ROSELAND — When Lee McCullum Sr. answered his phone Friday, the voice on the line shocked him.
It was Mayor Rahm Emanuel calling to express his sympathy “father-to-father” over the violent death of McCullum’s 22-year-old namesake son, the Fenger High School prom king who along with Emanuel was featured in the CNN docu-series “Chicagoland.”
“The mayor said he was sorry for my loss,” McCullum said. “He said a lot. He said, ‘I’m a father and I know how you must feel.’ I thanked him. It made me feel good that the mayor would take time out of his day to say that he was thinking about my son.”
It’s the kind of sad call that Emanuel often makes without any fanfare to families who lose loved ones to the gun violence that continues to plague Chicago.
Emanuel reached out to former Fenger High principal Liz Dozier, who was a mentor to Lee McCullum Jr., to get in contact with the slain young man’s father, “Big Lee.”
“We talked for about 10 minutes. You know, I told him I’m upset about a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff. Everything. The violence everything,” McCullum Sr. said.
“Right now, I’m at a loss for words. There’s so much stuff I gotta do. Everybody is calling on the phone. It’s so hard.”
McCullum Sr., who lost a leg to gun violence and, as a volunteer, tells his story to kids in Roseland in hopes of keeping them from gang life, said Emanuel listened and encouraged him to keep up that good work.
“The mayor said don’t let this discourage me from the work I’m doing in the neighborhood. Don’t let it stop me … and if there was anything he could do, he would,” McCullum Sr. said.
“I got his telephone number right here on my phone. Even though I feel bad, it made me feel good about my child that the mayor called. People say this and that about him; I don’t have a bad word to say about him. He called me, father-to-father.”
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