9712240071
DETROIT FREE PRESS
971224
Wednesday, December 24, 1997
METRO FINAL
1C
Photo NICO TOUTENHOOFD/Detroit Free Press
Debi and Jim Hillock dearly miss son Kenny Baumgart. Below from left,
Kenny poses last Christmas with friend A.C. Smith and nephew Donovon Langley.
MITCH ALBOM
DREAMS DEFERRED '97; SERIES
Copyright (c) 1997, Detroit Free Press
WHY DID KENNY HAVE TO DIE?
First in a series on heartbreaks and hopes of unsung Detroit area athletes.
His 17th birthday was held in a cemetery. His family, friends and teammates
gathered on a cold October afternoon with gifts, balloons, even a cake. The
ground was wet, so they spread out plastic trash bags and sat down. They lit a
maize-and-blue candle from the University of Michigan, where he had hoped to
play football one day. And as the skies darkened, they sang a soft rendition
of "Happy Birthday."
They sang it to a tombstone.
Later, as they left, the wind whipped up and blew out the candle. It lifted
some of the balloons over the fence and into a nearby tree. If you drive past
the graveyard now, you still can see a shrinking balloon stuck in the
branches. In some ways, it is like the teenagers on the streets below, trapped
by location, slowly oozing life.
Let's talk about a neighborhood where nobody walks home from school anymore,
where metal detectors are at the school doors, where nearly every student has
a gun or knows where to get one. Let's talk about a neighborhood where a young
football player named Kenny Baumgart, the son of two cops, took a bullet
through the lung from a kid he didn't even know, over an argument that nobody
can even remember. It happened in the school parking lot. Several shots were
fired. People screamed. Next thing you knew, his older brother was carrying
Kenny's limp and bleeding body into Holy Cross Hospital, yelling, "Somebody
help me, my brother's been shot...."
Let's talk about a neighborhood that is not in the Middle East, not in the
Wild West, but is right here, in your hometown, just a bullet trajectory
across Eight Mile Road, the invisible border that separates Detroit's city
from Detroit's suburbs -- and, for many people, caring from not caring.
That has to stop. We all need to care. Kenny Baumgart was 5-feet-9 and 165
pounds, played football like a tank, talked tough and didn't back down from
fights. He was no angel. But he didn't deserve to die. When he crumpled that
Monday afternoon in the asphalt outside Pershing High School, a piece of the
city went down with him.
If we can't keep the son of two cops alive, how much hope do we have?
Family sought safer ground
"The ironic thing is, we moved here because the gangs in our old neighborhood
had us worried," Debi Hillock says. She sits at a table in the bungalow house
on Norwood, on Detroit's northeast side. She is wearing a sweatshirt, puffing
a cigarette. A veteran of the police force, she has seen death in all its
forms. She always came to work the next day. Since Kenny died, however, she
has not returned to the force. She looks less like an officer now and more
like a mother, one who has cried too much in the last few months for her face
to look well-rested.
Sitting next to her is her husband, Kenny's stepfather, Jim Hillock, also a
Detroit cop. He had endorsed the move to this neighborhood. As a youth, he,
too, had attended Pershing. So when Kenny said he wanted to go there because
he liked the football program, Jim thought, "Well, I survived it...."
Yes, the Hillocks and their family are white. Yes, they live in an almost
exclusively black neighborhood. No, that didn't bother them, and it didn't
bother Kenny. His girlfriend was black. Many of his friends were black. His
teammates on the Pershing junior varsity team were almost all black. One of
them was named Ventonio Johnson, a tailback he met on the first day of
football practice.
"Who wants to try and get past this guy?" the coach asked, pointing to
Ventonio.
"I'll go, Coach, I'll go!" Kenny yelled.
Ventonio was bigger. Kenny sized him up. Kenny plowed into Ventonio and
knocked him back three feet.
They were friends ever since.
This should be celebrated, no? Color-blindness in the inner city? Well. Not
everyone was so open-minded. The gangs that own the streets in the Hillocks'
neighborhood took a quick dislike to Kenny. Maybe because he was white. Maybe
because he didn't back down from an argument. Whatever the reason, that was
the end of the peaceful coexistence.
And the beginning of his death.
"You want to know how this whole thing started?" says Dujuan Davenport,
another black Pershing student who counts himself as a close friend of
Baumgart's. "The whole thing started when this guy Elijah went up to Kenny's
girlfriend after Kenny and her had a disagreement. Elijah said, 'You want me
to whup his ass?' She was like, 'Nah, it ain't like that.' But Elijah wanted
to impress her, so he found Kenny and he wanted to beat on him. But Kenny's
strong, man. He beat Elijah instead.
"So Elijah goes back and tells his friends, and some of them are in the gang,
and that was it. Kenny was white and he wasn't from around here and he was
dating this black girl and he beat one of their boys. It was just a matter of
time after that."
Dujuan rubs his soft, young face, which seems at odds with his explanations
about murder, and the fact that he often carries a gun to school. He looks at
Kenny's mother. She shakes her head.
"Truth is," Dujuan says, "around here, you don't need a reason to pop
somebody."
A few troubling incidents
Fifty-three teens from ages 15 to 19 were murdered in Detroit last year.
Murdered. Not illness, not car accidents. Murdered. Many were gang-related.
And many of those killed were innocent bystanders, caught in crossfire. Some
will tell you Kenny Baumgart was asking for his bullet. That's insane. Who
asks for a bullet? It is true, Kenny went through life the way he went through
a defensive line -- with a hard head. In football, as a tailback, he never ran
out of bounds. He was quick to defend a teammate, even if it meant fighting.
And off the field, he could be just as stubborn. He fought with his parents
once about having to go on a trip to Texas, and it got so bad they tried to
teach him a lesson by locking him in a youth home. The incident gave him a
juvenile record.
