Tyrese Taylor is the 11th child aged 15 and younger to be gunned down in Chicago this year.
As his family packed to move to a safer place in the suburbs, a 14-year-old boy was shot and killed in Lawndale on the West Side Thursday afternoon.
The teen was shot several times around 1:45 p.m. on a sidewalk in the 1100 block of South Karlov Avenue, not far from a U-Haul van the family had been loading.
The boy was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital and pronounced dead, police said.
He was identified as Tyrese Taylor by the Cook County medical examiner’s office.
No one was in custody.
Police taped off the U-Haul moving truck, next to Frazier International Magnet Elementary School, as they worked the scene late into the afternoon.
The boy’s mother was moving the family to the suburbs to let him live in a calmer environment, according to a neighbor who said he knew the teen well.
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Tyler LaRiviere/Sun-Times
“He was a good kid. Sometimes he got mixed up with the wrong crowd, but he was a good kid,” said the man, who asked not to be named.
The man said he saw a white car drive up and someone fire shots at the boy.
The boy’s aunt, Dorothy Taylor, said the boy “loved to game” on his XBox. She said he was smart and went to Webster Elementary, a block north of where the shooting happened.
The boy had three sisters and five brothers, she said. “He was the baby.”
Ten other children aged 15 or younger have been shot dead so far this year, according to Sun-Times records. That’s more than the number killed in all of 2019.
The most recent fatal shooting of a child happened June 2 in Back of the Yards on the South Side. Savanah Quintero, 14, was shot in the head after three young gang members asked which gang she was affiliated with. After she said she wasn’t, the attackers chased her and opened fire.
