Veronica Coney and her four children were walking toward the front door of their home in Chicago Lawn when they heard the gunfire. It was a May evening in 2010, and the family was returning from church. Coney rushed the children inside and called 911.
Safe Start provides therapy for families with trauma-exposed children who are younger than six. It has four offices in Chicago, each with a skeleton staff, and one of the offices was at 67th and Western, just a couple blocks from the Coneys. A social worker named Kate Goetz was available to see the family.
Coney’s family rents a house on the 6800 block of South Claremont. She was president of the block club from 2010 until recently. Most of the homes here are occupied, but a half dozen are boarded up, and there are a few empty lots where homes once stood. Next to one vacant lot, a handwritten sign nailed to a dead tree beseeches passersby, “Please don’t dump paper, dog poop, cans, bottles, and any other trash. God is watching you!!”
Her mother had her own gun, and drew it on her father once, Coney says. During heated quarrels between their parents, Coney and a brother would cover their ears and flee upstairs, afraid that one of their parents would grab a gun and shoot the other.
She got pregnant that year, and she says she stopped selling drugs and drinking and smoking out of concern for her baby. She got her GED and later her nursing degree.
In June 1999, 15 years ago this summer, a National Summit on Children Exposed to Violence convened in Washington at the direction of President Bill Clinton. The president had called for the summit after the massacre that April at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, that claimed the lives of 12 students and a teacher.
