- Pierre Loury talked about going to college and becoming an engineer, yet he skipped classes for nearly a year in high school.
He encouraged his little brother to stay in sports and out of gangs, yet he claimed to have joined the New Breeds around the age of 10.
He spent hours recording rap music in a converted bedroom closet, but toward the end of his short life his Facebook postings show him posing with guns, cash and drugs and talking of chasing rival dealers off his block.
Still, his family and friends never imagined he would die in an alley not far from his home at age 16, shot and killed by a Chicago police officer last month after allegedly threatening him with a gun.
This isn't so much journalism as the groundwork for a hagiography of a dead gang banger who never would have amounted to a hill of beans.
- "He was becoming a man," said his stepfather, Vantrease Frazier, who disputes the police account. "You know every teenage boy made mistakes and did stuff they ain't supposed to do, but you got to learn from that."
"mistakes." Right.
- Loury, a flashy dresser who liked to impress girls, smoked marijuana every day, bounced around from school to school and often didn't go to class, according to friends and court records.
He argued with his mother and ran away from home, staying with friends for extended periods on a block that police once closed down for weeks because of its rampant drug trade.
He had his first court case when he was 14 and within a year was busted on a heroin charge.
By 16 he had a tattoo across his throat in honor of a friend who was slain.
At the time of his death, Loury was serving a sentence of five years of probation for his involvement in the robbing and beating of a woman on a CTA train.
Sounds like just the type of individual that Judge Hooks would release on his own recognizance regularly.
If you want to read the rest of this crap-tacular article, click at the link up top. The comments at the bottom of the article (some 300-plus at last count) convey our disgust as well as anything we could have written - this is a spectacular waste of writing, newsprint and bandwidth. The Trib ought to be ashamed of it.
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