Ronald Kitchen - My Midnight Years: Surviving Jon Burges Police Torture Ring and Death Row

S HOUTS, CURSES, CHAOS everywhere as the sergeant marched me upstairs to the third floor of the precinct building. In my twenty-two years I had experienced a lifetime of nasty encounters with the Chicago police. But I had never been here before. This was the Homicide Division. My hands strained in cuffs behind my back. We walked in silence through a corridor of noise. I could hear cries from all directions. Somebody yelled, The fat ones throwing up! and I smelled the sick scent of vomit coming from one of the side rooms. Confused, I turned my head right and left, trying to figure out why they had brought me here. A detective snapped me back to the present, sneaking up from behind and smashing the side of my face with a hollow clank into the cold steel of a locker on the wall.

Look straight ahead! he screamed.

They led me into a grim room with a scuffed-up desk, chairs, and a bank of telephones. Long fluorescent tubes cast a harsh yellow-green light. They chucked me down roughly into a chair and bolted my cuffed hands through a steel hoop in the wall. As soon as I was secured, the detectivea wiry man with a hard facestarted screaming at me. Who have you been talking to? His mouth was just inches from me. Who have you been talking to?

I talk to a whole lot of people, I replied, trying to keep cool and make sense of the question. Wrong answer. The detective punched me in the chest. He kicked my stomach and legs. He smacked my face with his open palms. The thuds from the blows echoed from floor to ceiling. He asked again and again: Who have you been talking to? Who have you been talking to?

I had done my share of bad thingscriminal thingsbut there was no reason I should be in this part of the precinct. I did not know what offense he was investigating, or how I could be involved. Damn, I thought, what am I doing in homicide? Maybe they suspected I was a gang member or something. I had no idea. No idea.

Who are you talking to?

I told you, I said. I talk to a lot of people. Wrong again. The blows thrashed down all over me.

Those first strikes that fell on my body were the start of a long, long night. For me, it was a night that has never ended. I have told the story so many times: to judges and juries, to friends and family, to students and teachers. Every time I describe it, I relive these experiences. Not a day goes by when I do not think about what happened to me back thenduring that dark night of August 25, 1988.

And yet the morning had showed such promise. Dawn came hazy and humid to the South Side of Chicago. I opened my eyes. Birds tweeted in the oak trees outside my apartment. It was a Thursday, a special day. I remember it like yesterday. I woke up filled with the kind of hope I hadnt felt in years.

It was my day off, and Id been looking forward to it all week. I tiptoed down the hall to my sons room and coaxed him out of bed. In the kitchen, I set Ronnie Jr. in his high chair while I fixed our favorite breakfast: oatmeal with raisins and Capn Crunch. Then I sat up on the tabletop while he ate and chattered to me about his birthday. Hed be turning three in a couple weeks and the party was the only thing he had any interest in discussing. My girlfriend, Tiffany, joined us in the kitchen. Our relationship was coming to an endat least in my opinionbut she was pregnant again and hoping that a second baby would draw us back together as a couple.

Apart from my feeling of hopefulness, it was an otherwise normal morning. I felt the typical cares that I experienced at the beginning of every day: fatherhood worries, relationship stress, and the uncertainty of surviving. But still I had a sense from the start that it was somehow different.

After eating I got set to go out on my regular hustle. I took my time getting ready, laying out a pair of parachute pants and a baggy linen shirt while brushing my hair. I peered through the front door. South Aberdeen Street looked as it always did. Although the streets all around us were filled with litter and decay, our block was pretty tidy, thanks mostly to my grandmothers insistence that everyone in the family did their bit. When I was a kid she had made sure I cleaned the gutters and mowed the lawns. Now that I was older Id give younger family members a couple bucks to do these chores for me. I checked both directions for trouble. Nothing seemed out of place. No suspicious cars idling, no strangers loitering on the corner. I knew that later in the day neighborhood life would pour from these homes out into the open, but for now all was quiet.

When I stepped outside, the temperature was in the mid-seventies, with a slight breeze. Sunlight gleamed like money off the chrome grille of my Cadillac Eldorado. I climbed in and cranked up the new Keith Sweat album so high that people could hear me coming from two blocks away. So far the summer had been fun. A lot of fun. Pool parties, women, clubs. It had been a nonstop bash. And I stood atop my game. All day and all night, the streets of the South Sidetrash piles, broken glass, boarded-up windows, and allwere my domain.

When I say my regular hustle, what that meant was seeing girls and selling cocaine. Dealing drugs was the path I took to support my family. I was not a kingpin or anything. Most of my business was local. But I had graduated from selling on the streets to the next level in the industry. Customers would come up to a couple dope houses I rented and buy $10 and $20 bags from my employees there. I was rarely even present when these transactions happened. This lessened the risk. It made what I was doing seem almost like a real business. Maybe that was why so many people I knew had gone into narcotics and made a lifestyle out of it. They joined one of Chicagos prominent gangsthe Stones, Vice Lords, Latin Kings, or Disciplesand turned cocaine into a career. That wasnt going to be me. I never affiliated with a gang. For me it was get in and get out. I had friends and family on both sides of the gang wars, though, and since I had cousins belonging to all of the rival crews, everyone tended to leave me alone.

When youre a teenager, and youre getting this money, you feel untouchable. You feel like, they cant fuck with me. In fact, I used to always say just that. I had never been locked up. I had never even seen the inside of a police station. Then I turned twenty-one and shit got hectic real quick. It got really real. In the 1980s everybody was coming up dead somewhere. If it wasnt in a garbage can, it was in the river. If it wasnt in the river, it was in a car. And every one of them that you heard about coming up dead was a dope dealer. I was getting antsy. Police had busted into my house in June and discovered seven hundred grams of cocaine. That was troubling, and I knew I was probably looking at several years behind bars.