after midnight, 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 early Tuesday 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, 27 of the 69 people hit by gunfire over the weekend were shot in or near the Harrison District, one of the city's most violent and one of the most heavily patrolled by police.
So many people were shot there that Deputy Superintendent John Escalante promised Sunday to beef up patrols. Nine more people were shot there by early Tuesday.
The rest of the weekend shootings were scattered across Chicago. They happened as far north as West Rogers Park and northwest as Jefferson Park and as far south as the West Pullman
neighborhood. The violence centered on the West Side, though. Seven of the shooting incidents on the West Side had more than one victim.
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.
There were no shooting deaths for more than 48 hours starting late Saturday afternoon through late Monday.
The breakdown from the weekend is: 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.
The holiday weekend was police Superintendent 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 spokesman Anthony Guglielmi 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 homicide victims, shot as she rode with two older men police identified as known gang members along Lake Shore Drive near Fullerton Avenue about 1:30 a.m. 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 Craigan 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 of a woman who was shot in the neck while driving down Lexington Avenue near Pulaski Road. Evans lamented that she had to get through "one more summer" until her 17-year-old could graduate high school and 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.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-chicago-shootings-memorial-day-20160530-story.html
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