Teaching ‘The Living Dead’: A Look Into the Life of Student Killed by Chicago Gunfire

CHICAGO, IL - Victims of Chicago gun violence aren’t often given a name, let alone a personality.

But that’s exactly what one city school teacher provided in memory of one of the latest of many teenage fatal victims in Chicago.

Seventeen-year-old Darrell Peden was among the most interesting students for the teacher, who penned a powerful letter with the pseudonym Ann Mastrofsky as part of the EduShyster blog headed by freelance journalist Jennifer Berkshire.

Peden, who was shot and killed in West Garfield Park on July 19 according to a DNAinfo report, was described by the educator as “charismatic” and “intractable.”

“Darrell very rarely attended class and when he did, he spent most of his time socializing,” wrote the teacher, who described herself as a white woman and one of Peden's favorite teachers. “He was barely literate, his math skills at the level of a third grader. But when I complimented his efforts, he beamed with pride. He did the best he could, and sometimes his best was outstanding.”

But Peden wasn’t at his best when school returned from holiday break. He confided in the blog writer then about an incident around Christmas in which he was shot at, but not hit.

“His worry was obvious,” she remembers. “He told me that he thought about dying every single day. Yet he seemed resigned to the reality that he would probably die this way, and probably soon.”

Peden was a known drug dealer, she wrote. He walked the halls with several one hundred dollar bills. That was before he was expelled, and shortly after killed.

Still, there was some brilliance in him.

“Had he been white and privileged he would have been an entrepreneur,” the teacher wrote.
But he never had that chance “living in the hood” and growing up poor.

“He was stuck in the purgatory of hopeless, helpless poverty, whose victims know they’ll eventually end up in hell, but plan to enjoy the party while it lasts.”

Educating youths in city school is “a different thing, teaching the living dead,” she described.

“It’s a different thing to understand that you will likely outlive your students, praying that they’ll be jailed, just so they’ll still be drawing breath.”

Read the teacher’s full blog post via EduShyster