* A fire damaged boarded up home at 120th Street and Normal Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. Boarded-up homes dot “Trigger Town,” the area in Chicago’s West Pullman neighbourhood where Jamila Pleas and her brother Rashod Bethany grew up.
Rashod Bethany and sister Jamila were born and raised in Chicago. But circumstances
led them to dramatically different paths – while Rashod became a deadly drug dealer,
Jamila led a normal life to become a medical professional. By Jason Meisner
Nearly two decades after circumstances set their lives on dramatically different trajectories, Jamila Pleas recently met with her younger brother at a federal jail in downtown Chicago as he awaited sentencing for running a menacing crack-cocaine operation known as the “killing crew”.
Rashod ‘Fat Man’ Bethany was angry, but not so much over the many years he faced in prison, Pleas recalled. What had upset him, she said, was reading pre-sentencing evaluations that detailed his sad, violent upbringing in a West Pullman neighbourhood drug house — born to a drug-addicted mother, bagging marijuana at seven as punishment for acting up, suspended from grammar school for assaulting teachers, shot in the back at 12.
“He said, ‘The way I grew up was just wrong,’ “ Pleas recalled of their jailhouse conversation. “It was like he was remorseful for his own actions, but he was also hurt that he was put in that situation so young. He never had a choice.”
By contrast, a family friend removed Pleas from the gang-infested home at 15, and she blossomed, settling into a “normal” existence, earning a college degree and putting herself through nursing school. She now works her “dream job,” helping deliver babies at a suburban hospital, she said.
How the lives of this brother and sister ended up so differently, Pleas believes, is powerful evidence that children exposed to drugs, gangs, poverty and violence are likely to be trapped in a vicious cycle. She still has a hard time explaining to her high school friends — many of whom are now attorneys, dentists, teachers — the world she so narrowly escaped.
“When I mention things about Rashod, they are like, ‘Really? How does that happen?’ “ said Pleas, 34.
Before it earned the name Trigger Town for its level of violence, the area of West Pullman where Pleas and Bethany grew up was still a fairly stable Far South Side community with a mostly blue-collar workforce anchored by nearby factories and steel mills. The backbone of Pleas’ family was her maternal grandparents and their large, two-storey house in the 12100 block of South Parnell Avenue. Grandfather Edward Pleas was an Army veteran who later worked for the US Postal Service, a disciplined man who stressed the value of education and hard work. His wife, Scenny, was the matriarch, doting on her children’s children.
Pleas remembered knowing all her neighbours, walking to school with little fear of crime and spending summer afternoons playing in nearby West Pullman Park, a hub of activity.
“There was family swim every Friday night,” she said. “We lived at the Park District. It was what you did after your homework was done.”
Walter Alexander, 72, a retired steelworker and church deacon who lived in the neighbourhood for nearly four decades, said residents took pride in the community. But as the factories began to shutter in the mid-1980s, jobs dried up, then the drugs started to seep in and within a few years everything changed, he said.
“Seemed like everything started happening then — gang fights, guys on the corner selling drugs,” said Alexander, who worked at the former Ingersoll Steel plant at 119th and Morgan streets. “They start bringing all the drugs in, flashing all their money and the expensive gym shoes and cars and all that.”
Alexander said he was dismayed over the sway that drug dealers held over younger children, including a relative who got caught up in the lifestyle and abandoned plans to follow Alexander’s footsteps at the factory.
“He started thinking he could make more in an hour than I made in a week,” Alexander said.
For Pleas, who was still in grade school at the time, the influence of drugs and gangs began to have real consequences for her family. By the time Bethany was born in 1984, their mother, Bithiah Pleas, was strung out on heroin and cocaine. Eventually, the grandparents had to take over raising the children.
According to court filings, several of Bethany’s aunts and uncles who also lived in the Parnell Avenue house had Gangster Disciples affiliations and sold drugs.
In the early 1990s, the house was raided by federal drug agents while the two children looked on. Not long after, their older sibling, Ojo Pleas, then 14, was shot in the neck and paralysed during a dispute on the street. Pleas said she still remembers neighbours running up to her as she was walking home from school and shouting, “Your brother just got shot!”
At the hospital, Ojo told family members he didn’t want to live life in a wheelchair, Pleas said. “I remember my grandmother telling him he was going to be OK,” she said. “He was there for a very, very long period of time, and it was very expensive.”
Eddie and Scenny Pleas died within a year of each other in 1994 and 1995, and during this time, Pleas floundered. She started skipping school and eventually dropped out altogether.
A longtime family friend, Rosalyn Buford, whose son had once been Pleas’ childhood sweetheart, noticed her troubles and followed through on a pledge, Pleas said.
“She said, ‘I promised your grandmother that you would go to college. You’re going to stay with us and finish high school,’” Pleas said.
