Late on the evening of May 31, a 15 year-old was killed when aa car was sprayed with bullets on a Chicago street. It was the 66th and last murder for the month in the Windy City and it capped the bloodiest May for 21 years in President Barack Obama’s adopted home town.
The murder victim, Fabien Lavinder, was sitting in a car on 89th Street around 11.00 pm on Tuesday when someone walked out of an alley and opened fire. The child was struck in the chest and was later pronounced dead at Advocate Trinity Hospital.
The 66 murders for May 2016 is topped only by May in 1975, when 75 perished in the Democrat-controlled city.
May also ended with a wild jump in crime. While murders in April rose only 2.9 percent over 2015’s total, by the end of May the crime rate had skyrocketed 40 percent over last year.
This year has already been a particularly bloody year with a total of 233 shot and killed, 1,308 shot and wounded, and an additional 27 murdered by other means.
The accumulated annual total so far this year is second only to the statistics from 1999 when 248 had died by the end of May. That year ended with 643 murders in the Windy City and 2016 may be on track to beat that bloody record.
As the Chicago Tribune notes, this is also the third year in a row that the murder rate has risen in the Democrat-controlled city.
Shootings have been so bad in Democrat-run Chicago that a person is now shot every two-and-a-half minutes and someone is killed every fourteen minutes.
The number of incidents with multiple victims is also rising in the city. Since January began there have been 146 shootings with two victims, 35 with three victims, and 14 with four victims or more shot at once. So far, 64 lives have been claimed during these multiple shootings.
According to Bloomberg, the cost in dollars of all this mayhem is a whopping $2.5 billion.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com