Candidate Switched from Latin Kings to Vice Lords
Local police don't ignore East Chicago, Gary slayings
Sunday, May 13, 2007 12:19 AM CDT
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BY JOE CARLSON
jcarlson@nwitimes.com
219.662.5339
Suspected street gang violence sent several bodies to Indiana morgues last week, and some city leaders began to wonder if the deadly stint would set a trend for the entire summer.
All told, seven people were killed by gunfire in Gary and East Chicago last week, a Lake County Coroner's Office spokesman said.
"I hope it's not a prelude, but it looks like it might be. That's why we're trying to get ahead of the problem now," Gary Police Deputy Chief Tom Papadakis said. "It's looking like it's going to be a long, hot summer."
In East Chicago last Monday, 7-year-old Angel Silvas was shot in the head and killed during a gun battle in a neighborhood long said to be controlled by the Latin Kings.
Police and neighbors say the boy's father, Michael Silvas Jr. -- who was a City Council candidate on Tuesday's ballot -- was a former Latin King who had recently become a Vice Lord.
Silvas was charged Friday with six gun-related felonies related to the shooting.
While difficult to tally which deaths were gang-related, officials on both sides of the state line are not waiting for explanations to take preventive action.
In Indiana, Gary police have formed a special interdiction unit this week to combat gun- and gang-related crimes, while Hammond officials appropriated $50,000 for enhanced after-school police patrols in areas with known gang presence. In Illinois, Lansing and Calumet City are in the process of joining Gary and several other area cities that have joined with the Chicago Police Department's Fourth District to form a new group called the Illiana Regional Gang Taskforce.
"I think when communities want to try to ignore activity that is happening in their community, or don't get aggressive, then they are really putting the community at risk," Lansing Police Lt. Pete Grutzius said. "It becomes a climate of tolerance, and I think that tolerance breeds more problems ultimately."
Those problems include drug dealing, homicides, and for some law-abiding residents, a general uneasiness, said Grutzius, who is all too aware that gangs don't stop at the state line.
Chicago Police Tactical Lt. Maurice Richards, who is helping organize the new task force, said the group intends to fight the gang problem by sharing "intelligence" between departments and thinking regionally.
With time as an officer in narcotic and gang task forces in his 21 years career, Calumet City police Investigator Marco Glumac has seen first hand how violence in one area can ripple to another.
"Whether with vehicles or computers, we know that a lot of these different groups are intermingled between towns, Glumac said. "They float between each particular town, and a lot of the different gangs are structured differently. With that structure comes a lot of movement.
"When you are on the run -- whether the police are chasing you, or other gang members -- you have to be mobile."
Officials in Hammond, East Chicago, Gary, Lake County and the FBI have long said the decision to tear down Chicago's crime-ridden Robert Taylor and Cabrini Green high-rises has scattered more instances of crime into Lake County and the South Suburbs.
"With a lot of this migration, you get problems. They used to be in downtown Chicago. Now they're in downtown Hammond," said Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott. "We know about that, and we're doing everything we can to deal with it."
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