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The teen was on the sidewalk Monday when a dark-colored vehicle drove by and and someone from inside pulled out a gun and fired shots in the 6600 block of South Langley Avenue, police said.
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Updated
Jul 5, 2021, 7:45pm CDT
The Fourth of July party that filled the 100 block of North Long Avenue had kicked off in the afternoon, and the air was filled with barbecue smoke and the sounds of fireworks and children squealing as they tossed water-balloon.
But the festive vibe ended not long after midnight, with a dozen squad cars clearing the street, and a police commander known for warm relations with the West Side community limping from a gunshot wound to the foot.
Patrina Wines — who’s been with the Chicago Police Department for 28 years and took over as commander of the 15th District a little over a year ago — and a police sergeant were wounded by bullets sprayed by a man who fired into a crowd of revelers around 1:30 a.m. Monday, according to the police.
Wines was hit in the foot, and the sergeant suffered a graze wound to the leg. Both were treated for their wounds, but neither required hospitalization, a police spokesman said.
The officers were standing among dozens of neighborhood residents when they were hit, according to Marshawn Feltus, a longtime resident of the block who said he saw what happened.
“There was no mistaking that they were shooting at police, and probably 50 people on the street,” Feltus said. ” The brazenness or stupidity that went into it, that’s what I don’t understand. There were police cars out with lights flashing.”
Tuesday, a group of about a dozen neighborhood residents congregated in the 90-degree heat of the street, a few houses down from the shooting scene. A woman, who did not want to give her name, said she had been standing next to Wines, arguing with the police commander, when Wines’ leg crumpled and she fell to the ground. The woman heard air escaping from a punctured tire, and looked down the street a few dozen yards and saw the gunman.
“I yelled to the cops ‘There he is! Shoot him!’ And they didn’t shoot,” the woman said. “They didn’t chase him, neither and he wasn’t half a block away. That’s why they don’t catch none of these shooters.”
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Not long before the shooting, a dozen or more officers had arrived to disperse the crowd. The gathering breaking up largely peacefully when a man emerged across the street from where Wines and several other officers were talking with people, according to Feltus. The man raised a gun and fired several shots, then took off, Feltus said.
“I wouldn’t say he even ran off,” he said. “He just kind of galloped.”
Amid the noise from fireworks going off on neighboring streets, only a handful of people closest to the gunman seemed to immediately notice someone was shooting, Feltus said.
“The reaction was almost slow except for the people that was right there to see they were shooting,” he said. “The people right there called out, and you could just see people moving like a wave as they realized it was shots.”
Police Supt. David Brown said both officers will be “all right.”
“As you know, there’s been a lot of large crowd gatherings tonight, a lot of celebratory fireworks going off, kind of spontaneous,” Brown said at a news conference. “They were dispersing a crowd when they heard shots and felt pain.”
Brown said it wasn’t clear whether the officer were targeted, “or whether this was people celebrating shooting in the air, shooting indiscriminately.”
Another witness, who asked not to be named, said that people had gathered throughout the day and were launching fireworks in the street around 1 a.m., when several squad cars arrived.
Wines and several other officers were talking cordially with residents when they were shot.
“That’s not unlike her,” said Feltus, who works as a crime victim’s advocate and is active in Austin. “She’s going to come out to the scene and tell people to party safely.”
When Wines took over as commander in August 2020, the South Side native was praised for her dedication to community policing when she was introduced at a community meeting by Deputy Chief Ernest Cato, according to an article by Austin Weekly. Wines said she considered community policing — emphasizing strong ties between the police and each community — a “calling.”
Filed under:
The teen was on the sidewalk Monday when a dark-colored vehicle drove by and and someone from inside pulled out a gun and fired shots in the 6600 block of South Langley Avenue, police said.
By
Jul 5, 2021, 6:46pm CDT
The Fourth of July party that filled the 100 block of North Long Avenue had kicked off in the afternoon, and the air was filled with barbecue smoke and the sounds of fireworks and children squealing as they tossed water-balloon.
But the festive vibe ended not long after midnight, with a dozen squad cars clearing the street, and a police commander known for warm relations with the West Side community limping from a gunshot wound to the foot.
