‘They took my baby.’ A weekend of violence in Chicago — 69 shot, six dead
Reporting from Chicago — Just after midnight Tuesday, in one of the last shootings of the Memorial Day weekend, two people pulled out guns and started firing in East Garfield Park.
The first call to police was for one person shot on Homan Avenue. Then a second victim. Then a third. Then someone walked into a hospital a few minutes later. In all, 69 people were hit by gunfire in a violent holiday weekend in Chicago, 27 of them in a single neighborhood. So many people were shot in or near the troubled Harrison District that police promised Sunday to beef up patrols. Even still, by Tuesday, nine more people had been shot.
While the number of shootings was up from last year, the number of deaths was down.
Last year, 12 people were killed and 44 wounded over the holiday weekend. This weekend, 13 more people were shot, but six fewer people were killed.
Still, the breakdown from the weekend was bleak: Three people killed and 12 people wounded Friday afternoon through early Saturday; one person killed and 24 people wounded Saturday evening through early Sunday; 13 people wounded Sunday afternoon through early Monday; and 16 people shot Monday into early Tuesday, two of them fatally.
Join the conversation on Facebook >>
The holiday weekend was police Supt. Eddie Johnson’s first since Mayor Rahm Emanuel picked the veteran cop to lead the embattled department in late March. The department sought volunteers to work overtime over the weekend, although police did not release figures on how many officers worked.
Instead of hiring more cops during a city budget crunch, Emanuel instead has relied heavily on overtime to try to tamp down violence. The weekend shooting scenes played out from a gas station in Dunning on the Northwest Side to a narrow tree-lined street in the South Side’s West Pullman neighborhood. Residents and passersby at times grabbed towels and ice packs to aid the wounded. Others tried to figure out if the victims were friends or loved ones.
Left mourning were family members, including those of Veronica Lopez. The 15-year-old was the youngest of the murder victims, shot as she rode with two older men police identified as known gang members along Lake Shore Drive early Saturday.
One of the men also was hit but survived. That afternoon, her mother, Diana Mercado, wept outside her family’s home above a storefront in the Belmont Craigin neighborhood.
She said she had begun planning to move with Veronica to Florida in a year because of the city’s violence. “Now they took my baby,” she said. Later that day, in the Lawndale neighborhood, the mother of another teen, Shequita Evans, walked up to a scene where a woman was shot in the neck while driving down Lexington Avenue.
Evans lamented that she had to get through “one more summer” until her 17-year-old could graduate high school and would be able to attend college outside the city. At another scene in the Back of the Yards, a woman had to explain to a small boy how the loud pops they had heard weren’t fireworks from the White Sox game. The boy smoothed the cape of a Superman doll as he asked officers if they had gotten the bad guys.
MORE IN NATIONAL NEWS
In the final stretch, how will a divided Supreme Court rule on these big cases?
Meet the Chinese American immigrants who are supporting Donald Trump
Obama, marking Memorial Day, calls on Americans to remember ‘those from whom we asked everything’
Nickeas writes for the Chicago Tribune. Tribune staff writers Grace Wong, Alexandra Chachkevitch and Joe Mahr contributed to this report.
Sign up for Essential California
The most important California stories and recommendations in your inbox every morning.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
