Pfleger’s painful memory at scene where 15 shot Tuesday: His foster son was murdered steps away

“An eye for an eye makes us both blind.”

— Chicago Police Supt. David Brown.

It wasn’t the sight of blood that was most unnerving to the Rev. Michael Pfleger as he stood on a red splotched sidewalk outside the Rhodes funeral home Tuesday evening, shortly after 15 people were shot.

It was the memory of his 18-year old son, Jarvis, who had been mortally wounded in 1998 directly across the street from where the mass shooting took place at 79th and Carpenter streets.

“I kept staring directly across the street ... staring at the corner where the blood of my own son once lay,” said Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina’s Catholic Church, which is blocks away from the funeral home.

“That corner was once smeared with the blood of my own [foster] son, Jarvis.

“It was like I was transfixed ... staring ... staring ... at the place where I had held his hand ... and squeezed it and talked. We thought he was going to make it. But he didn’t,” he said.

Pfleger said Jarvis had been standing on that corner with his friends, when a group started running and shooting back at each other and “he caught a bullet in the neck.” He died within days.

“He was on the street when he became my son at 16 years old; a lost kid who had been ‘socially promoted’ ... not taught to read in school,” he said. “As a result of tutoring, he went to Leo High School and was doing well when his life ended.”

He added: “Nobody smiled like Jarvis.”

The shootout that wounded 15 people outside the South Side funeral home Tuesday was most likely fueled by a longstanding war between two obscure gang factions, the Sun-Times reported.

Tyler LaRiviere/Sun-Times

At 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, a Chevy Malibu pulled up to Rhodes Funeral Services in the 1000 block of West 79th Street and people in the car fired at funeral goers on the sidewalk. The victims were also carrying guns and shot back, police said. The stolen Malibu crashed and the shooters ran away.

“So many lost children,” said Pfleger. “I just kept seeing that blood and feeling very defeated. Angry. So mad. Crying. Just wiped out. All these things at once.”

“I kept thinking about Dr. Martin Luther King and what he said about the four little girls who were killed decades ago in a church bombing in Birmingham,” he added. “Dr. King said: ‘Yes, we must find the bomber. But we must also arrest the society that formed the bomber.’

“He also said: ‘The riot is the language of the unheard.’”

“I’m angry about three young men that shot 15 people up at a funeral home,” he said. “What brought the shooters and those that shot back to this point? We’ve got to ask the deeper questions and do something this time if we want to end violence in Chicago and America.”

But the anti-gun peace priest knows that will be difficult, especially since the National Rifle Association “has created a new society marketing what America now needs to be safe ... guns! America is arming itself.”

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, “gun sales have gone through the roof,” Pfleger said. “People even go to church with guns, but not my church,” he said.

Pfleger said the easy access to guns contributes to the revenge culture that Supt. Brown described in his remarks after the shooting: “We can’t keep meting out violence with violence,” Brown said. “An eye for an eye makes us both blind.”

Pfleger emphasized that “communities on the West and South Side have been abandoned and neglected economically and educationally for decades. Everybody talks, no action. The neighborhoods are a ticking time bomb. COVID exposed it again. Lack of access to health care and healthy food ...

“We are now setting records for violence, not just heat.

“Add to this we have the worst relationship between police and community due to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

“The African American community can only scream and cry so long in the emergency room. They’ve been sitting in the emergency room and waiting, and now they are pounding their fists on the counter.

“They feel their waiting has been ignored. It’s now the perfect storm. Either action must be taken ... or the worst is yet to come.

Then Pfleger paused:

“You can only cry and scream so long,” he said.

Sneedlings . . .

I spy: Batter up! Cubbie manager David Ross and family spotted Tuesday dining outside at Chicago Cut Steakhouse. . . . Saturday’s birthdays: Matt LeBlanc, 53; Iman Abdulmajid, 65; and Jax Jones, 33. . . . Sunday’s birthdays: Helen Mirren, 75; Sandra Bullock, 56; and Korey Wise, 48.