Patrina Wines — who’s been with the Chicago Police Department for 28 years and took over as commander of the 15th District a little over a year ago — and a police sergeant were wounded by bullets sprayed by a man who fired into a crowd of revelers around 1:30 a.m. Monday, according to the police.
Wines was hit in the foot, and the sergeant suffered a graze wound to the leg. Both were treated for their wounds, but neither required hospitalization, a police spokesman said.
The officers were standing among dozens of neighborhood residents when they were hit, according to Marshawn Feltus, a longtime resident of the block who said he saw what happened.
“There was no mistaking that they were shooting at police, and probably 50 people on the street,” Feltus said. ” The brazenness or stupidity that went into it, that’s what I don’t understand. There were police cars out with lights flashing.”
Not long before the shooting, a dozen or more officers had arrived to disperse the crowd. The crowd was breaking up peacefully when a man emerged across the street from where Wines and several other officers were talking with people, according to Feltus. The man raised a gun and fired several shots, then took off, Feltus said.
“I wouldn’t say he even ran off,” he said. “He just kind of galloped.”
Amid the noise from fireworks going off on neighboring streets, only a handful of people closest to the gunman seemed to immediately notice someone was shooting, Feltus said.
“The reaction was almost slow except for the people that was right there to see they were shooting,” he said. “The people right there called out, and you could just see people moving like a wave as they realized it was shots.”
Police Supt. David Brown said both officers will be “all right.”
“As you know, there’s been a lot of large crowd gatherings tonight, a lot of celebratory fireworks going off, kind of spontaneous,” Brown said at a news conference. “They were dispersing a crowd when they heard shots and felt pain.”
Brown said it wasn’t clear whether the officer were targeted, “or whether this was people celebrating shooting in the air, shooting indiscriminately.”
Another witness, who asked not to be named, said that people had gathered throughout the day and were launching fireworks in the street around 1 a.m., when several squad cars arrived.
Wines and several other officers were talking cordially with residents when they were shot.
“That’s not unlike her,” said Feltus, who works as a crime victim’s advocate and is active in Austin. “She’s going to come out to the scene and tell people to party safely.”
When Wines took over as commander in August 2020, the South Side native was praised for her dedication to community policing when she was introduced at a community meeting by Deputy Chief Ernest Cato, according to an article by Austin Weekly. Wines said she considered community policing — emphasizing strong ties between the police and each community — a “calling.”
The note sat on the back of Tracey Bradley’s couch when she returned home from work late that morning.
Written by her 10-year-old daughter, Tionda, the note said she and Diamond, her 3-year-old sister, had run by the store and to a park on Chicago’s South Side.
But something was off about the note: Everything — the spelling, the grammar — was too perfect for a girl attending summer school to improve her reading and writing.
It was also unlike Tionda to leave a note. Even if the girls had left the apartment, Tionda would have called her mom’s cell phone.
The Bradley sisters were gone.
Twenty years ago this summer, Chicago launched what investigators say may be the city’s largest missing persons investigation to date.
The police superintendent ordered the city turned upside-down to find them. Over the course of months, nearly every abandoned building in Chicago — some 5,300 of them — was mapped and searched. Sewers, dumpsters, forests, lakes and rivers were dredged and scoured. More than 100 sex offenders were interviewed. And about 42 tons of garbage was picked over by law enforcement, including new police recruits.
Everyone was on duty.
In the hunt for the girls, leads took investigators and journalists across the country, even to Morocco, chasing possible sightings, psychics’ visions and fraud, with enough tips to fill 25 filing cabinets. But as the time stretched to weeks, months and years, no sign of the girls has ever turned up.
It was an odd case to catch the city’s attention. Two young Black girls had gone missing from a high crime and impoverished area of Chicago.
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Often when young Black children are missing, authorities write them off as runaways, and their cases are unlikely to grab high-profile investigator and media attention, according to investigators and missing persons experts and organizations. So when the Chicago Police initially labeled the Bradley girls’ case as “missing” — not abducted — the family was irate. The case was immediately reclassified as “missing/endangered,” as it remains now.
“I didn’t want the community to overlook it like, ‘Oh, it’s two kids who ran away,'” Shelia Bradley-Smith, the girls’ great-aunt, told USA TODAY. “No, these kids were taken.”