But he was also an "A" student at Pershing who would cook pork chops and
hamburgers for his younger brother and smother his mother in kisses like a
happy dog. Hey. He was 16. He talked tough and tried to act tough, maybe too
much. Then again, in this neighborhood, what choice do you have?
When football season ended, Kenny's problems escalated. There were incidents.
Threats. Fights with the gang members. Teens jumping other teens. It is not
even worth recounting them all because they began with such trivial
confrontations -- "What are you looking at, you bleep"; "I heard you were
talking about me, you bleep" -- that it only makes them more depressing.
The worst part is, these confrontations don't end with words anymore, they end
with weapons. "Just about everyone I know has a gun," Dujuan Davenport says.
"You can get into school with one easy."
What about the metal detectors, he is asked.
"They go off all the time. Kids wait until the bell rings, then run through,
and the guards just wave you in and say, 'Hurry up, hurry up.' "
This may or may not explain how the gun that killed Kenny Baumgart got onto
the Pershing premises that day. You would first have to explain how the
shooter got there. His name is Darrell Hagerman. He was not even a student at
Pershing. He attended Frederick Douglass Academy, an alternative school for
troubled kids. But he was in Pershing's halls that Monday morning -- even
though you're supposed to have an ID -- and that's when Kenny's friend,
Ventonio, bumped Hagerman's cousin, a freshman named Michael McCune.
A bump? That's what this was all about?
The two teens had words. Later in the day, they had more words and a teacher
had to separate them. Hagerman left school and came back with a .357 Magnum.
That's how tough it is for kids to get a weapon in Detroit. You go home and
grab one as if you forgot your lunch.
"The thing is, Kenny really wasn't involved in that whole fight," says his
older brother, Shawn. "It was just because he was friends with Ventonio. After
school, they were getting ready to leave together. I was in the parking lot,
too, in my car. And those guys came up and started arguing."
Those guys were McCune, 15; Hagerman, 16; and another freshman, Larry Walker,
15. The arguments were the awful macho boasting that leads to tragedy.
"You ain't s---."
"No, you ain't s---."
"F--- you."
"F--- you back."
Finally, Shawn says, he yelled to his brother and Ventonio to let it go and
get in the car. Kenny acknowledged his brother's advice, waved a dismissive
hand at the trio and turned to walk away. That, Shawn says, is when Hagerman
pulled out his death toy and started firing.
"I ducked onto the seat and heard one shot, then two," Shawn says. "Then I saw
him firing in the air a few times. Then he put the gun back in his pants and
left."
Shawn looked across and saw Ventonio staring at his brother, who was lying in
a heap. Shawn thought Kenny might be protecting himself, too.
He wasn't. A bullet had entered Kenny's back below his left shoulder blade and
had gone through a lung, nicked his heart, aorta and esophagus.
He was already dying.
Shawn lifted him from the spreading blood and put him in the front seat. He
drove madly to Holy Cross Hospital, jumping lanes, running lights, going on
curbs, yelling all the time to his brother, "Don't die. Come on! Don't die!"
His thoughts, he says now, were: "This ain't no movie."
When he reached the hospital, he screeched to a stop and carried his brother
inside. Blood was soaking Kenny's black Pelle Pelle jacket, his favorite
Christmas present from last year. His eyes were closed. Shawn hollered for
help. A woman yelled "this way" and he followed her into an elevator and
upstairs, then placed Kenny on a rolling bed and watched helplessly as he was
taken away by doctors, another what-for in a city full of what-fors.
He was dead on arrival.
The suffering continues
These days, the Hillock family stays mostly inside the house on Norwood.
Christmas, they admit, will not be very festive. Kenny's younger brother,
Robert, 15, fears for his life. He has been told the gang won't be happy until
he is gone, too. Sometimes his stepfather sleeps near the front of the house,
with his weapon nearby, just in case. Again, we remind you, this is not in
some far-off country. This is, depending on where you live in the suburbs,
maybe two miles, three miles, five miles away.
"It's a hell of a life, isn't it?" Jim Hillock says.
It is not a life at all. Debi is trying to make a new start, out of state. She
says she can't take living in a place "where 16-year-olds say, 'If it's my
time, it's my time.' " She hasn't gone back to police work at least partly
because "I can't tell people lies anymore. I can't tell them someone will help
them."
Meanwhile, Kenny's friends, like Dujuan Davenport, wonder whether they'll have
to pay for a continued friendship with the family. Not long ago, a car pulled
up alongside Dujuan with several gang members inside. One of them reached
down, perhaps for a gun, and a kid in the backseat smiled at Dujuan and waved
bye-bye.
"I thought my life was over," Dujuan says.
What did he do?
"I pulled out my gun and started shooting and they drove away."
There is no point in looking for innocence in this story. Innocence is an
unaffordable luxury. For all the talk about the revitalization of Detroit,
there are far too many parts where dodging bullets is still a childhood
activity. When police officers are mourning their kids, something is out of
control.
Darrell Hagerman was convicted of second-degree murder. He cried at the
verdict. Kenny Baumgart was buried in his Pershing football jersey. To this
day, some people say he was simply in the wrong place. The problem is, it's
all the wrong place, isn't it? A school is no place for a gun, a cemetery is
no place for a birthday party, and these streets are no place for our
children. The question isn't what side of Eight Mile Road do they live on. The
question is: Are we going to save them, or aren't we?
To leave a message for Mitch Albom, call 1-313-223-4581.
THIS ELECTRONIC VERSION MAY DIFFER SLIGHTLY FROM THE PRINTED ARTICLE.
KENNY BAUMGART; BIOGRAPHY; SERIES; JUVENILE; SHOOTING; GANG;
HOMICIDE