Pleas went to live with the Buford family, enrolled in Lindblom High School in Englewood and buckled down. She made up the semester she had missed, went to her junior prom, applied to colleges. “Things were very much normal for me,” she said.
Bethany, who had no real connection to the Bufords and would have involved a much longer commitment since he was younger, remained mired in Trigger Town, where guidance largely came from the gang members who used the grandparents’ house as a sort of headquarters.
A child psychologist diagnosed him at 10 as suffering from depression and “feelings of frustration, sadness, and anxiety about death,” according to a sentencing memorandum filed by his attorneys. After Bethany was shot in the back at 12, a social worker at the hospital noted he had “fallen through the cracks of several agencies.”
“Despite all of these warning signs, Mr. Bethany never received the help he deserved, and the results were as tragic as they were predictable,” his attorney, Beau Brindley, wrote in the recent memo.
Prosecutors alleged that by the time he was in his late teens, Bethany was known as “the Man” in Trigger Town, a ruthless boss who organised a reign of terror on the streets. He ran two round-the-clock crack houses several blocks apart, employing addicts as sellers and paying them in drugs to keep them under his control, they said.
Over the next several years, Bethany’s crew was suspected in at least five slayings, including the 2005 shooting of a Chicago police informant over an alleged drug dispute. Bethany was never charged in the homicides because witnesses feared retaliation and refused to co-operate, according to prosecutors.
By the time he was arrested in 2006 on drug charges, Bethany, then just 21, had cornered the area’s drug racket through intimidation and violence, prosecutors said.
At his sentencing hearing last month, a former crack addict testified that a member of Bethany’s crew shot her in the face to keep her quiet about its drug operation. Another woman who sold drugs for Bethany testified that after some crack and cash were stolen on her watch, two members of the gang beat her unconscious with a closet bar, breaking her arm. She escaped by breaking through a window and crawling down an alley to a church, where a deacon called 911.
Assistant US Attorney Kruti Trevedi noted that some of the witnesses seemed almost indifferent to the violence they were subjected to every day.
“There is a numbness there, a dullness that comes when you live in Mr Bethany’s world,” she told the judge.
When it was his turn to speak, Bethany stood in court in an orange jail jumpsuit, his legs in shackles. After three days of hearing himself described as a monster, he glossed over the violence but said he was sorry for dealing drugs.
“For the drugs that I did sell, I deeply apologise,” said Bethany, 28. “I accept full responsibility for my actions. To my family, I love them and I appreciate them for their support. Stay strong.”
US District Judge Harry Leinenweber sentenced him to 25 years in prison, citing the “huge amount of damage” he had done to his community.
Ojo, the older brother, had died in his sleep in 2001 of complications from his paralysis. Their mother died in March 2006, two months before federal agents swooped in and arrested Bethany and several other members of the “killing crew.”
The family home has since been lost to foreclosure, along with dozens of other homes in Trigger Town. Many are boarded up or burned out, standing silent in weed-choked yards. Down the street, the local public school, West Pullman Elementary, was recently named as one of 53 grade schools that will be closed by the city.
Sadie Cook is pastor of the Prayer Warriors Baptist Church at 120th Street and Eggleston Avenue, directly across from one of Bethany’s most notorious crack houses. She said her membership has dwindled to fewer than 50 in recent years as older parishioners have died and others have fled the decaying neighbourhood.
The retired Chicago Public Schools teacher said she’s tried every form of outreach: knocking on doors, taking neighbourhood kids to Bulls games and handing out clothing. But she has encountered mostly apathy.
“There is no sunshine, and it’s deeper than what people think,” Cook said. “People get up every morning, they don’t have a job. ... They need help.”
The crack house that Bethany ran on Eggleston was boarded up after his arrest and recently went to a new owner in a judicial sale, records show. No one answered when a reporter knocked on the door on a recent weekday afternoon. A sign in the front window from the anti-violence group CeaseFire showed a child’s face and the words “Don’t Shoot. I Want to Grow Up.”
Cook said the key to starting any kind of turnaround is to pool resources and reach out to children who are young enough to save, six or seven, about the age when Bethany was first being taught a life of crime. She said her church — a sturdy brick structure that has stood on the corner since 1916 when the neighbourhood was largely made up of German immigrants — has the room to open tutoring facilities, job training, computer labs and basketball courts.
“He needed help at an early age,” Cook said of Bethany on hearing of his story. “Children have to have a safe haven. They have to have love. Give them a place to go and something constructive to do.”
Jamila Pleas now lives in a Hyde Park high-rise and works the graveyard shift at West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park. Her memories of her old neighbourhood have faded but continue to influence her, especially when she is dealing with young mothers-to-be caught in tough situations.
As for her brother, Pleas still remembers him as intelligent and industrious, the kid who at six would sneak down to the store and offer to push shopping carts or load grocery bags for change.
“Sometimes I wonder if Rashod had been given another path, what he might have become,” she said. — Chicago Tribune/MCT