Black children, then as now, are reported missing more often than children of other races. More than 300,000 juveniles are reported missing in the U.S. every year, and while Census Bureau data suggests Black kids make up just 16% of the population under 18, more than 36% of missing juveniles in 2020 were Black, the latest FBI data shows.
For the Bradley sisters, pressure from family members, along with the girls’ ages, changed the narrative. What could have been a short mention on the evening news was soon leading the front pages of city papers and making national news and crime shows.
With each airing of the story, more tips would come in. Some leads seemed promising. Some still do. But no arrests have ever been made and no charges have ever been brought in the case.
The investigation into the girls’ vanishing seemed to move quickly at the start, zeroing in on a man close to the family who gave detectives reasons to suspect him. But the case against him is too circumstantial and the probe remains with the cold case and homicide unit in the same headquarters where it began.
Still, two decades later, a family and a city ask: Where are they?
USA TODAY interviewed a dozen people familiar with details of the case, including detectives, officers and other law enforcement officials who previously worked — or are now working — the investigation. Many sources, fearing for their safety or their careers, asked not to be named in the story.
When the girls went missing on July 6, 2001, Tionda and Diamond were living with their mother and two sisters — Victoria, then 9, and Rita, 12 — in the multi-building Lake Grove Village Apartments complex in the Oakland neighborhood on the South Side. The girls’ school, a handful of parks and Lake Michigan were all within a few blocks.
Tracey Bradley, their mother, is the eldest of nine siblings, and dozens of family members lived in the area, near what was once the largest stretch of public housing in the United States: the Robert Taylor Homes. The project was later demolished, and new residential and commercial structures took its place.
Because of their proximity to one another, the family took turns caring for one another’s kids. Tionda and Diamond primarily split their time between their mom’s place and their grandmother’s apartment in the Robert Taylor Homes.
One of their aunts, April Jackson, would bring them to work with her at Robert Taylor Park, where they took dance and gymnastics classes along with their cousins and other kids from the community.
Tionda wanted nothing more than to become a dancer. Helpful, smart, responsible and a little sassy, she was “like little mama caretaker” to Diamond, Bradley-Smith said.
Diamond, meanwhile, was “a quiet, humble little girl who always had a sweet little smile,” said Faith Bradley-Cathery, the girls’ aunt. Victoria, their sister, recalled how Diamond used to curl up under their mother at home or jump from couch to couch.
The day the girls disappeared, they had planned to go on a camping trip to Lake Shafer in Indiana with their mother and her boyfriend, according to family and investigators. Victoria and Rita weren’t going on the trip and had been dropped off at their grandmother’s place the evening before.
Tracey says she left early that morning for work and returned around 11:30 a.m. to find Tionda and Diamond gone. Before calling police around 6 p.m., Tracey borrowed $20 from a neighbor so she could buy food at the nearby Jewel store. A receipt from the store is stamped 12:21 p.m. Then, she searched the neighborhood, and called family, friends, the school and other places where the kids could have been.
Security cameras at the entrance of the apartment complex didn’t catch anything: The cameras had been pushed upward, according to the family’s private investigator, who goes by the name P Foster and has been working the case pro bono for 20 years. He said some residents may have wanted to hide criminal activity.
Foster does not provide his full name for fear of his family’s safety.
The night before the girls went missing, they were seen by many people. The sisters were at the apartment when Tracey had two friends over to drink and watch the Cubs baseball game. The friends were questioned twice, and they both said the girls were at the home when they left around 10 p.m.
There are also reports that a neighbor in their building came by after the friends left, but that he never went past the front of the apartment and never saw the girls, according to police.
Tracey’s boyfriend came to the apartment around 3 a.m., stayed for a bit, then took Tracey to work around 6:30 a.m., according to investigators. Tionda and Diamond were left alone, with strict orders from their mother not to let anyone — no matter who they were — into the apartment.
Classmates said they saw Tionda and Diamond at the nearby Doolittle Elementary School playground that morning, according to family, who believe the girls slipped out that morning but returned home once the other children headed in for the start of summer school.
According to family, Tionda left a voicemail on her mother’s cellphone around 8:17 a.m., asking if she had permission to let a man in. Tionda used a first name in the message that both Tracey’s boyfriend and the neighbor shared. The girls, however, regularly called the neighbor by a nickname instead.
