Articles
Publication: Chicago Sun-Times
Date: June 4, 1993
Author: Raymond R. Coffey
Section: NEWS
Edition: LATE SPORTS FINAL
Page: 3
Word Count: 701
`A very nice kid," this Ted Kochowicz. Doing the right thing. Working days as a clerk in a downtown law firm, nights as a recreation leader for the Park District at Hermosa Park on the Northwest Side.
Aiming at a career in sports management, in which he holds a college degree. Looking forward to being best man at his pal's wedding. So here he is, age 25, working with kids in a tough neighborhood, "trying to keep them busy, get them involved."
He's playing basketball and dodge ball with some of the kids at the park when two older guys come into the field house. Kochowicz never saw them before. They check out a basketball and play for a few minutes on an outside court.
It's now about 9:25 p.m., Tuesday, May 18.
The two guys check the basketball in again to Kochowicz and make as if to leave. Then one returns to the office, asks if Kochowicz has "seen a black wallet laying around."
"No," says Kochowicz, but "I'll help you look for it." He follows the guy out of the office into the hallway.
"I was about 10 feet behind him walking down the hallway," Kochowicz remembers. Suddenly the guy turns around, pulls a gun, a silvered .38, and tells Kochowicz to "get down on (your bleeping) face."
The gunman "kneels on my back and puts the barrel of the gun against the back of my head," Kochowicz recalls. The second guy reappears, and the two of them go through Kochowicz's pockets.
They take $10 and a pager and rip a gold chain off his neck. Hardly the kind of haul that's going to win them a spot on anyone's most wanted list.
"It's time to die," the guy with the gun says, the .38 still pushed into the back of Kochowicz's head, "We're going to kill you now."
"I started praying," Kochowicz remembers. "This is it, I told myself, I'm going to die."
Suddenly the guy with the gun "pivots on my back" and "puts the gun up against the back of my left knee." He tells Kochowicz, "You're tripping, man, you're tripping." He pulls the trigger.
The two guys run out. Kochowicz crawls to the phone in the office, gets under a metal desk in case they come back shooting, dials 911. The cops arrive promptly, and Kochowicz winds up in Illinois Masonic Medical Center.
A surgeon tells him there is a 30 percent chance of losing his leg. He doesn't, thank God. He got out of the hospital this week and he's "going to be fine." The bullet didn't hit any bones, "it's going to take some time in rehabilitation and all that," but the knee was not permanently damaged.
About 36 hours after the robbery-shooting, detectives had come to the hospital with mug shots of suspects. Kochowicz had no problem recognizing them - "their faces are frozen in my memory."
Cmdr. Joe Curtin of the 25th (Grand Central) police district says the two guys are gangbangers, one 17, the other 20, both members of the Imperial Gangsters. Both are being held at County Jail, bond on the shooter set at $250,000, on the other guy at $200,000.
And Kochowicz? He didn't make it to his buddy's wedding. He hasn't gone back to work yet - and he "definitely" is not going back to the job at Hermosa Park, where he had been putting in three nights a week, 4 to 10 p.m.
"Out of the question," he says, "I'm really scared." Who can blame him?
Scared as he was, and is, by what happened to him, Kochowicz has nothing bad to say about the predominantly Hispanic kids he was working with at Hermosa. He understands, even admires them.
"For the most part," he tells me, "the kids who hang out at the park are good kids. They're just trying to survive in a tough neighborhood."
Kochowicz, says Cmdr. Curtin, is "a very nice kid" himself; people at the park "rave about how good the kid is."
Sad, really, isn't it? Not only for Kochowicz, but for all those other good kids. For Chicago. For all of us. Where are we going when doing the right thing puts you in harm's way, turns you into a target for gangbangers?