[posted on Mulatto.org 16 Oct 2008]
Being black: The death of a teenager
Girl dies trying to live popular culture’s thugs-and-drugs life
By Kemp Powers, Savoy Magazine
April 26 2006 - Washington Park lies on the western edge of the prestigious University of Chicago, on the city’s infamous South Side. It marks the unofficial border between the affluent communities of Hyde Park and Kenwood (home to Rev. Jesse Jackson and Min. Louis Farrakhan) and the seedier neighborhoods of the South Side.
‘Many of the major [rap] artists who had crossed over were perceived as being hardcore, when many of them, in fact, came from stable, middle-class environments.’ — TYRONE FORMAN
ON THE MORNING that 15-year-old Texas runaway Sahara Moorer died in this park in the wee hours of Oct. 22, 2001, it would have been much too dark for her to have noticed the marsh with cattails sprouting around the lovely little lake at the park’s southern edge. From the backseat of the 1998 Chrysler LeBaron where Sahara was being raped and murdered, the park was no more than a tomb.
Sahara’s death received little attention in Chicago; it was just another crime in one of the city’s most notoriously violent neighborhoods. Still, her murder resonated deeply with everyone who knew of it, from investigating police officers to newspaper columnists.
Sahara Nicole Moorer was the daughter of a white mother and a black father. Growing up in El Paso, Tex., she was an overachieving student, thespian and athlete who stood a stunning 5-foot-9. She seemed the model teenager. Yet about a year before her death, she suddenly started running away from home. The reasons vary, depending on whom you ask. Some say Sahara began to question her racial identity; others cite a difficult relationship with her mother. One common thread ran through all of the explanations: Sahara had become infatuated with popular culture’s thugs-and-drugs portrayal of the “‘hood.” To a girl living in a city where blacks comprise only 3 percent of the population, the ‘hood represented blackness. Sahara believed the ‘hood was “real,” and some say she was attempting to validate her notion of an authentic black experience the night she died.
BORN IN EL PASO
Sahara, the only child of Michele “Missy” Hufford and Mark Moorer, was born in El Paso in 1986. Hufford was still in high school when she gave birth to her daughter. Mark, one of five children born to Gilbert and Nancy Moorer, who had achieved some measure of success as the lead singer of the Esquires, a doo-wop group from Milwaukee that enjoyed a string of Top 20 R&B hits during the late ’60s and early ’70s. By the 1980s, the group’s star had faded and Moorer’s family moved to El Paso.
“I was there when Sahara was born,” recalls Meleney Kienle, Hufford’s mother.
“When you’re young like [my daughter was], it can be hard to be a parent. But Missy did it. She and Sahara were very close.”
Upheaval came early in little Sahara’s life. Her mother and father tried living together for a while, but it didn’t work out. Kienle says Moorer physically abused her daughter. “He was knocking her around even when she was pregnant,” Kienle charges. (Efforts to reach Mark Moorer for this story were unsuccessful, and Michele Hufford declined numerous interview requests.)
By the time Sahara was a toddler, her father had left the family and relocated to California. Shortly thereafter, Moorer’s relatives moved back to Milwaukee, leaving Sahara to grow up without any black family members nearby. But this didn’t seem to hinder her. Before reaching seventh grade, Sahara was involved in numerous extracurricular activities, ranging from theater (she even traveled to Harvard University with her elementary school for an acting competition) to sports.
Just before Sahara began attending Hanks High in 2000, her grandmother Nancy Moorer died of cancer. Since it was Nancy who had always bought Sahara’s plane ticket to Milwaukee, the girl’s annual trips to visit family ended upon Nancy’s death. At about this time, Sahara’s circle of friends widened to include a number of 18 and 19 year olds. Most of them were black and many were dropouts. According to Kienle, the teen dumped her green contact lenses, started listening to rap music and began peppering her speech with “ghetto” colloquialisms. She and Hufford did not approve of Sahara’s behavior, and they told her so. “We didn’t like that rap stuff being played,” Kienle bristles. “My solution was to get her some headphones. She’d walk around the house with those headphones on all day.”