The boyfriend confirmed to USA TODAY he took Tracey to work that morning but denied showing up at the apartment later when the girls allegedly called their mom to say someone was at the door.
Family allege Chicago police accidentally deleted the voicemail off the cellphone when they brought it down to the station. Law enforcement sources say they’ve never heard it and could not confirm that an officer deleted the message.
Relatives say family, friends and law enforcement came in and out of the apartment before investigators cleared the space to take fingerprints and gather other evidence several days after the girls were gone.
“It wasn’t taped off at all,” the girl’s great aunt, Bradley-Smith said. “That, to me, was a valuable mistake.”
Police investigators familiar with the case could not confirm that the scene was not cleared and searched earlier.
Initially, investigators honed in on Tracey Bradley’s boyfriend at the time, who was close to the girls.
That day, July 6, police took Tracey and her boyfriend in for about 22 hours of separate questioning. They both took lie-detector tests and passed, police sources say. Foster, the family’s detective, said the boyfriend’s test was inconclusive.
Tracey and her boyfriend quickly got lawyers, closing opportunities for investigators to talk openly with them. But police and the FBI still remain in periodic touch with both.
USA TODAY is not naming the man because he has not been charged in the case. Tracey Bradley has not returned calls from USA TODAY.
Several pieces of evidence have pointed investigators in the boyfriend’s direction. For one, investigators found hair matching Tionda and Tracey’s DNA in his vehicle’s trunk. He told police he would sneak the girls into drive-ins in the city, although investigators said the closest drive-ins at the time were in the suburbs.
The boyfriend has offered law enforcement conflicting stories about his actions on the day the girls went missing. Four teenagers and three neighbors said they saw him setting fire to something in a 55-gallon drum in his backyard garage, about 10 miles south of the girls’ home, then putting the barrel into his trunk and driving away, according to sources.
The man, who worked as a machinist and welder, claimed he never burned anything in the drum — or even had a drum, according to police. But he did say he was doing refurbishments on his home and that he dumped debris in garbage containers in Chicago’s Washington Park. Police searched the South Side park but found nothing.
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Tyler LaRiviere/Sun-Times
Family pressed prosecutors under then-Cook County State’s Attorneys Richard Devine and Anita Alvarez to charge the boyfriend, but the circumstantial evidence was simply not enough at the time to go further, according to two sources involved in the investigation.
In an interview with USA TODAY in June, the boyfriend denied any involvement with the girls being missing or that he ever took a DNA test to see if he fathered one of Tracey’s children. He claimed he tried to help investigators find them at the beginning.
“I don’t know who did anything; I just know that I had nothing to do with it,” he said of the girls’ disappearance.
The man, who is now 50, said he gave investigators his pictures and videotapes of the girls and surrendered the keys to his car and house. In the garage, he and sources said, investigators found recently purchased rubber gloves, contractor trash bags and bleach from Home Depot that investigators think could have been a way of cleaning up after the girls went missing. Police have the receipt for the purchase.
“That was 20 years ago, and everyone tried to blame me,” he said, adding that “all three of them” — the family, investigators and the media — ganged up on him because they couldn’t solve it.
The family and investigators have also had other suspects.
A man who is a registered sex offender and spent time around the girls later dedicated a book to them, Bradley-Smith says. Some family members say Tracey gave $5 to a relative that day to go watch the girls at the apartment. Others allege the neighbor who the girls had a nickname for once suggested something bad would happen to them if Tracey kept leaving them alone.
And then there’s the theory a Moroccan man, rumored to be Tionda’s father, had something to do with it. According to family, the children who reported seeing the girls on the playground that morning also said they saw a fair-skinned man in a trench coat approach the girls and speak briefly with Tionda. The tip led a local reporter to travel to Morocco to search for the girls, to no avail.
The family also has suspicions about the note Tionda wrote.
According to forensic tests by the FBI in 2001, Tionda did indeed write the note found on the couch, and not under duress. That’s why the family believes Tionda was coached by someone she trusted in writing the note.
“Her writing a full letter with correct grammar? It’s not appropriate for her,” said Jackson, the girls’ aunt. “I’m quite sure whoever took them, she was very comfortable with them.”
