A Weekend in Chicago: Where Gunfire Is a Terrifying Norm
Videos by Craig Duff, Todd Heisler and Brent McDonald
“The Newlywed Game” is on the television. Julia Rhoden, 53, is sitting on her bed, exhausted from another long day at the health care center where she works as a nurse’s aide. There is a loud boom and then another and another. She feels a sting as a bullet enters her back. “I been shot! I been shot!” she cries out to her children in the next room, as blood soaks through the summer dress she wears as a nightgown.
That same night, 15-year-old Veronica Lopez is hit as she rides in a Jeep that is speeding along a waterfront drive. “Babe, they shot me in the stomach,” the girl tells a friend, who later says he covered her body with his own as the gunfire continued.
“Help, I’ve been shot!” another teenager screams as he limps down a darkened street, a bullet having torn through his leg.
It is Friday night in Chicago, and the Memorial Day weekend is just getting started. Police Department officials plan to deploy more than a thousand extra officers to deal with the violence they fear will intensify with the unofficial start of summer.
There is no stopping the gunfire, which comes in bursts and waves, interrupting holiday barbecues, igniting gang rivalries, engulfing neighborhoods, blocks, families.
From Friday evening to the end of Monday, 64 people will have been shot in this city of 2.7 million, six of them fatally. In a population made up of nearly equal numbers of whites, blacks and Hispanics, 52 of the shooting victims are black, 11 Hispanic and one white. Eight are women, the rest men. Some 12 people are shot in cars, 11 along city sidewalks, and at least four on home porches.
It is a level of violence that has become the terrifying norm, particularly in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. With far fewer residents, Chicago has more homicides than Los Angeles or New York.
In an effort to capture what is happening on Chicago’s streets, and why, The New York Times dispatched a team of reporters, photographers and videographers to virtually all of the shooting scenes across the city. Working around the clock through the three-day weekend, The Times interviewed relatives, witnesses, police officers and others, and captured how much violence has become a part of the city’s fabric. The Times intends to follow the cases throughout the year.
This weekend, among the six killed are a father, Garvin Whitmore, who loved to travel but was scared of riding on roller coasters, and Mark Lindsey, whose outsize personality brought him his nickname, Lavish. The oldest person struck by a bullet is 57. The youngest person to die is Ms. Lopez, a high school student and former cheerleader.
And so the logic of one Chicago mother, who watches another mother weep over her dead son in their South Side neighborhood, is this: She is glad her own son is in jail, because the alternative is unbearable.
“He was bound to be shot this summer,” she says.
This article was written by Monica Davey
With reporting byAlan BlinderJulie BosmanMalachy BrowneCatrin EinhornJohn EligonEmma FitzsimmonsMarc LaceyIan LovettBrent McDonaldRichard A. Oppel Jr.Frances RoblesStephanie SaulMitch SmithMegan SpeciaJulie TurkewitzTimothy Williams
Friday, 6 p.m.
Friday, 10:56 p.m.
Friday, 7:45 p.m.
Friday, 3 p.m.
Friday, 9:27 p.m.
Friday, 6 p.m.
Photos by: Todd Heisler; Joshua Lott; Turner Cowles; Sam Hodgson; Alex Wroblewski; Todd Heisler
Friday Evening
City on Edge; A Cry for Help; Documenting the Mayhem; ‘What’s Taking So Long?’
Friday, 3 p.m.
Rain is in the forecast, but Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson wants to make sure that his officers won’t let their guard down as they head into the holiday weekend.
“I think you all know how important this weekend is,” Mr. Johnson tells nearly 20 of Chicago’s highest-ranking police officials at Public Safety Headquarters. “Violence from the previous Memorial Day weekends hasn’t been good.”
The year, so far, has been steeped in blood. Shootings — 1,177 as of the Friday morning before Memorial Day — are up by 50 percent for the year. Two hundred and thirty-three people are dead.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel is also pushing for a quiet weekend. At a community event promoting nonviolence on the South Side, he greets men playing basketball, watches children draw, and compliments a mural underway, which reads: “Hearts Up. … Guns Down.”
