Chicago police were alerted to two reports of gunfire, hours apart, at Englewood home where 4 were killed and 4 others woundedon June 15, 2021 at 5:34 pm

Three women and a man were shot and killed, and four other people were seriously wounded, when an argument broke out inside a home in Englewood on the South Side early Tuesday, according to Chicago police.

The four were pronounced dead shortly before 6 a.m. at the scene, a two-story house with a gray stone front in the 6200 block of South Morgan Street.

Chicago police spokesman Tom Ahern initially said all four were women, but he was corrected by Police Supt. David Brown at a news conference.

Four other people were taken to hospitals, at least two of them in critical condition:

• A woman was taken in critical condition to the University of Chicago Hospital.
• A 23-year-old man went to St. Bernard Hospital with a gunshot wound to the back. He was taken to University of Chicago Hospital also in critical condition.
• A 41-year-old man suffered a gunshot wound to the back of the head was taken to Christ Hospital.
• A 25-year-old man suffered a gunshot wound to the back of the head. He was also taken to Christ.
• A 2-year-old girl was taken from the home and brought to Comer Children’s Hospital for observation but did not appear injured, police said.

Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times

A witness told police there were two volleys of gunshots inside the home, hours apart.

The first was around 2 a.m., when Brown said the ShotSpotter system alerted police to gunfire near the Morgan address. Brown did not say if police responded to the alert.

The witness heard shots again around 5 a.m., around the time officers arrived to find the eight victims. Police found shell casings inside the house and a large-capacity “drum magazine.”

There was no sign of forced entry, Brown said. At least one of the victims likely lived at the address, but Brown did not elaborate on the relationships of the victims and the shooter.

Brown said the victims taken to hospitals had not yet been interviewed by detectives, and the investigation still was “very preliminary.”

“All we know about this residence is there’s been several calls there for disturbances,” Brown told reporters. “Overall, the block where this residence is located is fairly quiet, not much activity going on that requires a police response.

“I can reassure the public that there will be an increased police presence in the area until we’re able to identify offenders, if possible, or what, exactly, happened inside,” he said.

As officers continued working the scene into the morning, the family of one of the victims who died, Denice Mathis, approached the cordoned off section of South Morgan. Some sobbed. Others cursed at the tragedy of what happened.

The family said Mathis, in her early 30s, was a devoted mother of four sons and a daughter. On Monday, she’d been up at Six Flags with her boys.

“She was a good person — a free-spirited person,” said a cousin, Vickie Smith. “She loved her family.”

Mathis lived on the South Side, but the family didn’t know what brought her to the gathering on South Morgan.

A man who said he was Mathis’ brother said his sister had been to the house many times before. The place was home to a barber, and a lot of people went there to get their hair cut.

“She was a good girl — none of these knuckleheads,” the brother said.

Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times

Earlier Tuesday, a woman sobbing hysterically ran under the police tape blocking the entrance to South Morgan at West 63rd. She was quickly surrounded by police and guided back behind the tape.

A few moments later, she cried: “They killed my daughter. That’s my baby. That’s my baby.”

It wasn’t until around 12:45 p.m. — seven hours after they were discovered — that the bodies were removed from the house and taken to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.

The attack is the third mass shooting in Chicago in little over a week, and came just hours after gunfire erupted at a party in the Back of the Yards neighborhood on the South Side, killing a man and wounding two women wounded.

Early Saturday, a woman was killed and nine others wounded near 75th Street and South Prairie Avenue. Kimfier Miles, 29, a mother of three, was out with a group of girlfriends when two men opened fire about 2 a.m. Saturday.

Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times

The weekend before, six men and two women were wounded when someone in a silver car opened fire in a shooting in the 8900 block of South Cottage Grove Avenue in the Burnside neighborhood.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Chicago is part of a “club of cities to which no one wants to belong: Cities with mass shootings.”

It’s a club that will keep on growing until Congress summons the “political will” to stop the never-ending flow of illegal guns from states like Indiana onto the streets of Chicago, she said at an unrelated news conference Tuesday morning.

“When gun [laws] are so porous that they can come across our borders with such ease, as we see every single day in Chicago, we know that we have to have a multi-jurisdictional, national solution to this horrible plague of gun violence,” she said. “And that starts with eliminating opportunity for criminals, for children to get access to illegal guns so that petty disputes turn into mass shooting events, as we’ve seen over and over and over again–not just this year, but every year.”

Lightfoot bristled when asked how the steady stream of mass shootings might impact her efforts to reopen the city and encourage Chicagoans to come downtown to dine and shop and patronize the stores and restaurants in their own neighborhoods.

She noted that the latest mass shooting, in Englewood, happened “inside a single residence” — not out on the street or in a large outdoor gathering.

“The reality is, our city is safe,” the mayor said. “And I stand by that. We have done yeoman’s work over the course of a very difficult year where every major city–New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Atlanta and on and on the list goes–has seen similar surge in violence.”

She was pressed about the perception of safety, and the impact that Chicago’s latest mass shooting will have.

“What I’m concerned about is the fact that people lost their lives this morning. I’m concerned about the fact that there are people who are dead in an act of violence that makes no sense to me,” she said. “I’m concerned about the families who will be forever scarred by the loss of their loved ones … That’s what my primary focus is as the mayor of this city.

“Obviously, perception matters. But, what matters most is the people who, right now, are the in the hospital fighting for their lives and the family members who are fearful of what was gonna happen,” she said. “And the people who are now claiming the bodies of their loved ones at coroner’s [office]. That’s what I’m most focused and concerned on.”

Asked whether she believes Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx is doing a good job prosecuting gun offenders, Lightfoot pointed to what one of the state’s attorney’s top aides said about the Chicago Police Department during a recent webinar for reporters.

“The conclusion of her policy person was that the Chicago Police Department is arresting the wrong people who possess guns. I fundamentally disagree with that,” she said. “We are a city that’s awash in illegal guns. Those illegal guns cause deep pain and injury and death.”

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