Bradley-Smith said she’s hoping the new state’s attorney, Kim Foxx, will revisit the case and bring charges.
A spokesperson for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office sent an email to USA TODAY in late June saying it has not been asked to review criminal charges related to the girls’ disappearance but was “open to reviewing any information that is brought to us by law enforcement.”
While police said they never asked the office to bring charges, the office was kept regularly apprised of developments.
The Chicago Police Department, which remains the lead agency in the Bradley sisters’ missing persons case, declined official interviews through the head of the department’s News Affairs, saying the investigation remains open and there are no new leads.
But as recently as Wednesday, a source told USA TODAY the FBI office in Chicago is coordinating with out-of-state authorities about a new tip.
July 6 marks 20 years since Tionda and Diamond disappeared. In those two decades, the number of detectives working the case has dropped from more than 100 to one person working it part time as he handles other cases. Three of the five lead detectives on the case have died.
But many in this city never forgot. The family — who held vigils for the first 40 nights after the girls went missing — now holds an annual one.
A former police detective started writing a book about the case as a sort of therapy to deal with the lack of answers. “There’s very few cases in my career when I didn’t know who did it,” he said. “It was the most frustrating thing I worked on in my life.”
Foster, the private detective, said he’s spoken to a family member every day since soon after the girls went missing. He becomes emotional when talking about the case. “I am so dedicated to the cause, if it takes my grandchildren’s children to find out what happened to Diamond and Tionda, I’m willing to put that at stake,” Foster said.
The two decades of searching has worn on members of the large family and, at times, caused rifts.
Faith Bradley-Cathery, the girls’ aunt and now the mother of four adult children, became so paranoid that she had her landlord put up a 7-foot fence around her property when her children were young.
April Jackson, another of the girls’ aunts, partners with schools to host safety assemblies and help kids craft personalized ID cards. She worked with Walmart to put up a missing children board in each of its stores nationwide. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, she printed face masks with the sisters’ faces on them.
Victoria Bradley, the sister whose birthday is the day after the girls disappeared, said she hasn’t celebrated in 20 years. Her mother, Tracey, suffers from panic attacks and often calls her daughter crying, Victoria Bradley said.
Tracey Bradley has been described by multiple sources involved in the investigation as reserved and somewhat suspicious of police. She did talk with some detectives working the case, but sources say her prolonged questioning immediately following the girls’ disappearance forever made her less willing to cooperate with law enforcement.
Bradley-Smith, the girls’ great-aunt and now a missing persons advocate, has spearheaded most of the family’s efforts to raise awareness about the girls. She has lost several jobs and was temporarily homeless in part because of her quest to find the girls.
In 2015, she went looking for a missing Minnesota boy who disappeared three blocks from her home, 10-year-old Barway Collins, and helped find his body on the banks of the Mississippi River. “I did feel like, ‘God, why? Why you gonna let me find somebody else’s? What about ours?'” Bradley-Smith said.
Tens of thousands of dollars in reward money was offered at the time the girls went missing, and the FBI is still offering $10,000. Family set up several online and social media pages dedicated to the girls. Tips — and false hopes — poured in.
Psychics based in New York led the family to the site of animal bones. A MySpace photo that a world-renowned facial recognition expert determined was Tionda turned out not to be. A Dallas woman who claimed to be, at times, both of the girls, was a fraud.
As recently as eight months ago, Bradley-Smith got a tip about alleged bones buried in a backyard, and police and members of the nonprofit Community United Effort Center for Missing Persons went to the South Side to investigate.
“I’ve stressed and worried and searched and hoped and prayed and been disappointed,” Bradley-Smith said. “But all I can do is keep going.”
That Tionda and Diamond have remained an investigative — and media — focus over the last 20 years is due largely to the outspoken family members, who have kept pressure on law enforcement to find the girls, on prosecutors to consider or bring charges against suspects, and on the media to draw the spotlight to the case.
They’re fighting a decades-long uphill battle against a system that tends not to give missing Black children much attention, according to investigators and missing persons organizations.
Social scientists have long noted missing white children — particularly white girls — receive a disproportionate amount of news coverage compared to missing children of color.
