Her Sister's Keeper

In Chicago, tragedy touches even the most celebrated families. But Dwyane Wade’s mother and aunt have learned that hope can follow despair.

- Eli Saslow

The sound of distant police sirens drowns out the first notes of gospel music as Jolinda Wade’s extended family hurries inside the church. There have been 19 shootings in Chicago this winter weekend, and the family’s chapel has become a safe haven on the city’s far southern edge. An usher guards the door, on the lookout for gang members. A sign near the entryway reads: put the guns down.

Jolinda, 62, steps to the pulpit and looks out at her small congregation of friends and family members, a group shaped in many ways by Chicago’s gun violence. There, offering a welcome prayer, is a great-nephew who survived being shot twice while buying a snack at a convenience store. There, asleep in the back, is a 5-month-old baby already orphaned by gunfire. And there, standing in the far corner of the church, is Jolinda’s sister Diann Aldridge, 64, whom Jolinda worries about most of all.

“It’s not like this violence just came knocking at our door,” Jolinda preaches. “It kicked our door down.”

The church was purchased for Jolinda by her famous son, Dwyane Wade, who left the Miami Heat in the summer of 2016 and returned to his native Chicago to find a family and a city in crisis. There were 787 homicides in Chicago last year, according to the Chicago Tribune, the most in two decades and far more than the total for New York and Los Angeles combined. No one is exempt from the gun epidemic here, not even members of one of the city’s most well-known families.