Shauntay Speaks

Henderson's other aunt, Betty, still lives on Van Brunt Boulevard, in a house with two plaster fawns on the front lawn. That's where Henderson's grandmother Doretta lives now.

Doretta now suffers from Alzheimer's disease. A hired nurse visits her in the daytime. The family has tried to shield her from news regarding her notorious granddaughter.

"We don't let her know. If she [Doretta] was in her right mind, she wouldn't have let this go on," Michelle says, referring to the portrayal of Doretta's granddaughter by police and the media.

She used to be real hard on us about school," Henderson says of her mother, who died of cancer when Shauntay was 10. "A teacher couldn't even call the house about me or I'd be on punishment. All she really wanted was for us to finish school and go to college." Her mother was religious, too — Catholic, she thinks.

Henderson was born on October 19, 1982. Her parents, both schoolteachers, met in college in Jefferson City. When they later divorced, Henderson moved with her mother to St. Louis, where they lived until 1993 — the year Henderson's mother died and the girl moved back to Kansas City to live in Charlie Parker Square with Doretta.

Alvin Brooks remembers Doretta as an energetic activist who did her community organizing out of an office at 12th Street and Michigan. Brooks says he joined her for marches and demonstrations. "She's been a good strategist and a very intelligent woman," Brooks says.

Steve Baston, a pastor at the New Visions Baptist Church at 4334 Troost, knew Doretta in the '60s and '70s. He and Doretta were partners in neighborhood-beautification projects; he describes her as "an advocate for justice" who was involved in "a lot of positive activities."

Later, he would see the teenage Henderson on the street with her friends. "When she passed me by with the group of women she was with, they were very cordial young women, very respectful young women," he says.

"I seen old pictures of her from when she had a big Afro," Henderson says of Doretta. "Mainly I would overhear people thanking her for something she did for them, telling her she was a good woman. I know she helped raise a lot of kids, a lot of grandkids."

Doretta's best friend was Juanita Smith. The two women lived next door to each other at Charlie Parker Square from the time the complex was built in the 1970s, and their grandchildren — including Shauntay and a boy named Josh Hudspeth — grew up as if they were all one family.

"It was close to where it was like, she could walk into my grandmother's house unannounced, and I could do the same with her grandma," Hudspeth tells The Pitch in a phone interview. "It was that kind of relationship."

Henderson hung out mostly with boys — her brothers, a cousin and Hudspeth. (One brother, Rodney, did not return calls for this story.) Henderson remembers visiting elderly neighbors in the projects who would sell kids little candy bars, Laffy Taffys, soda pop. Hudspeth remembers sharing a mattress with Henderson for naps, playing in the streets in the summer, aiming fireworks at each other in July, having water fights and walking to the nearby Gregg/Klice Community Center to shoot hoops.

Henderson remembers that all the kids in the projects had to go to church. "We had to go to bed early on Saturday nights, and in the morning everyone would put on their suits and dresses. I never liked wearing dresses, not to this day."

As hard as Doretta and her neighbors might have tried to make Charlie Parker Square a safe place for her grandchildren, they couldn't prevent the street elements from finding them. The neighborhood has been immortalized on YouTube, where a filmmaker named Aquis Bryant has posted his 2005 series, Hood 2 Hood: the Blockumentary, a five-hour road trip through the worst ghettos in America. Bryant visited crime-ridden blocks and housing projects in 27 cities, encouraging his subjects to brandish arsenals of automatic weapons, bricks of drugs and thousands of dollars in cash for the camera while talking up their neighborhoods. The Kansas City segment was clearly filmed in Charlie Parker Square.

In it, a tall kid wearing a white T-shirt, a black hoodie and a tan hat introduces himself to Bryant's camera as "Tay Diggs." He says, "Missouri. Twelfth Street. Twelve hundred. The real mob right here, me and my goon squad."

Hudspeth is visible behind him, wearing a puffy black jacket with "Chicago" written across the front, a striped shirt and a blue-brimmed cap labeled "12." Hudspeth takes the hat off, points to the number and says, "Twelve hundred, all day."

Diggs pulls a plastic bag of white powder from one hoodie pocket and a black Glock 9 pistol from the other and spreads his arms wide like he's embracing all of 12th Street. In a later shot, he emerges out of a doorway wearing a vest strapped to his chest with Velcro. "Man, you know, that protection," he says.

Henderson says she knows Diggs, that they grew up together. "He was cool to me growing up. He played basketball."