The violence in Chicago did not stop even for a minute during the beautifully cool weekend that featured a “Blood Moon” and first supermoon eclipse in over 30 years. With 53 wounded, including a ten-year-old girl, and four killed during the weekend, the moon was not the only place for blood in the Windy City.
Friday came in slowly with seven shootings. But there was an eighth incident, a police-involved shooting in the city’s Humboldt Park neighborhood, which ended in the death of a suspect.
Killed was a 33-year-old man who confronted police with a “knife or a sharp object,” according to police reports. The Chicago police say they ordered the man to drop the object several times, but he continued to advance, ignoring their orders. After deploying a stun gun, officers say they were forced to shoot the man when he continued to resist orders.
Saturday picked up early where Friday left off, with the first shootings recorded at 1:30 a.m. in separate incidents in the Chicago Lawn and North Lawndale communities. These incidents were quickly followed by a pair of shootings in Garfield Park.
The first death on Saturday was around noon on the 700 block of East 47th Street. Dead is a 25-year-old whom police say was shot three times, allegedly by Marvin Lee, 34.
Lee was charged with murder and was remanded to jail to await further proceedings.
Sunday’s violence also started out in the 1 a.m. hour, as yet another shooting occurred in Garfield Park. But the first death occurred nearly as early, taking place on the Lower West Side at 3 a.m.
By noon, in the Woodlawn neighborhood, a ten-year-old girl had been shot, caught in the crossfire between rival gangs.
Fortunately, the bullet only grazed the girl’s neck, and she was later listed in good condition at Comer Children’s Hospital.
This weekend’s numbers only added to a particularly bloody year, bringing the total number of Chicagoans shot to 2,282–339 of whom were killed.
By the estimation of one observer of Chicago’s violence, the totals mean that a person is shot every 2 minutes and 50 seconds in the Windy City, and a person loses his life to gunfire every 16 hours and 46 seconds.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.