jobs and was with his girlfriend heading to visit a cousin near the notoriously violent Parkway Gardens housing complex on the South Side.
His sport-utility vehicle got caught in the crossfire as two men started shooting at each other across Dr. Martin Luther King Boulevard.
Brown — hit in the spine — spent weeks in a hospital and now uses a wheelchair.
The two men who were arrested six months later were charged with crimes including attempted murder, which carries a prison term of up to 30 years if convicted.
For Brown, knowing the men who shot him had been caught and would have to hear from him in court meant more than the possibility of seeing them sent to prison for most of their lives. Brown asked prosecutors to allow them to plead guilty to lesser charges that would see them serve just five years in prison.
Brown says he didn’t see the point in compounding a tragedy by putting his assailants behind bars for longer.
“They wanted to get them for attempted murder,” he says. “But that didn’t seem right to me. They weren’t trying to kill me. They were just popping off.”