A life cut far too short (Michael Montoya)

On the morning of July 15, 1993, my mom told me that she thought Michael Montoya had been killed. I didn’t know Michael Montoya personally, but I certainly did know he was a kid at my very small elementary school. Furthermore, my mom worked in the kindergarten there, and he was one of the little kids there; he had just finished first grade.

Not only that, but he was taking part in the Vacation Bible School where my mom and sister were volunteering. I couldn’t since I had to make up classes that from what had been the disaster of my freshman year in high school, so it was sitting in Mr. Adamowski’s biology class that day that I heard on the radio, indeed, that Michael Montoya, from my elementary school had been shot and killed.

Terrible as it sounds now, the announcement on the radio left me only with the thought in my mind, “Well, I can tell my mom that she heard the news right.” Nothing more than that. As a kid growing up in a bad neighborhood in Chicago at that time – the 1990s had some of the worst murder numbers until 2020 – hearing about kids getting killed was kind of ho-hum. It happened; such was life in the city. That year, the Chicago Tribune was even doing a series about kids getting murdered in the city, and so Michael Montoya even ended up on the front page of the paper – how odd it was to see his school picture there, knowing it had been taken in the same place as so many of my school pictures had been taken!

My mom and sister went to his funeral; he was dressed head to toe in Chicago Bulls regalia, after all, this was Chicago of 1993, and the air was electric, as Michael Jordan and the Bulls had just managed their first “Three-peat” a couple weeks earlier. I didn’t end up going, after all, I didn’t know him, and I probably had school… I do know that Michael’s mother, at one point, picked up this petite red-headed boy named Ralphie and said to the crowd assembled, “This was his best friend”.

It wouldn’t hit me until over a year later what some idea of what a child’s death actually means. I was the first “responsible” person on the scene of an accident with a child badly injured. I thank God that the child survived and that there seemed to be no long-term damage. Ralphie was there too, and after the incident, I had picked him up and was kind of holding him on my him, and he turned and said to me, “I know I’m easy to pick up.” The scene that I was told about from Michael Montoya’s funeral flooded my mind…

Even in a city of tons of senseless violence, the murder of Michael Motoya was kind of the epitome of it. Michael’s mother was incredibly protective of her son, being as his father was killed by a stray bullet of a drive-by shooting when Michael was 12 days old. She moved to a better neighborhood, she didn’t let him hang out outside, she was making sure he was getting an education to do great things with his life. According to my mom, he was the kind of kid who was mature for his age, who one would expect to someday be a leader of some sort, a preacher, perhaps.

And yet, as I recall, his mother allowed her son outside to return something, perhaps a video game, to another child down the street. It was an errand that should have taken a couple of minutes. Yet in that short amount of time, an argument broke out down the street, somebody getting angry about someone blocking the street or something, and then gunshots. The man who did it fled to Mexico for some time, but due to the persistence of Michael’s mother, he was eventually arrested. The man cried that the reason he fled was because he wanted to have time to spend with his children, never mind the child that he took away from this young mother. According to one article, the man is set to be released later this year, but chances are, it’s already happened.

As for Michael, it’s been thirty years. He’d be thirty-seven now. But there’s no magic that can bring these children back, only the hope remains that they will be there to meet us in the life to come. Of course, Michael shouldn’t have died then, but Chicago still has not learned this lesson, and its children continue to be killed for no reason, their names forgotten in time to all but the few who may have known them.

Memory eternal, Michael Montoya.

Michael Anthony Montoya, Jr. at Find-a-grave.com

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