Community outrage a catalyst for change in earlier shootings

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Eric Galarza, 5, was fatally shot while in a vehicle in Elgin Friday at about 7 p.m. Photo courtesy Jenny Jaramillo | Sun-Times

Updated: January 23, 2012 4:02AM

The cases are tragically similar.

In August 2002, two brothers — ages 3 and 6 — were in the family car in the driveway of their Aurora home when someone shot into the vehicle, hitting the boys who had just returned from a run to the store for ice cream.

Police decried the crime, calling it gang-related and beefing up their street presence throughout the city. The boys’ father, Charles Booker Sr., was a cousin to Rashard J. Wright, whose murder a few days earlier had sparked a string of shootings among local gang members.

“At 3 and 6 years old, these are clearly innocent victims,” recently appointed Police Chief William Lawler said at the time. “The community has to look at that and realize ... people need to come forward and help bring this person to justice.”

Although authorities suspected the dad knew who was behind the act, no one ever was arrested. Six-year-old Charles Booker Jr., hit three times, was hospitalized in critical condition. But luckily he and brother Jauna survived.

Last weekend, Eric Galarza Jr. — also named after his father and only 5 years old — was not so lucky.

The little boy — pictures show a chubby angelic face framed by long dark curls — was sitting in the back seat of the family car in the driveway of his Elgin home when someone drove by and shot into the vehicle.

A bullet hit him in the eye, and Eric died at Sherman Hospital a short time later.

Like the Aurora case nine years earlier, Elgin police say it was a gang-related shooting. And Police Chief Jeff Swoboda, expressing the same outrage as Aurora’s Chief Lawler had in 2002, assigned not just the EPD gang task force to the case but every detective in the department.

“When someone young and innocent is killed in what appears to be a gang-related shooting,” said Elgin spokesperson Susan Olafson, “the audacity of gang violence is just exacerbated.”

Aurora’s current police chief, Greg Thomas, felt the same frustration after the Booker boys were shot. Fortunately, while it wasn’t necessarily the impetus for change, things took a dramatic turn for the better in Aurora after that summer.

In 1996, the year 6-year-old Nico Contreras was killed while sleeping at his grandmother’s house, there were 300 shootings in Aurora. The Booker shootings, Thomas said, were just two of 280 in Aurora in 2002. But by that time, Lawler’s predecessor, Larry Langston, already had reached out to federal agencies for help with the city’s outrageous gang problem.

In fact, the month before the children were wounded, local police and the feds — including the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service — had pulled off the first of what eventually would be 16 large-scale raids that took close to 140 high-ranking gang members off our streets.

By 2005, shootings were down to 124 in a year. Last year, there were 75; and so far this year, Thomas says, there have been 50.

Police remember incredibly long days during that summer of 2002; Thomas recalls attending neighborhood meetings and the outrage people expressed as they feared for their safety and the safety of their children.

Now he goes to those same meetings and “the main concern is loud music and parking,” he adds.

Crime overall was down 13 percent last year in Aurora, he noted, compared to an average of 5 percent across the country. No wonder. When you’re not chasing shooters, the chief says, you have more time to devote to other crimes.

Still, you can never let your guard down. And you never forget when the innocents become the victims. It’s that same sense of sadness and outrage now being felt in Elgin after little Eric Galarza was laid to rest Wednesday.

“It particularly resonates with people who have young children,” says the city’s Olafson. “It breaks my heart.”