He beat up and robbed a man who was doing pizza deliveries. Then they became friends.
Their journey to friendship began in the most unlikely way.
On a snowy night in 2013, 22-year-old Ed Daniels Jr. jumped out of a red Ford Taurus on Chicago’s West Side with four men in tow. They beat up 56-year-old Guillermo Diaz — who was delivering pizza — and took all his money. Daniels was arrested that same night.
It was once Daniels sat within the confines of a jail cell, chipping paint on cement walls and rusty green bars separating him from the rest of the world, that he had time to think.
“I just sat there thinking all night long,” Daniels said. “Is he all right? Like, did we kill somebody? Is he breathing? Is he in the hospital?”
Daniels didn’t know it on that December night, but Diaz would decline to press charges against him. And Diaz didn’t tell his family about the attack, because he didn’t want them to worry. Instead, the pizza restaurant owner did something else that would change Daniels’ life forever: He offered him a second chance.
“The lessons that I learned and the grace that he gave me, makes me who I am today,” Daniels told the Tribune.
The two would be introduced by the legal center that represented Daniels during a restorative justice process called a “peace circle.” The result of that meeting was a bond that left a lasting impact on both men.
The football player
Daniels’ life wasn’t always troubled. As an 8-year-old, he told his mom he wanted to do a coat and blanket drive the next year during Christmas. The two would collect hundreds of dollars in donations from neighbors and fellow churchgoers and leave Walmart and Target stores with carts full of blankets. It became a tradition that carried on until Daniels was in high school, where he became a football star.
“So football, honestly, was my life,” Daniels recalled. “Football was the only thing that kind of gave me a sense of, you know, I’m gonna make it out and I know my parents won’t struggle.”
During games, he’d cry tears of joy under the cover of his helmet. At night, he slept with footballs tucked in his bed.
Daniels went on to play football for Lake Forest College on an academic scholarship. While on a break during his sophomore year, he was running through the last 20 minutes of NFL combine drills with two trainers when he jumped to catch the ball and his right leg entwined with the resistance parachute he was wearing. He fell and broke his tibia and fibula, dislocating his ankle and fracturing his kneecap.
The injury cut short his football career.
“There was no more whistles, there was no more cheering, there was no more scouts,” Daniels said. “Nobody. No more emails from (Division 1), nobody called me or (was) in my inbox begging me to come do a workout here, get me to do this or speak to kids. It was literally like a slap in my face.”
A few months after surgery, Daniels said, he started to lose himself. He began sneaking off to the gym and distancing himself from family. The accident “killed parts” of him, he said. “Even now, (I’m) still picking up the pieces.”
Daniels said he felt everybody had turned against him. He stopped listening to his parents, who were his support system. His sadness and depression turned to anger, rage and bullying. And then came the fateful night when he encountered Diaz, near the border between Little Village and North Lawndale.
“Being in those handcuffs in the snow, being pulled over and watching all my boys ... look at me and basically say, ‘Yeah, he’s our lead’ or ‘He’s the one that told us to do this’ — that moment right there kind of changed my life,” Daniels said.
The pizza shop owner
After the attack, Diaz signed an affidavit saying he didn’t want to press charges. His family only found out about it right before he died of cancer in 2019 at the age of 62.
Diaz’s second oldest daughter, Carolina Calderon, spoke of learning of the robbery almost a decade after it took place.
Her father, she said, “was very forgiving, very understanding, a very patient person. Having been an immigrant himself, coming here with nothing, he knew how important it was to help each other, how important it was to support someone who needed help. And (in) the neighborhood we grew up in, you don’t typically see that camaraderie.”
She also spoke about meeting Daniels in May 2022, at another peace circle facilitated by the Lawndale Christian Legal Center, which represented Daniels in his legal troubles. They were there to share their story with others of the friendship between the men.
“Everything he said was just like seeing my dad again,” Calderon said.
Calderon was referring to a “dividing line” between North Lawndale and Little Village that she said people normally didn’t feel comfortable crossing.
“Those lines were blurred to him,” she said of her father.
Diaz lived in Chicago for almost 47 years after migrating to the United States from Tupatarillo, a small town in Michoacan, Mexico, when he was 15. He was married to his wife, Cleotilde, for almost 40 years, and had four children with her.
