User:Ohmyyes/Robert Sandifer

Robert "Yummy" Sandifer (March 12, 1983 — September 1, 1994) garnered national attention in September 1994 after his murder by fellow gang members in Chicago, Illinois. He appeared on the cover of TIME magazine in September 1994.

Nicknamed Yummy because of his love of junk food, Sandifer was a young member of the street gang the Black Disciples. After committing murder, arson and armed robbery, he was executed by fellow gang members who feared he could be turned snitch. Coverage of Sandifer's death and retrospectives on his short, violent life were widely published in the American media, and Sandifer became a symbol of the gang problem in American inner cities, the failure of social safety netting, and the shortcomings of the juvenile justice system.

Early life
Robert Sandifer was the son of mother Lorina Sandifer and father Robert Akins. At the time of his death, he was the third child of seven born to Lorina Sandifer.

Lorina Sandifer was the third child of at least ten born to her mother, Janie Fields, by four different fathers. Lorina was a prostitute and a crack cocaine addict who had her first son, Lorenzo, in 1981 at age fifteen. Lorenzo was followed by Victor, born in 1982 and Robert, born in 1983. Their father, Robert Akins, was convicted of drug and weapons charges and sent to prison in Wisconsin three months before Robert was born.

The children were victims of abuse and neglect from an early age. Lorina was charged with child neglect in 1984 after failing to treat Victor's eye infection, which eventually blinded him. In 1985, Robert was taken to Jackson Park Hospital where medical staff observed multiple bruises and scratches. Later that year, Lorina took Robert's younger sister to Jackson Park Hospital for treatment of second- and third-degree burns to the infant girl's genitals, which a nurse testified were probably caused by pressing the child against a hot radiator. Robert and his siblings were sent to live with his grandmother Janie Fields in August 1986 by the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) after he and his siblings were located by themselves in an apartment where five-year-old Lorenzo was expected to supervise the rest of the children alone for upwards of twelve hours per day. Robert was found to have cigarette burns on his buttocks, neck, and arms, and linear scar welts all over his body caused by beatings done with an electrical cord.

A psychiatrist who evaluated Lorina Sandifer reported to DCFS and a Chicago juvenile court that year that Lorina tended to "disown responsibility," regularly failing to pick up public welfare checks, and that there was "no reason to believe that Lorina Sandifer will ever be able to adequately meet her own needs, let alone to meet the needs of her growing family, which soon will be consisting of five children ... There certainly has never been any stability in Lorina Sandifer’s life throughout her development periods to the present time." However, the same DCFS report stated that "the placement with the maternal grandmother [Janie Fields] is not a good placement for these children, who are in need of placement in a warm, nurturing environment, which they have never known," and described Janie Fields as "a very controlling, domineering, castrating woman with a rather severe borderline personality disorder" who attempted to "almost immediately dispute and deny the previous allegations [of child abuse committed by Lorina Sandifer]."

Janie Fields's residence housed as many as nineteen children at times, making it difficult for her to adequately monitor the children under her care. By age eight, Robert had stopped regularly attending school and was spending most of his time on the streets. In November 1993, Robert and a brother were removed from their grandmother's home and placed with Lawrence Hall Youth Services, in a residential group home for troubled boys on Chicago's north side. Robert ran away from Lawrence Hall Youth Services in February 1994 after fighting an instructor. He did not return to the group home. By August 1994, Robert, having been rejected by thirteen Illinois residential placements, was still living with his grandmother while the Department of Children and Family Services sought an out-of-state placement for him in a locked facility.

Criminal behavior
Robert was known for bullying and extorting money from local children and the community in the Chicago neighborhood of Roseland. He repeatedly stole motor vehicles and burglarized homes. He liked luxury cars such as Lincolns and Cadillacs and, remarkably, was able to drive them despite his small stature (in 1994, he was 56 inches tall, still beneath the height limit for many of the rides at nearby amusement park Six Flags Great America). Many of his twenty-three felonies and five misdemeanors were committed in the course of running errands for street gangs. The penal system had no way to keep him out of trouble and the courts were helpless to lock him away because he was too young for juvenile detention and too dangerous to be placed with children his age.

Homicide
On August 28, 1994, Yummy walked up to 15-year-old Kianta Britten and asked him to which gang he belonged. Kianta responded that he did not belong to any gang, and Yummy opened fire on him with a semiautomatic pistol, hitting him in the stomach with one bullet and also catching a nerve with another bullet leaving Britten partially paralyzed. Later on that same day, Yummy shot at some rival gangmembers. One stray bullet hit Shavon Dean in the head and killed her as she walked home from a friend's house.

For the next three days, gang members from the Black Disciples kept Yummy on the move, evading the police investigation of the shootings. Yummy was last seen by a neighbor on August 31, waiting for his grandmother to pick him up, but instead two brothers (14 and 16 years of age [Derrick and Cragg Hardaway]) from his gang arrived. Telling him they were going to take him out of the city, he was brought to a viaduct underpass and executed. He was found later in a muddy pool of blood with two gunshot wounds in the head.