In 1986, a child-abuse worker at a Chicago hospital said something that made Robert Sandifer snap. "F--- you, you bitch!" the boy shot back. He then grabbed a toy knife and put its blade to the woman's arm. "I'm gonna cut you," he warned. At the time, Robert was less than 3 years old.
Last week, two .25-caliber bullets to the back of Robert's skull ended his life at the age of 11. By then he was a career criminal, a pint-size Capone running with a South Side street gang. His rap sheet listed 28 charges, 23 of them felonies. Police suspected he was the shooter who, in the space of two hours on Aug. 28, sprayed bullets from a semiautomatic pistol into two groups of youths. The gunplay, evidently gang-motivated, injured two 16-year-old boys. But a stray shot killed Shavon Dean, 14, one of Robert's neighbors, who was about to start her freshman year in high school. After combing Chicago for three days, the cops found Robert under a railroad viaduct, face down in dirt and broken glass. He'd allegedly been hidden -- and then executed -- by the Black Disciples, the local street gang he wanted to impress. Police theorized that gang members wanted the boy silenced before officers got to him.
Robert's case exposes a justice system unable to keep kids from killing kids. Even when they see the warning signs, judges and prosecutors often don't have the tools they need to stop the violence. The most dangerous young offenders mock laws intended to keep them from being punished as harshly as adults, or even adolescents. Though a huge increase in killings by 14- to 24-year-olds has raised the nation's homicide rate in the last decade, younger kids have committed a fairly steady 100 murders a year since the 1970s. Now a summer of shocking violence blamed on preteens has rocked communities nationwide (box). Robert, who stood 4 feet 6 inches and weighed 86 pounds, was so small that Judge Thomas Sumner had to stand up to see him last year when he made the first of many appearances in Sumner's courtroom. The frustrated judge had no secure, long-term treatment facility in Illinois where he could send a child so young and incorrigible. "I can hold an 11-year-old for 30 days," Sumner says. "That's it."
Long before he menaced others, Robert himself was a victim. He was taken from his mother in 1986 after state workers found scars on his face, cordlike marks on his abdomen and cigarette burns on his neck, shoulder blade and buttocks. A judge placed him with his grandmother. His first arrest was at the age of 8 for shoplifting. A cascade of subsequent arrests led to charges of damage to property, robbery and armed robbery. At 10, Robert was moved to a juvenile center after a judge heard a Cook County probation officer testify that young women were working as prostitutes from the grandmother's home. (Newsweek could not reach her for comment.) Officials who dealt with Robert had a hard time believing that the boy could commit so many crimes. "He was adorable," says Ann O'Callaghan, an attorney who met Robert last December. "I thought, no way this little pumpkin could be in a gang."
But the earlier abuse haunted Robert. A psychological profile prepared by a children's shelter and obtained by Newsweek stated that "he has a sense of failure that has infiltrated almost every aspect of his inner self." Asked to complete the sentence "I am very . . . ," Robert answered "sick." His chaotic life had left him so stunted educationally that he couldn't complete written questionnaires; asked to add 3 and 4, he answered, "Zero." His many brushes with the law didn't stop him from voicing every little boy's dream: he wanted to be a policeman.
Robert ran away from another juvenile home last February. Chicago police captured him in June and charged him with auto theft; he spent the next month in a jail-like juvenile facility. Judge Sumner, unwilling to keep the boy imprisoned with older youths and lacking a facility that could treat him, then released Robert to his grandmother. Within days he was arrested for burglarizing a school. At his own grade school, principal Jacqueline Carothers says that Robert -- nicknamed Yummy for his love of cookies -- had another side: he could be "giggly, playful and loving." Days before his death, Robert came by to tell one teacher about a frog he'd found.
Last Friday, authorities charged two other boys, brothers, 16 and 14, with Robert's murder. Police said they were members of the gang whose insignia Robert wore as one of three tattoos. Both allegedly admitted to being at the murder scene. Officers said Robert was tricked into thinking he was being taken to a hiding place out of town. The older youth, they say, was the trigger man.
Officials warned that there would be more Roberts -- severely abused children with neglectful mothers and absentee fathers. "America has thousands of these little powder kegs," says Cook County pub-lic guardian Patrick Murphy, whose legal staff represents 31,000 abused and neglected kids. "The question is whether they'll kill at 11 or 15." Robert's life was all but over at the age of 3. His criminal career was a gruesome prophecy fulfilled. "He warned us in no uncertain terms that he was going to do something like this," says Jack O'Malley, the county's top prosecutor. But nobody met Robert's needs better than the gangbangers who probably killed him. For a while, it appears, he found something that passed for a family.
In Chains: Manuel Sanchez and John Duncan, both 12, charged in Wenatchee, Wash., with the Aug. 20 murder of a migrant worker. They may be tried as adults.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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