Hours before 17-year-old Monterio Williams was gunned down outside his Loop high school, he was planning his future.
Monterio, who loved cars and motorcycles, had tracked down information on a trade school that he was excited about attending after graduation and shared the news with his mom. That was her final communication with him.
“I dropped my son off at school, and that was the last time I saw him alive,” Blondean Gartley, Monterio’s mom, told the Sun-Times.
Boyhood friends, Monterio and 16-year-old Robert Boston were shot and killed Friday afternoon by masked gunmen at Washington Street and Wabash Avenue near Innovations High School in the Loop, where they were both students.
Gartley was shopping when she got a call from Monterio’s dad and learned about the shooting. Not knowing if it was a graze wound or something more serious, she tried to stave off panic and raced to the scene.
As she worked her way through the masses of officers who kept her from getting close enough to see if the boy lying on the street was her son, police told her that an ambulance had already gone to the hospital.
“In my mind, one of them is gone and one of them is still alive, and I don’t know who’s who,” Gartley said. “I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone or something. I’m just praying, praying, praying, at this moment.”
She followed a second ambulance to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where she was told that Monterio had died. Donicka Doss, Robert Boston’s mother, got the same news.
“Is that really him?” Doss said she was thinking in the hospital waiting room.
Doss said her son was a “good kid” who liked basketball and video games.
Monterio and Robert grew up in the same Near West Side neighborhood, and their families are friends, said Gartley, who struggled for the right words to say to Doss.
“I’ve never been through this. It hurts though. I don’t know what to say to her. I hate that this happened to these boys,” Gartley said.
“Every time I walked in the door, he would always come in from behind and hug me and smother me,” Gartley said. “He’d hold me tight to the point where I’d say ‘OK, that’s enough, now let me go.’”
Gartley is unsure how she’ll ever get used to her son’s absence.
“At this moment, I don’t even know if I have accepted it,” Gartley said. “I’m still calling his name.”
Monterio and Robert are two of at least 11 minors who have been shot in Chicago this year, according to data kept by the Chicago Sun-Times. At least 25 homicides have been reported this year.
For Gartley, it’s long been a fear of hers that her children would get caught up in violence.
“A call too early in the morning, I’m scared. A call too late at night, I’m scared,” Gartley said. “I feel like the streets of Chicago are like war. Is it gonna be your turn to get this call?”
Police have not announced any arrests.
