Friends pay tribute to 11-year-old Xavier, nickname Wedos. Photo: Stan Hister.
We’d all be human if we could
– Bertolt Brecht
Children aren’t doing well in America these days. The most obvious example is the Trump administration’s brutal policy of separating immigrant parents from children at the US-Mexico border but there are many far less well publicized instances of neglect or worse.
When I was in Chicago last month there was a horrifying fire in a mostly Mexican neighborhood on the city’s west side. The first reports had it that 6 kids and two adults had died, and two other kids were in critical condition in hospital. Within days the two kids in hospital died.
And then it turned out that the two adults were actually teens, 15 and 16 years old. Because their bodies were covered in soot and because of their size relative to the other kids, they’d been mistaken for adults. No doubt there was also the assumption that there must have been some adults around. But there weren’t.
This was the worst fire fatality in Chicago in over a decade, and the most children to die in a fire since 1958.
No one lived on the main floor of the house, which was boarded up. One family lived in the back, in a two bedroom apartment in what’s known as a carriage house. All but one of the kids were related, as siblings or cousins. They were all together for a sleepover. The youngest was a three month old baby.
The building had a long string of safety code violations. Early reports…