Multiple studies in the past two decades have documented the so-called Missing White Woman Syndrome in online, print and television news outlets reaching national and regional audiences. Less news coverage can lead to a greater chance that young Black children are never found or recovered much later.
When a child of color is reported missing by their family members, they’re more likely to be classified as a runaway by law enforcement and receive little media coverage, said Natalie Wilson, co-founder of Maryland-based Black & Missing.
Children classified as a runaway also don’t receive Amber Alerts — messages with information about the missing child broadcasted on radio, displayed on television, sent as text alerts and more.
“Our children are adultified and they are not seen as children,” Wilson said. “We’re trying to change these narratives to say that these are valued individuals missing from our communities, our neighborhoods, and we need to find them.”
Frequently, Wilson said, Black families “feel as though law enforcement just believes that their child ran away, and we’re telling them, ‘You know what — you know your child better than anyone else. If this isn’t what they do, this isn’t characteristic of them, you need to speak up.'”
And the Bradley family spoke up. They knew the girls wouldn’t leave their large family — let alone venture out of the apartment to the store.
In mid-June, Bradley-Smith walked into the third-floor, three-bedroom apartment where the sisters lived, for the first time since July 2001. She traced her fingers along the walls as she walked from room to room, conjuring images of the old layout and pointing to where Tionda and Diamond used to sleep.
“It still feels like yesterday,” Bradley-Smith said after she got back into her car and looked up at the apartment through her window.
Twenty years later, she hopes time will be on her side.
“People talk. People get old. People go to jail. I’m just praying someone will come forward with the information,” Bradley-Smith said. “The world will know Tionda and Diamond Bradley by the time I’m done.”
The FBI asks anyone with information about the disappearance of Tionda and Diamond Bradley to contact Chicago Police Department detectives at 312-747-8380, your local FBI office or the nearest American Embassy or Consulate. You can submit an anonymous tip online here. The family’s private detective can be reached at 847-579-9771.
Read more at usatoday.com
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In many cases, pessimists’ glass-half-empty outlook is actually an attempt to reject false hopes, given how often our species’ progress is encumbered by our tendency to (at best) shoot ourselves in the foot. There’s joy to be found in lowered expectations: Would you rather be disappointed by leaders and institutions that fall short of their lofty promise, or pleasantly surprised when they clear a low bar?
Even among pessimists, Detroit-born horror author Thomas Ligotti (also known for his musical collaborations with David Tibet and Current 93) skews bleak. In his 2010 nonfiction book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror, he opines that our consciousness is the “parent of all horrors,” an evolutionary defect that has doomed us to a futile search for meaning while our survival hinges on the response to pain, the fear of death, and the instinct to procreate. Awareness of this absurdity pushes us to shut it out, trapping us on a proverbial hamster wheel where we busy ourselves with whatever will keep those thoughts away–religion, hedonism, even the distractions of art and music.
Rather than choose escapism, At the Gates use Ligotti’s dire ruminations as fuel on their new seventh album, The Nightmare of Being (Century Media). The legendary Gothenburg melodic death-metal band formed in 1990 and released four full-lengths, including 1995’s landmark Slaughter of the Soul, before parting ways in ’96. Nightmare is their third full-length since reuniting for 2014’s At War With Reality, and unsurprisingly (considering its inspiration) it delves into some of the darkest depths of their career.
Opener “Spectre of Extinction” uses a reverential instrumental intro to pull you into a world where humankind’s mutually agreed-upon demise is its only hope of liberation. The record has monolithic ragers to satisfy your death-metal cravings (“The Paradox,” “The Abstract Enthroned”), with varied dynamics and stylistic adventures that boost their power. The motorik chugging of “Cosmic Pessimism” underlines its message that despite our best attempts, our destiny is out of our control: “We do not live, we are lived,” sings front man Tomas Lindberg Redant. “Pessimism, the last refuge of hope.” The sleek, cinematic “Garden of Cyrus,” one of the album’s most unexpected twists, detours into prog territory with a majestic saxophone melody by Anders Gabrielsson that dances around somber spoken-word vocals.