By sophomore year, Sahara’s grades, once all A’s and B’s, began to slip. She would run away from home for days on end. “She just became fascinated with these bad kids all of a sudden,” says Kienle. “They all stayed at a nearby apartment complex, and she must have gotten it into her head that she wanted to be independent.”
Sahara started sneaking out her bedroom window at night, so her mother and grandmother nailed it shut. Undeterred, the increasingly brazen teen took to walking right through the front door, sometimes staying out for four or five days at a time. Yet despite her new attitude, Sahara was still very much a child. Once she was bribed into returning home with the promise of McDonald’s for dinner.
GOING TO CHICAGO
Sahara had known Theryl Bonner fewer than six months when she began counting her as one of her confidantes. “We were really close,” says Bonner, a 19-year-old single mother of two. “She told me everything, and I told her everything.” Bonner’s 25-year-old boyfriend frequently worked in Chicago, a city that had long held a lure for Sahara. So when Bonner announced one day that she was accompanying her boyfriend on a trip to the city, Sahara jumped at the chance to go with them. Chicago was just 75 miles from Milwaukee, where Sahara’s favorite uncle, Gilbert Moorer III, lived. Sahara rationalized that she could spend a week or so hanging with her girlfriend in Chicago, and then have one of her relatives, probably Uncle Gilbert, come pick her up. Bonner’s boyfriend purchased the bus tickets, and the girls were Chicago-bound. Once there, they set up temporary residence in an Extended Stay America motel. It was the second weekend of October.
Initially, Sahara and Bonner spent their time engaged in the decidedly non-urban activity of hanging out at a shopping mall in nearby Riverside. One day someone handed them a flyer advertising a party at a small club on Chicago’s West Side. Bonner says that she and Sahara, having spent so much time in the suburbs, were excited by the prospect of finally getting to see the city.
PARTY AT PLAYER’S CLUB
Player’s Social Club, where the party was to be held, sits on Chicago’s Madison Street. The club’s plain brick front features a chipped brown wooden door with a missing doorknob. Although the landmark Sears Tower is visible from here, the club is miles from the stretch of Madison Street occupied by the sparkling United Center (home of the Bulls) or the city’s newly renovated, $500,000 condominium. Sahara placed several calls to Milwaukee on the day of the party, surprising both her grandfather and her uncle with the announcement that she’d been staying in the Windy City. “I asked her what on earth she was doing there,” Gilbert Moorer says from his home in Milwaukee. “She told me she thought she’d do better living with me. Maybe then she’d be able to stop running away and stay in school. She was coming here to talk to me about it.”
Gilbert says Sahara responded to his scolding with the usual “I knows” and “uh-huhs.” When she excitedly told him that she was going to a party that night “in the ghetto,” he tried to talk her out of it. “She told me she’d be here tomorrow,” he says with regret. “I should have gone and gotten her as soon as she called.”
According to newspaper reports, Sahara and Bonner, accompanied by Bonner’s boyfriend, arrived at the sparsely occupied club at about 11 p.m. It didn’t take long for the sharks to start circling. “These three guys walked up to us,” recalls Bonner. “They said ‘What’s up? Y’all look good. You wanna smoke some weed?’” Police records indicate one of the three men was Baruch Shaw, a 29-year-old auto mechanic living in Chicago with his girlfriend and their child. Bonner says that Shaw invited the girls to get into his car with him and his friends. She refused, but Sahara was happy to oblige. Bonner says she and her boyfriend tried to stop Sahara from leaving with these men they had just met. At one point, according to reports, Bonner’s boyfriend even shouted to the men that the girl they were about to drive off with was only 15.
Nonetheless, Shaw wheeled his LeBaron away from the club, with Bonner and her boyfriend tailing them in a car. Shaw sped from the Eisenhower Expressway through the South Side and headed for the Indiana Skyway, a toll road that leads to nearby Gary, Ind. Bonner reportedly lost sight of Shaw’s car at the tollbooth, where she told the clerk to call the police because a 15-year-old had been kidnapped.
