On July 18, Mbiganyi Lashani was in in his kitchen preparing a meal.
"So a dove came and sat on my window, as I was getting the skillet ready, it flew away," he wrote on social media.
Friends thought it was a good omen.
Eleven days later, just before six in the morning on July 29, Chicago Police Department ( CPD ) officers responded to reports of shots fired in the 6500 block of South Peoria Street in the South Side neighborhood of Englewood.
Lashani was pronounced dead at the scene. He was 41.
Born in Gabarone, Botswana, Lashani had forged a life in the United States in which potential seemed limitless not only for himself but for the youth of Englewood.
It is one of the most violent neighborhoods in Chicago. Death is so commonplace there that the kids who are cut down have now become part of routine, weekly reports in Chicago media.
Yet Lashani was determined to see them prevail by using his multifaceted abilities as an artist, musician and landscaper.
He believed that a "better life [doesn't] just happen. You have to prepare and work hard to achieve it. I know that now."
He shared that philosophy as a regular volunteer. Lashani cared so deeply about the kids with whom he worked that, a month before he was killed, he used his Facebook page to memorialize 18-year-old Latrell McMahon, who was shot to death June 18 in East Garfield Park. "These kids don't value life out here," he said.
Earlier this month, both McMahon and Lashani made national headlines, but only as numbers when the 2016 Chicago murder rate topped 500.
Lashani's body had long since been returned to Botswana where a grieving family laid him to rest while still hoping for a suspect to be found in his death.
Instead, he had become an unnamed talking point between warring politicians or for the usual fickle 24 hours of frenzied analysis on cable news.
His life and everyone it touched boiled down to a body count in what CBS News called an "undeclared war."
Initial reports of his death from the Chicago Tribune, Sun-Times and DNAinfo contained the usual boilerplate facts: name, residence, the time, place and circumstances of his death.
There was little about the man himself—a man with model good looks, whose heroes included civil-rights leader Malcolm X, who always looked forward to the arrival of spring, supported Bernie Sanders during the primaries and who prided himself on consistently looking his best.
A man who John Zeigler, the director of urban education and community partnerships at DePaul University's Steans Center for Community-Based Service Learning knew for more than 20 years.
At the time they met, Lashani was a philosophy major at DePaul who had arrived in the United States as part of a scholarship program for young students from Botswana and South Africa.
Zeigler was a social worker with the Chicago-based youth advocacy organization Youth Guidance.
"I was in my third-floor office at Harper High School in Englewood," Zeigler said. "MB just walked in unannounced and wanted to volunteer. He was adamant about being engaged and involved and felt that it was his calling to work in that community and contribute to it. I asked him what his skill set was. He told me he was an artist and that wherever I wanted him to be, he could adapt."
Zeigler's first impressions of Lashani were of a "gentle and very bright man. He had an unassuming way. He was a tall fellow with an accent that people immediately noticed. Always curious and a risk-taker, he was always trying to deconstruct what Africa meant to him and what it should mean to others. He educated others about Botswana."
Zeigler said that Lashani took the train from DePaul to Englewood almost every day to volunteer.
"He did a lot of tutoring in math and science, so we set up a space for him," Zeigler remembered. "People began to feel very comfortable with him and so students would talk with him about their science projects and where they were having problems with math."
Lashani was also heavily involved in a project Zeigler set up called Connections.
"It was an international program that involved students in a rite of passage," Zeigler said. "Part of that meant taking them to Senegal in West Africa. MB was enamored and intrigued with that process. Part of our work was looking at character and economic development, different ways to make an abstract Africa more concrete. Having MB there helped to move that process along."
It was at the Boulevard Arts Center on the South Side of Chicago that Lashani was able to put his artistic talents to an equally altruistic use under founder and executive director Patricia Devine-Reed.
"At the time it was the largest arts center in Chicago," Zeigler said. "It was a space in Englewood that you really could be free. Pat really used art as a way for community engagement around social justice issues. MB was immersed in that—painting murals, you name it. He was also a musician. In fact, he could make anything musical."
With the growth of the internet, Lashani began to design websites and dabbled in film.
"He would find raw filmmaking equipment and engage young people in participatory filmmaking around anti-violence," Zeigler said.
Lashani envisioned a TV Show he called Culturevate. The story, as he described it on the project's Kickstarter campaign, revolved around a "high school talented athlete who gets caught in the web of inner-city youth politics. With his mother strung on drugs, father and older brother in prison, all hell breaks loose when his grandmother loses her battle with Leukemia. He is then forced to fend for himself and his younger siblings."
Lashani believed in the project so fervently that he had Culturevate t-shirts designed. By May of 2015, he was a quarter of the way to his campaign goal.
"He was so multitalented," Zeigler said. "Every plant in my back yard, he planted. A month before he was killed, he painted a bench with the word 'peace' in different languages."
Such was his talent with landscaping that, in 2007, Lashini founded a company he called D'fynation. "As my clientele grew, I engaged teenage students in the neighborhood during summer breaks to help them gain earnest allowance" he wrote. "We also compiled a newsletter which we distributed free of charge in the community."
