Seventeen are wounded and two dead as a result of Chicago’s incessant gang warfare. The death toll included a 13-year-old boy who had spoken out against gang violence only last year.
Killed on Friday was 13-year-old Zarriel Trotter, a victim of collateral damage from a fight between two groups of gang members. Trotter was standing on the sidewalk several yards away from the men, when one pulled a gun and fired during the heat of the argument.
Instead of hitting one of his targets, the gang member’s bullet found the 13-year-old student. Trotter was hit in the lower back and later died from his wound.
The child was one of the members of the Catalyst Circle Rock Charter School who appeared in an anti-gang violence video that was released in February of last year.
“I don’t want to live around my community where I got to keep on hearing and hearing people keep on getting shot, people keep on getting killed,” Zarriel is seen saying in the 2015 video.
The ad ends with the phrase, “The loss of a black boy is a loss for America.”
By Saturday, another death was noted; a 27-year-old man was killed in the city’s West Englewood neighborhood.
In addition to those two deaths, seventeen others were shot in the city over the weekend.
Chicago’s rising gang violence is far from the only big U.S. city seeing a rise in murders. A recent analysis of crime statistics from The Washington Post found that the number of homicides in America’s 50 biggest cities rose nearly 17 percent last year.
Meanwhile, the Windy City has seen more murders than this time last year and seems to be on track to find a much higher total of murders than it did in 2015, which was itself a rise over 2014’s numbers.
Thus far this year, the city has seen 771 people shot and 142 homicides.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.