All who discussed gangs before the Commission said that most of the members were boys of seventeen to twenty-two years of age. Witnesses before the coroner's juries testified to the youth of the participants in mobs. Many of the active assailants of street cars were boys. In the case of the Negro Hardy who was killed on a street car, it was said that the murderers were not over twenty years, and many were nearer sixteen. In the raids in the Ogden Park district the participants were between the ages of fifteen and twenty. The raid just west of Wentworth Avenue, where a number of houses were much damaged, was perpetrated by boys of these ages. The attacking mob on Forty-third Street near Forrestville Avenue, was led by boys of eighteen to twenty-one. The only two hoodlums caught participating in the outrages in the "Loop," the downtown business district, were seventeen and about twenty-one. Most of those arrested on suspicion in the arson cases were taken before the boys' court. Negroes involved in many cases as assailants were also youthful. The young Negro boys who killed Lazzeroni were fourteen to eighteen; those who killed Pareko and Perel were about sixteen.
A member of "Ragen's Colts" is said to have boasted that their territory extended from Cottage Grove Avenue to Ashland Avenue and from Forty-third Street to Sixty-third Street. At Sixty-third Street and Cottage Grove Avenue they were said to have attacked a colored man in a restaurant and thrown him out of the window. It was reported that trucks of a downtown store, each carrying about thirty men, yelling that they were "Ragen's Colts" and that "Ragen's bunch" were going to clean out the community, came to Sixtieth Street and Racine Avenue. Some of the boys who took part in the assault upon Negroes at Sixtieth and Ada streets were reputed to be members of "Ragen's Colts." The club, according to some of its own members, operated with automobiles from which they managed to "bump off a number of Niggers." A truck driver said he had driven some "Ragen's Colts" to Forty-seventh and Halsted streets, where they "dropped" four or five people, then he drove them back to the "Ragen's Colts" clubhouse at Fifty-second and Halsted streets. "And," he says, "they had plenty of guns and ammunition." State's Attorney Hoyne, however, said that no evidence could be found that "Ragen's Colts" had a store of arms. Members of the Illinois Reserve Militia reported that they had been threatened by "Ragen's Colts" that they would be picked off one by one when they got off duty.