A few hours later, the shooting starts.
Friday, 9:45 PM
Tim Miller and a group of friends are sitting on the steps in front of their apartment building drinking beer when they spot a teenager walking out of an alley between low-rise apartment buildings onto South Racine Avenue. He has been shot and cries out for help. Two of his friends coming down the street are also shouting for assistance.
The wounded teenager is bleeding heavily from his thigh. Mr. Miller and his friends, all in their 20s, put pressure on it, and then an ice pack. One goes inside to call 911. The police and an ambulance are on the way.
So is Pauley LaPointe. With the crackle of the police scanner, he steers his Ford Crown Victoria toward the scene and punches the gas. He makes his living by selling video to the city’s television news stations, and is often the first to report at a shooting scene.
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Pauley LaPointe of Captured News, which provides video for local TV stations, responding to a report of a shooting victim on South Racine Avenue on Friday. Video by Brent McDonald
Friday, 10:55 PM
Mark Lindsey is outside his mother’s house after a visit. He has chopped off his signature dreadlocks, and a woman has sent him a compliment. He forwards her message to a cousin. It’s working already, he writes.
He is behind the wheel of his red Chevy Monte Carlo, a car he so prizes that neighbors see him wash it again and again. A man approaches on foot and opens fire, and Mr. Lindsey, 25, is hit. The car lurches forward and strikes a parked pickup truck.
His mother hears the gunfire, runs out and yanks on the locked car door. “Someone get him out of the car!” she shouts over and over.
The screams continue for long minutes. They are jarring here. This section of Ashburn, on the city’s Southwest Side, had seemed somewhat removed from the worst of the gun violence.
Lorenzo Carter with a cellphone video of his cousin Mark Lindsey, who was shot to death on Friday night. The video shows Mr. Lindsey getting his dreadlocks cut off that day. Credit: Julie Turkewitz
This block on West 75th Place is a cluster of small, neatly edged lawns rolling toward a quiet street where children play soccer. Late at night, television screens glow in living rooms.
“This stuff don’t happen here,” says Mr. Lindsey’s cousin Lorenzo Carter, 28. “We know everybody in this neighborhood.”
In only a matter of minutes the police and ambulance will arrive, but the mother is frantic. “What’s taking so long?” she shouts.
Witnesses see Mr. Lindsey in the driver’s seat, his head resting against the window. He is taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center and is pronounced dead at 11:34 p.m.
Mr. Lindsey worked at a railroad management company, friends say. “He was one of the success stories,” says Leroy Cook, 26.
A backyard memorial for Mark Lindsey, 25, shot dead sitting in his car outside his mother’s house on Friday.Whitney Curtis for The New York Times
The police have made no arrests in the case, and a motive is uncertain. Mr. Lindsey was arrested just a day before on a domestic battery charge. He was released on bond.
Neighbors say the shooting shows that the violence is trickling onto blocks that had long been considered safe.
“Shooting in Chicago is like a cancer,” says Charles Parker, 46, standing on the street with another neighbor. “It’s starting to spread out, and I just figured it was a matter of time.”
Saturday, 8:45 p.m.
Saturday, 1:10 a.m.
Saturday, 2:55 a.m.
Saturday, 1:27 a.m.
Saturday, 1:46 a.m.
Saturday, 5 p.m.
Photos by: Brent McDonald; Todd Heisler; Alex Wroblewsiki; Todd Heisler; Joshua Lott; Sam Hodgson
Saturday
The New Normal; Lingering Fears; ‘I Was Trying to Save Her’; A Mother’s Anguish; High-Tech Policing
Saturday, 1:10 AM
Calvin Ward, 50, is smoking a cigarette on the front steps at his wife’s home on Paxton Avenue just after 1 a.m. when two young men come up the street and fire in his direction six times.
