`Duck The Bullet' Code Doesn't Always Preserve Life At Cabrini

CHICAGO - Al Carter believes there's a code of survival all young people must learn at Cabrini-Green. He sums it up in three words: Duck the bullet.

It means more than hitting the ground when guns start crackling and snipers start shooting. It means avoiding gangs, drugs and the other demons that destroy so many lives and cause so many deaths at the housing project.

"It's the negative surroundings that might be able to grab a young person up, swallow him whole, spit him out and make him run wild until he's hit by a bullet," Carter says. "It's difficult to duck a bullet at Cabrini."

Dantrell Davis didn't even have a chance.

The 7-year-old was murdered Oct. 13 by a sniper aiming an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle with a scope from a 10th-floor window. The little boy was walking with his mother from their home to school - a 100-foot, one-minute journey that proved too perilous, even with the police parked nearby.

He was the third pupil from Jenner School to be murdered in seven months.

It was Dantrell's death, though, that shocked the city, that grabbed the headlines, that spurred the mayor, police and public-housing officials to say the killing MUST stop, this MUST never happen again, something MUST be done.

But Carter, who was raised in Cabrini and now runs an athletic foundation for kids there, wonders when - and if - it will end.

"We continue to talk about the deaths, we rant and we rave, we get news coverage, yet the murders go on," he said. "It's heartbreaking."

Carter has given eulogies at five funerals of Cabrini children since 1985. The first was Laketa Crosby, a bubbly 9-year-old killed in gang crossfire while playing. The most recent was Anthony Felton, a budding 9-year-old boxer, shot in March - on the day he was to collect a trophy.

"You remember what they did," Carter said. "You can remember the laughter. When it happens, it just tears you in half."

This time, Carter knew the accused - an Army veteran and expert marksman with a criminal record - and had hired him to umpire baseball games as part of a gang-intervention program.

"I still can't believe it," Carter said. "I was the guy who encouraged him to go to the Army to get off the streets."

At 51, Carter is a mentor to some kids, a surrogate parents to others, giving pep talks, picking up report cards, hoping his athletic programs will build self-esteem and pride.

"Everybody wants to jump up and down on the police. They're not the ones committing the crimes," he said. "The parents, the aunties, the uncles, are the ones that need to be involved, instead of pulling their shades down until it happens to them."