Chicago Shootings Push Murder Rate over 100 — 200% More Than This Time Last Year

The weekend’s death toll in Chicago has now pushed the city’s murder rate to over 100 deaths a full two months earlier than last year and at least 200 percent higher than this time in 2015.

A woman shot and killed on Friday won the dubious honor of being the 100th person murdered by gunfire in the Windy City this weekend. Only hours later, the 101st death occurred. This is nearly two months earlier than the 100th murder that occurred on April 16, 2015.

As reported by the Chicago Sun-Times, just before 10 PM on Friday, Shari Graham, 30, was sitting in a taxi cab when shots were fired nearby, striking the woman in the back of the head. Police feel she was not targeted by the shooters and was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The 101st homicide occurred in the late afternoon on Saturday when a 26-year-old man was shot and killed as he sat in a car, shot by someone who walked up to the car and opened fire. Eric D. Henry was struck in the head and died soon afterward. A woman who was also in the car was shot but will recover.

While only two people were killed over the weekend, there were an additional 26 people shot and wounded. This contrasts to 2015 when no one was killed and only five were wounded and 2014, with 6 killed and 5 wounded.

The last time Chicago experienced 100 homicides during the first two months of the year was 1997, a year that ended with 761 homicides.

It has now been a full year since the last time Chicago went even a single day without having someone shot and killed or killed in some other manner. The last day Chicago saw without a homicide was January 28, 2015. Since that day there have been 556 citizens killed and an astonishing 2,769 wounded.

But by the first quarter in 2015, the murder rate had also climbed over that of the year before. In April of last year, the Sun-Times reported that killings had risen 30 percent over 2014.

But 2015 has been a deadly year thus far. Chicagoans are being shot at a rate three times higher than this time last year. Year to date, the city has suffered 102 homicides with 86 of those being death by firearm. There has also been 298 wounded, for a total of 484 shot.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston, or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.