Four bullets pierce the screen on the front door. One round grazes Mr. Ward’s arm. Another tears into the house, flies through the living room and penetrates the bedroom wall before striking his wife, Julia Rhoden, sitting on her bed. She jumps up and runs out of the room, calling for help.
When he hears Ms. Rhoden’s screams, Mr. Ward scrambles to get a towel, and applies pressure to the wound as he waits for an ambulance
The violence in this city has long been concentrated along blocks like the one on Paxton, where sleep is often disturbed in the middle of the night by the sound of gunshots. It’s a world away from the glimmering downtown skyline and the mostly white, wealthier neighborhoods north of the tourist-clogged Loop.
“It starts to become normal,” says Darryl Edwards Sr., a neighbor who was awakened by the shots.
Three years ago, he and his wife consulted a Google map before moving here, trying to see if there were people hanging out on the corners. He’s happy with his choice – even though he estimates there have been gunshots on this block about 10 times.
“You get some gunshots every day in some neighborhoods — every day,” Mr. Edwards says. “So I say 10 in three years, that ain’t too bad.”
Julia Rhoden was sitting on her bed watching television Saturday when she was hit by one of six shots fired outside.Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Mr. Ward is separated from Ms. Rhoden, but he is at her house visiting a 16-year-old daughter. He says he has no idea why the two men shot at him. “I ain’t no gangbanger or nothing,” he says.
Records show that Mr. Ward has been convicted several times of battery, and in 2012 was found guilty of aggravated unlawful use of a weapon.
“I hope they catch them,” Mr. Ward said of assailant, “but I doubt it.”
A day after Ms. Rhoden is sent home from the hospital, she is resting in bed, her feet swelling and the bullet still lodged in her back. It is too close to her spine to be removed, she says doctors told her.
Still, she is confident she will recover, physically. Her mental state is a different story.
“Emotionally, I’m not good — this put a fear in me,” Ms. Rhoden says.
Saturday, 1:27 AM
A group of friends are crammed into a blue Jeep Grand Cherokee, music blaring. One of them, Jose Alvarez, calls himself “Chi Rack Alvarez” on Facebook, a play on Chicago’s war-inspired nickname, Chiraq. He records a video of himself flashing signs disrespecting a gang, and posts it to Snapchat.
A recording of a Snapchat video by Jose Alvarez, made shortly before Veronica Lopez was shot and killed Saturday morning.
Mr. Alvarez, 28, is at the wheel as the Jeep heads north on Lake Shore Drive, speeding by the affluent neighborhoods of the North Side, when a dark vehicle pulls alongside and someone inside opens fire.
There are 15 shots in all, Mr. Alvarez estimates later from his hospital bed. He escapes with minor injuries: a bullet wound in the arm and a graze of his forehead.
Not his friend Veronica Lopez, 15.
“I turned around, put my whole body on her, and hold her wound while they are still shooting through the door,” Mr. Alvarez says. “I was trying to save her, and it didn’t work.”
Ms. Lopez, a high school freshman, becomes the youngest murder victim of the mayhem over Memorial Day weekend.
So much of Chicago’s street violence is documented electronically that detectives scour the internet for the gang ties and grudges that often spark the gunfire. The police describe Mr. Alvarez as a gang member and say he may have been the intended target of the shooting. Mr. Alvarez insists that the police are wrong in labeling him part of a gang.
After Ms. Lopez’s death, he changed his Facebook profile name to “Rip Princess Veronica.”
He says he expects the killers to boast about the shooting on social media.
Saturday, 5:15 a.m.
Damien Cionzynski, a 25-year-old forklift operator, is killed at a BP gas station just within the city limits. He is the third fatality of the weekend. The police, citing surveillance video and a witness, say they have identified two persons of interest in the killing and soon have one of them in custody. Mr. Cionzynski’s landlord, Sue Harle, says he came from Poland as a child and grew up in the area. He rented a basement room in her house just a few blocks from where he was killed. “He hasn’t lived half a life,” she says. “I hope they find these guys.”
