To Our Readers

By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

Considering all the tragedy they come across in their jobs, reporters have to develop tough skins to survive. But when members of TIME's Chicago bureau fanned out in the city last week to reconstruct the short, shocking life of Robert Sandifer, known as Yummy, their journalistic reserve was sorely tested. In an intense three-day period of reporting, the Midwest bureau chief Jon Hull and reporter Julie Grace trekked through Robert's former neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, talking to friends -- and more often enemies -- about the slain 11-year-old. They searched out family members, spending time with both Yummy's mother and his grandmother. They pored through worn folders on Robert at Juvenile Court and the Department of Children and Family Services. Joined by photographer Steve Liss to produce this week's cover story, they found themselves as moved as we think readers will be by their work.

Grace was particularly shaken by the interviews she did with Robert's former neighbors. "It's depressing to hear them talk about murder as if it's an everyday thing," she says. "And it's just heartbreaking to talk to 10- and 11-year-olds who don't expect to live past 19. As I was leaving Yummy's block, a woman called out to me, 'When are you coming back? You've gotten to be my friend.' Sometimes stories get to you; this one left my stomach in knots." Hull, who wrote our cover story last year on kids and guns, realized after all his digging that Robert's death was sadly predictable. "After three days of reporting," he says, "I still couldn't decide which was more appalling: the child's life or the child's death."

Integral to the coverage were Liss's evocative black-and-white photographs. Liss, who has covered presidential elections for TIME since 1976 and has taken 18 cover photos -- including last year's on the Midwest floods -- was called in from vacation in Boston. Flying to Chicago, he went immediately to the scene of Robert's murder, where he found that someone had placed a single red rose. Later he joined Hull and Grace to retrace the steps of Robert's life. Most poignant of all was the funeral on Wednesday. Liss, who volunteers as a Big Brother, was struck that the victim, no matter how troubled, was just a little boy. "His grandmother kept wailing that someone should have been there for him, and I know that's true," says Liss. His photos of the scene, he says, were quite simply "the saddest pictures I've ever taken."