FAMILY PAYS FOR BRAVE STAND

When Tirzo Esquivel last spoke to his wife, his words were frightening
and prophetic. Horribly, they came true by nightfall.

"If they kill me, leave here immediately and don't come back,"
Florentina Moreno, 40, recalled her husband told her on Sept. 10,
1995. "He said, `I love my kids, especially Jessica, and I don't want
anything to happen to them. For Jessica, I'll give my life away.' "

Hours later, when Moreno returned home from an afternoon church
service with their four children, she learned Esquivel had been gunned
down on nearby Division Street in the Humboldt Park community. He was
a casualty of gang members who had grown to resent his pleas they sell
drugs elsewhere.

Recently, Moreno attended a sentencing hearing at the Cook County
Criminal Courts Building--aided by a translator who whispered in
Spanish what the lawyers and the judge were saying about Esquivel's
killers, Michael Austin, 23, and Dominique Johnson, 22. Austin
received a 120-year prison term and Johnson a 90-year term for the
killing.

"I wish he had called police," Assistant State's Atty. Elissa Rhee-Lee
said of Esquivel, who had tried to handle a bad situation by himself.
"You can't, as a citizen, tell drug dealers, `I'm displeased with
you,' on your own. He had the right heart, but he used the wrong method."

More than three years later, the ramifications of Esquivel's
good-intentions-gone-bad still are playing out--just one example of
the little-seen lives that go on after countless slayings.

Moreno followed her husband's advice, moving within five weeks to a
small basement apartment in a different neighborhood. Moreno said the
family feels safer.

But the impact of the gang's actions revisit her daily, sometimes in
nuts-and-bolts matters such as trying to support her family on her
machine operator's salary, and often in emotional dues extracted every
night when she tries to appease her crying children, Veronica, 8,
Benjamin, 6, and the baby, Jessica, 4. She tells the kids their daddy
is watching over them from heaven.

Her eldest daughter, Martha, 10, was so traumatized by the killing,
she had to move to live with relatives in Mexico, Moreno said.
Martha's grief and anger over her father's death hindered her ability
to concentrate in school.

Esquivel, a 32-year-old construction worker when he died, believed in
solving a lot of his problems himself. He and his wife hadn't called
police because they feared doing so would bring the gang's wrath on
their family, Moreno said. Esquivel particularly feared the gang would
hurt his family when he was away at work.

The family had moved to the 1100 block of North Harding Avenue in
December 1994 and soon realized the Four Corner Hustlers street gang
was using the children's playlot across the street to sell drugs. The
gang also stashed rocks of cocaine in the grassy courtyard of the
building where they lived, Moreno said.

The situation worsened as the weather improved, she said. Gang members
clucked, "rock, rock, rock" at passersby day and night and handed off
tiny plastic bags to buyers on the sidewalk outside their apartment,
she said.

In time, Esquivel requested a compromise. He asked gang members to
stay out of the courtyard where his children, who were then between
the ages of 1 and 6, played and to keep their business across the
street. They ignored him, Moreno said.

"My husband would say to them, `From here on, don't come in here. Stay
over there (in the playlot). I don't want my kids to see what you're
doing,' " Moreno recalled.

That summer, a gang member hit Esquivel in the forehead with a piece
of wood after the Mexican immigrant repeated his request. Moreno said
Esquivel came into the house bleeding. He declined to see a doctor
because he had no medical benefits and the family couldn't afford
another bill.

Moreno said she watched as her husband stood before the bathroom
mirror, pulling splinters out of his face. He cleaned the wound with
rubbing alcohol and, when it healed, he covered the scar with a
bandana that he seldom left home without, she said.

Moreno said she realized how bad the problem had grown in August 1995,
when emboldened gang members began yelling at Esquivel through their
open apartment windows as he slept. They called him "stupid" and other
names, she said. They also followed the family to La Puerta Estrecha,
the church Moreno and Esquivel attended with their children.

In services one day, less than a week before the killing, Moreno said
Veronica saw her father crying and told her mother. It was then,
Moreno said, that they decided to concentrate on finding an apartment
in a safer neighborhood.

But Esquivel was killed before they did.

On Sept. 10, 1995, Esquivel asked a gang member not to sell drugs and
he was slapped across the face. He walked away without fighting back
and told Moreno to leave with the children if anything happened to
him.

Hours later, he was surrounded by gang members as he walked to a store
with a friend. Austin and Johnson shot him five times, prosecutor
Rhee-Lee said.

Moreno, who was a stay-at-home mom, now works in the western suburbs.
She said she pays a neighbor nearly half her weekly salary to baby-sit
her children.

She has learned to live with hardship.

"When my husband was here, there wasn't anything we didn't have,"
Moreno said, recalling better times. "Now, every night my kids cry and
they say, `I want to see my daddy.' "

Rhee-Lee said this case also saddened her. People don't stick their
necks out that often, as Esquivel did, but the consequences his widow
faces every day are extremely harsh, she said.

"The actions their father took for their sake ended up killing him,"
Rhee-Lee said. "But he probably never thought these guys were actually
going to gun him down in the middle of a Sunday afternoon."