Tony Sanders: 'a survivor who loved unconditionally'

by Suzanne Hanney

Tony Landers was found dead in his South Shore apartment on October 24, less than two months after finally receiving keys, in what the Chicago Police Department is investigating as a homicide. Tony was 61, mute after surgery in 2022 for esophageal cancer, but most of all, a “survivor." He didn’t take his handicap and make it a handicap.

“We want the world to know our brother as a kind person, a thoughtful person,” his sisters Kim Landers and Melissa Winston said in a phone interview. “He didn’t want to be identified as a disabled person. He had beat all the odds. He broke his hip but continued to walk. He was able to communicate, even being mute. He was articulate with his body language and how he felt. The most important thing: he loved unconditionally.”

Tony used to take freight trains between Chicago and Seattle or California to see his 30-plus grandchildren, as he told his sisters and StreetWise Director of Programs Aman da Jones. He had visited every state in the U.S. except Alaska, Hawaii, Connecticut and Vir ginia, and stayed anywhere from a day or two to a couple of months or even years. One of his favorite states was Ohio, which he said has good shel ters.

“Mostly he came in for the community here,” Jones said. “He always wanted to help out around the office. Once he lost his ability to speak, he would write what he wanted to com municate, which is kind of a blessing right now because I am able to read notes he left over the years.”

His sisters agreed about his de sire to be independent and to communicate. When he went to the hospital, he brought a board with an eraser.

Tony lived on the streets for more than 30 years: under the Wilson Avenue bridge in Uptown and at encampments. "Sometimes it’s fun. I like being outside because on the outside I am able to just be me. I get a whole lot of blankets. I just love wintertime in the snow.”

However, Tony admitted that as he was getting older, he was tired and experiencing dizziness. Being outside in the cold interfered with his ability to take his medication for seizures. In the worst weather, he would go to a shelter, but he didn’t like them.

Tony had been offered apartments, but he refused them because their rules prevented him from hosting his grandchildren. He dreamed of owning a big house where he could have

Winston said that even though Tony didn’t have the money for board games, he was so creative that he used cardboard to make them for his nieces. He never owned a car, but he would walk to and from Englewood and Rogers Park, a 15.5mile, 5½-hour trek. When he took his nephews around the K-streets of the West Side, however, he used a shopping cart to give them a respite when they got tired.

“He lived well,” Landers said. “He was the type of person who would say, ‘I want to invent something,’” Winston added.

He went to Manley and Crane high schools, where he played baseball. “I was going to be in the minor leagues, but I quit,” Tony said in a 2018 StreetWise profile. “I just got caught up with the wrong people – drinking and playing cards.”

In the two years since his esophageal cancer surgery (not lung cancer as previously said), however, Tony had been compliant with all his doctors, Winston said. Landers had been his caregiver since then; he listened to her advice about health matters. Twice a week, Landers traveled from her apartment located 7000 north to his at 7100 south. He still lived like he was on the street, with stuffed animals, Christmas lights, a lot of knickknacks and blankets on the floor instead of a bed, she said.

Just before noon on October 24, she went through Tony’s back door and saw a bloody footprint, then another, according to ABC7. She called out to him before she found him lying unresponsive, struck on the head with a blunt object.

Chicago Police Department Area One detectives are conducting a homicide investigation – and looking for multiple suspects, according to ABC7. An October 25 autopsy by the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office found that he died of multiple sharp force injuries.

Jones said it was more than ironic that Tony had finally started receiving regular disability checks and the social work that enabled him to get the apartment of his dreams on September 1. “I thought it would be safe for him and what he needed. It was a tragedy after all this culmination.