October 13, 1992

There were 943 slayings in Chicago that year — the highest per capita ever recorded — but few of them sickened Chicagoans as deeply as that of the 7-year-old boy killed on his way to school by a sniper firing from one of the Cabrini-Green towers. (The shooter claimed he was aiming at a rival gang member.) Vincent Lane, who was the Chicago Housing Authority’s chairman at the time, later told the Reader that Davis’s killing was instrumental in advancing the public housing policies that would ultimately bring down the Cabrini-Green towers and other CHA buildings.