BELATED OUTRAGE FOR GIRL X

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

Girl X was like a lot of young kids in her neighborhood. Relatives say the nine-year-old liked to play, skate and tutor younger students. Her favorite subjects at school were math and English. And she would frequently go up and down the stairs to visit her grandmother, Zater Bolhar, who lived just a few floors away in the same apartment building. But Girl X's neighborhood is the partially vacant Cabrini-Green housing project on Chicago's near North Side, and the child's current anonymity is an apt symbol for the forgotten lives--and forgotten crimes--in this desolate inner-city area.

On January 9, Girl X was found raped, beaten and poisoned in the seventh-floor stairwell. She was unconscious and foaming at the mouth, her panties shoved down to her knees. Her T shirt had been used to strangle her, and gangster-style graffiti was scrawled on her abdomen in black ink. While the country focused on the case of another brutalized child--this one a privileged little beauty queen in Colorado--public outrage over the comatose Girl X was at first virtually nil.

To the media and the general public, the fascination with the JonBenet Ramsey case makes a certain sense. There are the mysterious details of the crime, the near silence of the Boulder police department and the unusual behavior of the girl's wealthy parents. And, of course, there are all those pageant pictures available to feed the nightly TV-news machine. But others see an injustice here: a fixation with the violence that rarely befalls members of rich or famous families--the JonBenets or Ennis Cosbys of the world--and a glossing over of the more pervasive violence sweeping through the lives of the poor. "No one is surprised when an underclass kid is raped or killed," says Patrick Murphy, the Cook County Public Guardian. "I think we expect these kids to get killed. It's not that people don't care. It's that they yawn. Whereas if it's a blond-haired, blue-eyed kid, they all go crazy. I've seen it a million times."

Marv Dyson, president of WGCI, a popular black-oriented radio station in the city, first read about Girl X in a local black newspaper. "She had been forgotten by the mass media," Dyson says. "It's not a big story. This kind of thing goes on in housing projects all over the country." Only as some local community and church leaders got involved and Louis Farrakhan came to pray at her bedside did Girl X's plight come to the attention of the mainstream Chicago press. "The Cabrini-Green rape would be widely known had the victim been white," wrote reporter Lee Bey in the Chicago Sun-Times on January 25. "Then it would have been news. Some legislator would have pushed for tougher laws against the brutalizers of children." While Cabrini-Green is slated for demolition, thousands of children still live in frightening circumstances. "I'm scared," says Tatiana Chatman, 11, who lives in a nearby building. "I don't even like to walk past strange men. They look at you. They just keep looking at you. Then they disappear, and then you see them again."

Station WGCI parked a mobile studio outside Children's Memorial Hospital, where Girl X remains, and Dyson launched a 16-hour, on-air fund-raising drive that along with other efforts has yielded a staggering $200,000. The proceeds will go toward the child's medical expenses. Girl X, meanwhile, is conscious but unable to speak. So far, police say, they have no suspects.

--By Elizabeth Gleick. Reported by Julie Grace/Chicago

With reporting by Julie Grace/Chicago