According to court documents, Shaw never actually went to Gary but instead turned around and headed back toward Washington Park. He stopped his car on East Best Drive, a winding road that runs along the park’s southern tip, and told his friends to leave him and Sahara alone. Then the pair had sexual intercourse, apparently by consent, state prosecutors say. The situation took a turn when Shaw decided he wanted anal sex, according to prosecutors. Officials believe Sahara wasn’t comfortable with it and tried to end things. Shaw allegedly became violent then, wrapping his hands around her throat and holding her facedown in the car seat while entering her.
When Shaw’s two friends returned, they saw him step out of the car. Sahara was still lying facedown in the backseat. She wasn’t breathing. Shaw and his friends drove her across the street to the University of Chicago hospital, where they told the staff that they’d found her in the park. Sahara was pronounced dead on arrival. At about 3 a.m., Bonner was summoned by police to identify her friend’s body. Two days later, Shaw was arrested and charged with first-degree murder and aggravated criminal sexual assault. His friends were not charged. At press time, no trial date had been set.
WHAT’S REAL?
Sahara’s death leaves several questions, among them this one: Why did this teenage girl believe that “real” blackness could be found in a seedy Chicago club with someone like Baruch Shaw? Tyrone Forman, a professor of sociology and African-American studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago, offers a not-so-surprising theory that almost borders on cliché. “It has a lot to do with the media, and in saying that I’m not trying to lay the blame on the media or rap music,” he says. “Many of the major [rap] artists who had crossed over were perceived as being hardcore, when many of them, in fact, came from stable, middle-class environments. Now even white kids associate being black with being raised in the projects or some ghetto.”
Much of the speculation about Sahara’s motivations has focused on her biracial heritage. The truth is, Forman says, being raised in a predominantly white environment might have been a greater factor. “Issues of racial identity are by no means restricted to biracial children,” he says. “All minority kids deal with it during adolescence, and black and biracial black kids that grow up in predominantly white communities often deal with the same issues of not feeling ‘black enough.’”
More than 450 people attended Sahara’s funeral in El Paso. Much of her family from Milwaukee came down. Even the father she barely knew showed up. Bonner was there too, screaming and wailing and falling in front of the casket. (Sahara’s grandmother, Meleney Kienle, chastised her for “making such a scene.”) A video titled “Always Smiling,” full of images of Sahara throughout her short life, was played for the sobbing crowd, as was Sahara’s favorite song, “Fallin’” by Alicia Keyes.
In Chicago, the Franklin Charitable Foundation established a fund to create the Sahara Moorer Angel Alliance for Biracial Youngsters. Director Joseph Fosco says the goal of the organization is to provide counseling for biracial children dealing with emotional problems and questions about identity. Organizers say they don’t want people to forget that Sahara Moorer’s death was pointless, and they hope to ignite a discussion on the twisted notion of “keeping it real,” which remains pervasive among too many young blacks. So far, not a single additional dollar has been donated to the fund.

[Obituary]
MOORER, SAHARA NICOLE 15, beloved daughter of Michelle Hufford and Mark Moorer passed away in Chicago, Illinois SUNDAY OCTOBER 21, 2001. She was a sophomore at Hanks High School. She was active in the Varsity Track team, Basketball team and a had a great love for the Theater Arts. She will be greatly missed by her friends and family. Sahara is survived by her brothers Colten Hufford and Christopher Moorer and her sister Josslynn Moorer. She is also survived by her grandparents Meleney Kienle, Harvey Hufford and Gilbert Moorer. Visitation will be held from 1:00 PM to 7:00 PM on Sunday October 28, 2001 at Mt Carmel Funeral Home Chapel. There will be a prayer service at 1:00 PM Monday October 29, 2001 at Cielo Vista Church. Pallbearers will be Lonny Hufford, Cory Hufford, Dirk Hitle, Gilbert Moorer, Mike McKay, Richard Benetez. Funeral arrangements by Mt. Carmel Funeral Home.
Dear Sahara, Hi Baby! Its me Mommy, I love you so much and miss you terribly. I can't believe you were able to meet God before I did. He's everything I told you he would be, isn't he? I'll be waiting for you in my dreams. I love you sooo much, Mommy