The Nightmare of Being is multidimensional, revealing more on repeat listenings, and proves that At the Gates still have plenty to say and explore after three decades. For their fans, that can only be a good thing. If pain and death are the only certainties, then I want to distract myself with as much good music as possible. v
The Listener is a weekly sampling of music Reader staffers love. Absolutely anything goes, and you can reach us at [email protected].
In the deadliest and most violent weekend this year in Chicago, 92 people have been shot over the long Fourth of July weekend, 16 of them killed.
The 76 wounded include six children and teenagers and two Chicago police supervisors.
Both the number of fatal shootings and the number of shootings overall are highs for 2021, according to a Chicago Sun-Times database of shootings.
In one incident, two people were killed and four were wounded, including a 12-year-old girl and a 13-year-old boy, in a shooting early Monday in Washington Park on the South Side.
That happened around the same time that a 6-year-old girl and a woman were shot in West Pullman and about four hours after an 11-year-old boy and a man were shot in Brainerd on the South Side.
Late Sunday afternoon, a 5-year-old girl was shot in a leg, also in West Pullman.
The Washington Park shooting happened around 1:05 a.m. Monday in the 6100 block of South Wabash Avenue. Someone inside a car that drove by a group of people there started shooting, according to the police.
A 21-year-old man, shot twice in the head, and a 26-year-old man, shot in the torso, were pronounced dead at the University of Chicago Medical Center, police said.
The 12-year-old was struck in the buttocks and taken to Comer Children’s Hospital, according to the police, who said the 13-year-old was shot in a hand and also taken to Comer to be treated.
A woman, 29, was struck in the elbow and taken to the hospital in good condition, and the sixth victim, a 34-year-old woman, suffered two graze wounds, according to the police.
“I wish that whatever this madness is going on, I wish that it would stop,” said Toni Watkins, who lives in an apartment complex that overlooks the parking lot where the shooting was and has lived in the area for seven years. “Usually, I feel safe around here. But now this has me questioning it because it’s close to home right now.”
She said she’s fearful for her own 16-year-old daughter.
“I tell her every day, ‘If you’re going to out or going to work, please be careful, and come back home to me. Stay away from those knuckleheads,’ ” Watkins said.
Watkins said she cried when she heard about an earlier shooting in which a 1-month-old baby was shot last week while in a car. She said she’s distraught over kids being shot: “They didn’t ask to be hurt. I just pray and hope that the kids are OK that got hurt.”
Several people who live near the parking lot where the shooting took place said a group of men often gather there.
A 27-year-old man who said he has lived on that block for 15 years said he fears that gangs are going after each other because “everything revolves around retaliation.” But he said what he can’t understand is, “You see a whole bunch of kids, something should click in your head saying not to shoot.”
Police commander, sergeant shot on West Side.
A Chicago police commander and a sergeant were shot and wounded early Monday while dispersing a crowd on the West Side.
The officers were hit when someone on foot fired at the crowd around 1:30 a.m. in the 100 block of North Long Avenue, police said.
The commander was struck in the foot and the sergeant was grazed in the leg, according to police.Both officers were transported to Stroger Hospital. The shooter has not been located, police said.
Driver fatally shot in Little Village
A man was killed while driving Monday in Little Village on the Southwest Side.
He was driving a gray SUV about 9:15 a.m. in the 3400 block of West 26th Street when someone fired shots at his vehicle, striking him multiple times, police said.
The 34-year-old crashed into a parked car after the shooting, police said. He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
1 killed, 1 hurt in Lawndale shooting
A man was killed and another man wounded in a shooting Monday morning in Lawndale on the West Side.
The men were outside just after 2 a.m. in the 1800 block of South Kildare Avenue when they were struck by gunfire, police said.
One man, about 30 years old, suffered multiple gunshot wounds to the body and was pronounced dead at Mount Sinai Hospital, according to police. He has not yet been identified. The other man, 62, suffered a gunshot wound to the knee and was taken to the same hospital where his condition was stabilized, police said.
Woman shot to death in Austin
One person was killed and three others wounded in a shooting Sunday night in Austin on the West Side.
About 10:45 p.m., two men and a woman were standing in an alley in the first block of North Menard Avenue when a 33-year-old man began shooting at them, police said.
A woman, 30, suffered a gunshot wound to the head and was pronounced dead at the scene, according to police.