The body of Damien Cionzynski, 25, who was killed inside a BP gas station on Saturday.Whitney Curtis for The New York Times
Saturday, 10 a.m.
The doors are open at the Universal Missionary Baptist Church in Austin, on the West Side, and a steady stream of people are dropping off rifles, revolvers, even replica guns — 61 weapons by the end of the day. Some are rusty. Some date to the 1920s. Most donors walk away with gift cards for $100, an incentive paid for by the city to get some firearms off the streets.
“That’s one gun gone,” says Cordelia Brooks, who turned in a weapon that had once belonged to her grandfather and had barely been touched in years.
Officer Bob Garcia strains to find the serial numbers etched on one revolver. It has a night sight guide and bullets that resemble shotgun shells. “A criminal would love to get his hands on this,” Officer Garcia says.
Some of the guns turned in at a buyback program on Saturday at the Universal Missionary Baptist Church.Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
The Chicago Police have regularly seized more illegally possessed guns than New York or Los Angeles. People arrested here generally face a one-year minimum sentence for illegal possession. But efforts to make the laws more like New York’s, which mandate a three-and-a-half-year minimum sentence for an illegal, loaded weapon, have so far failed in the state legislature, and Chicago’s bans on handgun ownership and on gun sales have been struck down by the courts in recent years.
The Rev. Michael Pfleger, a South Side priest, says guns have become part of the “wardrobe” for some in the city. They would rather risk a short prison term than face the danger of walking the streets without a gun.
Sharod Roper, 24, who grew up in the Englewood neighborhood, says he had occasionally carried a gun to protect himself from being robbed, but never used it. “I have to have a gun to scare them off,” he says.
Saturday, 5:20 PM
“He’s gone!” Shorlanda Tutson cries. Her face is soaked with tears. Her hands stretch toward the sky.
The body of her son, Garvin Whitmore, 27, is in the car he borrowed from her, now covered with a white sheet.
Mr. Whitmore and his fiancée, Ashley Harrison, 26, had been sitting in the car outside a liquor store, in a South Side neighborhood accustomed to gunfire, when, in broad daylight, shooting started. Mr. Whitmore was fatally shot in the head. Ms. Harrison, the mother of his two children, grabbed a gun from the car, jumped out and fired into the air. She was later charged with discharging the weapon, and the police say they are following leads from video and forensic evidence in the case.
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Relatives of Garvin Whitmore, who was shot to death in his car in a South Side neighborhood on Saturday, gather with nearby residents at the scene. Video by Craig Duff, Brent McDonald
Standing off to the side is a woman, in tears. She does not know Mr. Whitmore’s family, she says, but understands their pain.
The woman, Noel, says she does not want her last name used, for fear of bringing more troubles to her family. She says her nephew was killed a year ago as he left a party. Her 20-year-old son is a member of a gang. He has been shot each summer for the past three years. She is relieved that he is now in the Cook County jail.
She says she tried to raise him right, but the forces outside her door were stronger. “Somehow these streets suck my son in,” she says. “His friends, they’re dropping like flies. The boys, the girls, all of them. It’s a never-ending cycle.”
Saturday, 5:30 PM
In a police command center packed wall to wall with computer screens, Officer Richard Walton is tracking in real time the shooting that left Mr. Whitmore dead. Witnesses say the suspect fled in a white sport utility vehicle.
Officer Walton has views from all the city cameras mounted along nearby intersections, and there, on one monitor, comes a white S.U.V., making a sharp turn onto South Princeton Avenue.
“You can even see a figure in the driver’s seat, right there,” Officer Walton says, after alerting officers on the scene which way the suspect is headed and sending them images of the car.