“He just wanted us to have a better situation than he did. So he worked a lot,” Calderon said. “But he always — when he had the moments with us, they were quality moments.”
In the early 1990s, he bought one of the three Dennis pizza shop locations on West 26th Street, Calderon said. The restaurant had an open-door policy: If you didn’t have any money, you’d still leave with food, his daughter said. Her father wouldn’t close shop during the holidays, “because he said, ‘If I’m not open, they don’t have anywhere to go.’ ”
“He was always a constant source of support for anybody and everybody,” she said. “I mean, if you just came from Mexico, had nothing on your back, my dad would offer you a room. He would offer you a job at the restaurant, so you had something to get you started on.”
And that’s the state Diaz found Daniels in after his attempted robbery.
“Honestly, I was terrified to even meet Guillermo the very first time,” Daniels remembered. “And I remember when Guillermo walked in the door, I don’t even think I knew what words to say. I just started tearing up. I put my hands on my head.”
The friendship
The men met through the Lawndale Christian Legal Center peace circle after Diaz decided not to pursue charges. The legal center, which was representing Daniels, asked Diaz if he wanted to participate in the process, which talks about the harm done and ways to move forward and heal.
“And Guillermo — I always say this about him — because I just think he was an above-average human being,” said Cliff Nellis, executive director of the legal center, who organized the meeting. “He was very kind. He was very gentle. He was very forgiving.”
And, according to Daniels, Diaz looked as sweet as he was.
“Guillermo looks literally like the happy grandpa that everybody loves in the neighborhood,” Daniels said. “Like, he literally looks like he loves everybody. Like, you could curse at them, and he still would say, ‘I love you’ and ‘Give me a hug.’ ”
The peace circle, which can often last two to three hours, is meant to build relationships, since oftentimes its participants are meeting for the first time, Nellis said. It’s an opportunity to learn about one another and talk about the harm done. It can be a “very personal, difficult thing for a person to sit and listen to how they harmed somebody,” Nellis said.
The legal center has led hundreds — if not thousands — of peace circles since it opened in 2010. They are part of the culture at the center: Until 2018, all-staff meetings would start with a peace circle.
Now, the center has too many people on staff for that to be practical, but they still conduct peace circles with clients and victims of crime to resolve street conflicts.
“Circles is kind of like a baked-in practice, it’s kind of in and throughout everything we do,” Nellis said.
And in the case of Diaz and Daniels, it worked. The circle Daniels and Diaz were a part of was such a “positive and powerful” experience, Nellis said, that they were able to come to an agreement on how harm would be repaired in one single session.
“And at the end, his response to everything was: He forgave me a long time ago,” Daniels said. “His response was: Am I OK? He didn’t want to see me in prison. He chose grace, especially for me. Because I was labeled as the leader of it all.”
They decided Daniels would volunteer at the pizza shop for one month. But he ended up volunteering for three times as long.
“Meeting Guillermo made me believe that I was worth more than just a football player,” Daniels said.
Daniels and Diaz developed a father and son type of relationship, Daniels said. The pair would watch soccer matches on TV and reruns on YouTube. Diaz also taught Daniels to take fried chicken and pull it apart, “and that’s how you make real chicken tacos,” Daniels said.
They remained friends for at least a year before they moved on with their lives.
Diaz eventually was diagnosed with cancer, and his family sold the restaurant in early 2019. Daniels moved to Sacramento, California.
Even though they lost contact, Daniels said Diaz had a lasting impact on him.
“When I left Chicago, my plan was to give back,” Daniels said. “I did the worst of the worst and the best of the best. I’ve done it all. I’ve led people in the wrong direction. But I’ve taken every wrong in my life — at least that’s what my goal is — to take all my wrongs, and to change them into a right.”
Today, Daniels runs his own gutter-cleaning business. He is a supervisor for City Wide Property Services, managing five locations and cleaning them for the community. He also gives free haircuts to children and men in his neighborhood, because when “you feel good, you look good, you do good.”
Restorative justice, Daniels said, can be successful with just a little bit of compassion and love. “Like, not even a full spoon,” he said. “Because Guillermo gave me a full spoon — not everybody is like Guillermo.”
Nellis said there is a misperception of restorative justice as a simple “slap on the wrist.”
“But that’s really not true,” he said. “I think it’s actually far more meaningful, for both the victim — in this case, Guillermo — and Ed. It’s a win for both.”
