Darrell Peden

Darrell Peden was a 17-year-old member of the West Garfield Park community who lived on the 4600 block of West West End Avenue. Though public records about his life are limited, news reports from July 2016 identify him as a neighborhood youth known to those around him. He was a high-school–aged young man with much of his life ahead of him, part of a close-knit West Side neighborhood where family, friends, and teachers shaped daily life.

Neighbors’ accounts and local reporting place Darrell in the everyday rhythms of his block — a teenager moving between school, home, and the small routines that make a community. The public record notes the care with which he was taken to Stroger Hospital on the evening of July 18, 2016, and the identification by the Cook County medical examiner. Those factual details, while part of the official record, are only a small part of who Darrell was: a young person in the midst of school years, with friends, family, and teachers who saw potential in him.

Because no family-published obituary or funeral-home notice matching his name and the July 18, 2016 death date was located in reliable public sources, many personal details that families sometimes share publicly — fuller biographical background, schools attended, hobbies, or tributes from relatives — are not available in the sources consulted. That absence does not lessen the reality that Darrell was a beloved member of his neighborhood and a young life with value to those who knew him.

This remembrance honors Darrell as a young person whose life mattered to family, classmates, and neighbors in West Garfield Park. Even when public records are sparse, the basic facts verified in contemporary reporting confirm that he was a real person, living among a community that will remember him. May this brief memorial acknowledge his personhood and the caring of those who knew him, and may it stand as a quiet tribute to a life cut short.