As Americans tallied up their primary choices for president of the United States, Chicago was counting a tally of its own in the number of citizens shot and killed by other citizens waging incessant gang violence, plaguing the city. This weekend some citizens of the Windy City were pulling out guns instead of ballots with a toll of 32 shootings that resulted in five deaths.
By Sunday morning the Chicago Sun-Times was already reporting that four Chicagoans had been killed by gunfire and another 22 wounded. But as Sunday drew to a close, ten more shootings occurred, along with yet another fatality.
One of the Sunday murder victims was a 16-year-old male gunned down in the city’s far South Side Rosemoor neighborhood. It was reported that when police arrived on the scene the teen was already dead from gunshots to the head.
Others killed included a 22-year-old man shot on the Northwest Side, a 24-year-old killed in Garfield Park, a 20-year-old man shot several times, and a pregnant woman shot in Jeffery Manor on the Far South Side. The fifth and final death occurred in the Roseland neighborhood.
The toll exceeds the tally from the same weekend in 2014 when 3 were killed and 6 wounded and rivals the 6 killed and 28 wounded over the same weekend last year.
Chicago has seen 603 shootings, of which 103 were fatal so far in 2016.
The weekend included the arrest of the father of a 9-year-old assassinated in a gang retaliation shooting late last year after he allegedly shot three people.
Police charged that gang bangers shot Little Tyshawn in the head last November. But law enforcement later said that the shooters belonged to a rival gang to that which Pierre Stokes, the boy’s father, belonged. On Sunday Stokes himself was arrested with the Chicago Police, charging that he engaged in a retaliatory shooting against the girlfriend of the man arrested for shooting his son.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.