Jaime's gift

The weekend of June 29, 1996, a couple of teenagers from Milwaukee, Wis. were in high spirits because they had wrangled a weekend off from their family’s Milwaukee-based restaurant business. On their docket was a trip to Chicago to visit the clubs, hear some music and maybe meet a couple of girls.

Before all that though, they stopped at a convenience store so that one of the boys, 17-year-old Jaime Estrada could pick-up a couple of packs of cigarettes and a couple Cokes. His cousin waited in the car. And he waited. And he waited.

When Estrada finally did exit the store, he stopped at the passenger side of a van that was parked next to the car he was driving.

His cousin waited some more thinking that Estrada got busy flirting with the young woman sitting in the van’s passenger seat.

But when the van pulled away, Jaime Estrada was nowhere to be found. He had been kidnapped and taken to a house at 3225 N. Newland Ave. on Chicago’s Northwest side. There he met two other men who had also been kidnapped and held for ransom by what would turn out to be a nationwide criminal kidnapping ring.

As soon as he was able, Estrada called his family in Milwaukee and left a message containing the family’s code indicating that Estrada was in trouble or danger or both.

By then though, the kidnappers had also contacted Estrada’s family demanding $30,000 in cash and his brother’s tricked out sports car.

In a nutshell, the family contacted the FBI and arranged for agents to meet the kidnappers to exchange the cash and car for Jaime.

He never made it.

Jaime was a strong and feisty kid who talked back to his kidnappers and was otherwise generally uncooperative.

One of the more trigger-happy of the bunch became fed-up with Estrada’s wisecracking and shot him in the gut.

With the exchange just a day away, a young woman residing with the kidnappers mopped up Estrada’s blood and fed him hamburgers from the nearby McDonald’s restaurant to keep him alive.

On the designated day, the kidnappers loaded the wounded Estrada into a white van and headed off to the exchange site just near Damen Ave on the city’s South Side.

The kidnappers released the gut shot and bleeding Estrada on West Grand Avenue not far from the Chicago Police Department Grand Central Police Station – where he stumbled through the door of a storefront and asked the manager to call 911.

He was transported to Illinois Masonic Hospital in critical condition.

Everyone who was covering this case including crime reporters from the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune and me from the Northwest Leader newspapers had been on the phone with each other since the incident began. We were jubilant.

We reporters were pretty jaded when it came to covering crime in Chicago. I mean, it was practically an everyday thing.

But this Estrada kid had done everything right – he had called his family with its emergency code when the incident took place, when the ambulance came to pick him up he was able to tell the cops exactly where he was being held, the names of kidnappers and where they were going when they dumped him on the street.

So we celebrated his survival and the bad guys’ defeat.

But the story was not over yet.

Just hours later, doctors downgraded Jaime Estrada’s condition to serious. Still, hours later he died of complications from a gunshot wound to the abdomen.

I hit the wall.

For years I had been covering shootings and muggings and drug deals gone bad. Every Monday morning, I stepped over fingers, ears and pieces of cheeks severed in the early morning knife fights at the 4 a.m. bar three doors from my office.

I saw the worst of the city, but after the Estrada case, I had had enough.

So, I accepted an offer from the publishers of the Reporter-Progress Newspapers in Downers Grove to become their features editor.

It lasted three weeks until Hinsdale High School announced that it was redistricting and would not allow students from the less affluent suburb of Downers Grove to attend the school.

That same day, a woman threatened to get me fired if I did not add the name of her long dead husband into her grandchild’s birth announcement.

Nobody needed to fire me.

I marched into the publisher’s office.

“I’m going back to the city,” I told him. “I can’t cover the suburbs objectively.”

I neglected to tell him that I could not understand these suburban folks and why they did what they did.

I did however understand the gangbangers and the bad guys and the cops and why they did what they did. I empathized with their long-suffering grandmothers and with the local activists that tried to pressure the pols to keep the neighborhood safe.

I would never have known that for sure – never would have been the journalist that I am - if I had never covered the last few days of Jaime Estrada’s life.

That was Jaime’s gift to me.

It cost him plenty.

And I am forever grateful.