A man, 32, was struck multiple times in the body and taken to Stroger Hospital where his condition was stabilized, police said.
Another man, 49, suffered a gunshot wound to the buttocks and was taken to the same hospital where his condition was also stabilized, police said.
A 49-year-old man, who was a concealed carry license holder, witnessed the incident and shot at the offender, according to police.
The offender, a 33-year-old man, was struck in the arm and hip, police said. He was placed into custody and taken to Stroger Hospital in serious condition.
Old Town fatal shooting
Just after 6 a.m. Sunday, a man was walking across the street in the 200 block of West Division Street when someone approached him and the two exchanged words, police said. The other person then began firing several shots towards the man, striking him in the torso, police said.
He was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital where he later died, police said.
Teen killed on Near West Side
A 19-year-old man was killed while riding in a vehicle late Saturday on the Near West Side.
Just after 11 p.m., the teen was riding as a passenger in a vehicle in the 2600 block of West Van Buren Street when someone fired several shots, police said.
He suffered five gunshot wounds throughout his body and was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital where he was pronounced dead, police said.
Another teen fatally shot in West Pullman
A 17-year-old boy died after he was shot Saturday night at a West Pullman neighborhood home on the Far South Side.
About 9:30 p.m., the teenager was in the basement of the home in the 12000 block of South Yale Avenue with several others when someone opened fire, police said. He was shot twice the head and was taken to Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn.
The teen, identified as Amari Brown, was pronounced dead at 7:50 a.m. Sunday at the hospital, the Cook County medical examiner’s office said.
Little Village shooting
A man was killed and two others wounded in a shooting Saturday evening in Little Village on the Southwest Side.
About 7 p.m., a concerned citizen called in a tip about a vehicle driving slowly and bumping against a curb, police said. Responding officers found the man, thought to be about 20 years old, inside the vehicle in the 4200 block of South Cicero Avenue with three gunshot wounds to the torso, police said.
He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, police said. His name hasn’t been released.
Two other men, 32 and 27, were struck in the arm and taken to the same hospital, where they were listed in good condition, police said.
Teen shot to death in Belmont Cragin
A 19-year-old man was found shot to death early Saturday in Belmont Cragin on the Northwest Side.
About 1:25 a.m., officers responded to a call of shots fired in the 2200 block of North Lockwood Avenue and found the teen lying unresponsive on the sidewalk with gunshot wounds to the back and abdomen, police said. He was transported to Illinois Masonic Medical Center where he was pronounced dead, according to police.
Last weekend, ten people were killed and 68 others wounded in shootings across Chicago.
Amid the notoriously violent weekend, the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition on Sunday hosted a Fourth of July cookout and party at the Concordia Place Apartments on the Far South Side.
At the event, Jackson urged people to put down their guns and called on city officials, including Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Chicago Police Supt. David Brown, to actively work together to tamp down gun violence.
“The finger-pointing must end,” Jackson said.
He later added that, “We need better and we deserve better.”
Jackson’s comments come two days after City Council members spent six hours interrogating Brown over his plans to curb the latest surge in summertime gun violence.
“We urge people… to put down their guns, stop the violence. Of course, when they see violence — [an] attempt to overthrow our government and they’re treated with kid gloves, it decreases the message: If you pick up a gun and shoot somebody, you’re not walking away,” Jackson said. “We deserve a better America.”
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We’re growing more closer the older we grow
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A 17-year-old boy died after he was shot Saturday night at a West Pullman neighborhood home on the Far South Side.
About 9:30 p.m., the teenager was in the basement of the home in the 12000 block of South Yale Avenue with several others when someone opened fire, Chicago police said.
He was shot twice the head and was taken to Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, police said.
The teen, identified as Amari Brown, was pronounced dead at 7:50 a.m. Sunday at the hospital, the Cook County medical examiner’s office said.
No one was immediately in custody as Area Two detectives investigate.
17-year-old boy dies in West Pullman shootingSun-Times Wireon July 5, 2021 at 5:24 pm Read More »
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The 34-year-old was driving about 9:15 a.m. in the 3400 block of West 26th Street when someone fired shots at his vehicle, striking him multiple times, Chicago police said.
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Jul 5, 2021, 11:12am CDT
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