BRAINERD — Before last year, neighbors always considered Robichaux Park safe. Violence was never too far, but residents knew Eggleston Avenue between 91st and 94th streets to be a quiet stretch, where families could walk their dogs or take their kids to play.
That changed on July 8, 2014, when 17-year-old Marcel Pearson was shot to death.
On a warm Tuesday evening, a few weeks after Pearson's graduation from Johnson College Prep, he was hanging out with some friends in the park when they noticed a white van approaching fast. A man jumped out and fired shots at the group, hitting Pearson in the chest and another boy in the leg.
Pearson was two days away from freshman orientation at Western Illinois University, where he'd been accepted on a partial scholarship.
On Saturday, more than a year later, members of the Robichaux Block Club organized a small gathering in the park to honor Pearson's memory.
"It really hit the community hard when it happened, because he was college-bound," said Candace Carole, the block club's secretary. "The kids saw him as someone who worked hard and got out, so when it happened, it hit them hard."
Marcel Pearson's mother, Quianna Pearson, remembered that Marcel was looked up to by most of his peers, saying "everyone thought he was cool." Many people knew him from his high school's basketball team, where he was voted Most Valuable Player his senior year.
"He was such a loving and good-natured person, and people really flocked to him," Quianna Pearson said. "People would always look to him to see what the newest trends were, and they would try to copy him."
On the night of Marcel's murder, Quianna got a distressed phone call at home saying something had happened at Robichaux Park. When she came to the park to pick up her son, she saw a crowd standing around police cars and caution tape. But it wasn't until she saw a pair of Nike shoes peeking out from under a white sheet that she suspected that the worst had happened.
"People were mute to me, just shaking their heads in a state of disbelief, and at that moment I just got infuriated," Quianna said. "I just walked away saying 'no, no, no,' just refusing to believe that anything happened to Marcel."
Quianna never heard who the shooters were, but whoever they were, she said, they were "sadists." Though at the time of his shooting Chicago Police officials had named Marcel as a "documented gang member," Quianna said her son wasn't involved in that life.
No arrests have been made in the murder.
Now, in 2015, Quianna and other members of the block club are hoping to use Marcel's memory to jump-start a new conversation about keeping kids out of trouble and the neighborhood safe.
"There are a lot of kids around here who feel like they have to stay home all day, and we want them to be able to get out in the community and be active," said Nicole Shepherd, one of the block club's co-chairs. "We just want to give them resources — we want to be able to reassure them that they don't have to be scared all the time."
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