"He knew soil," Zeigler said. "What would grow and what wouldn't. I helped him with the start-up business design but it was frustrating because he wasn't consistent enough to keep it going and growing; to really just focus on what you can do well and do it. There were times when I had stopped talking to him out of that frustration."
In June 2012, Lashani graduated from the Keller Graduate School of Management with an MBA in marketing.
"MB was fearless and also the most trusting person," Zeigler said. "You know, even in his participatory filmmaking, he would give his equipment to people he didn't know well and he never got it back. I think because he was so soft-spoken and had such a gentle soul, people thought they could take advantage of him. I never saw him angry about it. He said 'it's just material. I can get another.'"
"He was always achieving," Zeigler added. "But he never could connect those dots to the point where it became profitable. Our final conversation reflected on that. He was thinking about how to move from one stage to another—where he could actually grow something verses jumping to the next thing. I always thought of him as a spiritual person but he had started actively going to church and he was really beginning to find himself."
All that ended in an Englewood abandoned building on July 29. He had been shot multiple times. His wallet and cellphone were not taken.
Dawn Valenti is a crisis responder with the organization Chicago Survivors—an organization which "provides multi-cultural crime victim/survivor services to surviving family members following homicide in Chicago."
"I got called to the 6500 block of South Peoria and it was about 6:30 in the morning when I arrived," she told Windy City Times. "I talked to the detective on the scene and they were trying to find next of kin. We talked throughout the day and he couldn't locate anybody because one address that he had, MB hadn't lived in for years; another was abandoned. So it took him quite a while."
"MB was supposed to come by our house to do some work with my wife's business," Zeigler said. "Every other week he was by there. My wife texted him and he said he was coming but he didn't show up. He didn't leave a message. He had been pretty consistent. A week went by. It was an awful, rainy day when I remember that I got a call from a friend who said that MB had been murdered."
Zeigler said that Lashani's body had laid unclaimed in the city morgue during the entire time.
"I was numb," Zeigler said. "In the work I do in the community, death is never personal. But MB's death just hit me in a way that I was in a dream-like state. Images of him smiling, the last conversation we had, hearing him crack corny jokes and showing me his latest work all was a kaleidoscope that went past me. That day, I was supposed to meet with a pastor in North Lawndale to do some work around trauma. But something told me just to follow through. When I went up the stairs, she just hugged me and told me that she felt my spirit. I could not stop crying."
Zeigler believes that Lashani knew his killer. Although news reports placed his residence on the West Side, Zeigler said that Lashani had recently moved to Englewood and was killed "right next door to where he lived."
Nevertheless, progress on finding a suspect has been slow.
"The investigation is moving and it isn't," Valenti said. "It's not moving for a lot of reasons—where MB was found and the time that he was found, which was early in the morning. Somebody heard the gunshots, but you are talking about the South Side of Chicago, so it's not uncommon to hear gun shots. It was a neighbor who went out to walk his dog who found MB. DNA and forensic evidence takes time to come back, but I can guarantee you that the police are definitely working on it. I have seen the detective at a couple of other crime scenes and we always talk about MB."
Zeigler is not convinced.
"I am trying to figure out why it happened," he said. "We are at a place now where it has kind of come to a screeching halt. I don't know what the CPD is doing. Some of his family and friends here want to send out fliers, pay for a private detective and do a news conference to tell people who he was and maybe help bring someone forward who might have information."
"I've talked to MB's cousin and his family have been following the investigation through the media," Valenti said. "They want somebody to be arrested."
Malcolm X once observed that, "History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals."
In the case of Lashini and so many like him, his history and memory could have easily been demoted to the following three paragraphs from the Sun-Times wire published in Homicide Watch Chicago August 9.
"A man who was shot to death nearly two weeks ago in the Englewood neighborhood has been identified as 41-year-old Mbiganyi Lashani, a West Side resident and native of Botswana.
"Officers responded to a call of a person shot at 5:58 a.m. Friday, July 29, in the 6500 block of South Peoria, and found the victim unresponsive, according to Chicago Police.
"Lashani was pronounced dead at the scene at 6:20 a.m., according to the Cook County medical examiner's office. He lived in the 3200 block of West Walnut in East Garfield Park.
"An autopsy found he died of multiple gunshot wounds, and his death was ruled a homicide."
The framework of that report has been repeated over 500 times this year. The only words that change are the names, dates and address.
It has left people like Zeigler wondering where it all ends.
"I don't know where to place anger," he said. "I am angry at the communities I have worked in for so long where nothing's changed. It's made me think in a very critical way about why I am doing the work I am doing. It's made me reflect on my own sense of purpose."
"The most important things for people to know is that not everything is gang-related," Valenti said. "The media may say it is gang-related but what we happen to see a lot of the time is that the victim was not in a gang. We have lost a lot of innocent people. They were never in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were just doing what they were supposed to be doing and were preyed upon by predators."
"Behind that victim there is an entire story," she added. "There is a family, siblings who are hit the worst, friends. All of them loved that person."
"I remember I thought about MB being alone and so isolated," Zeigler said. "All of those things unfolded themselves like a bad novel that I am just trying to get through page by page."
See related article at the link: www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/SIDEBAR-LGBTQs-gun-violence-prevention-coalition-to-provide-education-action/56587.html .