From this nerve center, a dozen police officers monitor the city minute by minute. There is a map of the city overlaid with rectangles glowing red and orange to show current hot zones for gang disputes. A screen tracks the locations of the latest gunshots, capturing the sounds of shots and estimating their origin down to 15 feet. Facial recognition software helps narrow down suspects whose images are caught on security cameras.
Sometimes only minutes after the gunshots end, a computer system takes a victim’s name and displays any arrests and gang ties — as well as whether the victim has a rating on the department’s list of people most likely to shoot someone or be shot.
Police officials say most shootings involve a relatively small group of people with the worst ratings on the list. The police and social service workers have been going to some of their homes to warn that the authorities are watching them and offer job training and educational assistance as a way out of gangs.
Of the 64 people shot over the weekend, 50 of them, or 78 percent, are included on the department’s list. At least seven of the people shot over the weekend have been shot before.
For one man, only 23 years old, it is his third time being shot.
Saturday, 9:20 p.m.
About a block away from the Lexington Street shooting, a fight breaks out. Now the anger is aimed at arriving police officers.
Distrust of the police flashes on the streets, again and again.
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Police confronting angry residents Saturday night after reports of a fight breaking out on Polk Street. Some footage includes vulgar language. Video by Brent McDonald
“Please sir, don’t beat me,” one man yells, mockingly, at the scene of early morning gunfire that has left three men shot — two in their legs and another in his back — along West Walnut Street on the West Side.
Four men in their 20s are watching as the police mark the scene. Shell casings speckle the street. The men, who say they have been drinking a concoction of Pineapple Crush, hard candy and cough syrup, call out tauntingly to the officers.
“Man, you remind me of Clint Eastwood,” one says.
The Chicago Police Department, the nation’s second-largest municipal force, with about 12,000 officers, has a deeply strained history with its residents, particularly African- Americans. The distrust makes solving so many shootings all the harder.
Anger boiled over last year when the city, under court order, released video of Laquan McDonald, a black teenager, crumpling on a Southwest Side street as a white police officer shot him 16 times. Only a third of Chicagoanssay the police are doing a good job.
“The Police Department is only as strong as the faith that the community we serve have in it,” Mr. Johnson, the police superintendent, says in an interview over the weekend, as he patrols parts of the city wearing a body camera.
The distrust means hurdles for law enforcement. Witnesses say they cannot remember what happened. The wounded refuse to cooperate. Victims drive themselves to hospitals, rather than call the police. They give the same story, over and over again: I felt a sting and realized I had been shot; I didn’t see anything.
How residents feel about crime and the police in Chicago, according to a recent poll:
CHICAGO
More than 50%said calling the police will make the situation worse or will make no difference.
Neighborhoods where …
WEST SIDE
More than 60%said the biggest problems facing the city are crime, violence and gangs.
SOUTH SIDE
So crimes go unsolved. In 2015, the authorities made arrests in just over a quarter of that year’s approximately 470 homicides. That only frustrates residents and fuels resentment.
Just before 3 a.m. on Saturday, a young man, bleeding badly, cries out for help after being shot on North Kimball Avenue. But then he begs the neighbors not to call the authorities. “When I say, ‘I want to call 911,’ he’s running from my house,” Mauricio Sandoval, 37, says. “He don’t say nothing. I see the shot in the back. I’m scared too, you know.”
Saturday, 9:30 p.m.
Over four decades, Herb Harrington, 64, has seen generations pass through his barber shop in the Austin neighborhood, and cut the hair of many of the neighborhood children who have since become involved in gangs.
Mr. Harrington is trimming a customer’s hair in his shop when he hears a series of loud bangs. They come from the direction of the nearby Christ Outreach Deliverance Center on West Chicago Avenue, where a 23-year-old man is bleeding profusely from a gunshot wound to his leg.
“I heard five shots and I thought it was fireworks, but that was just wishful thinking,” Mr. Harrington says. “It was real close, and one of the customers went outside and saw a young man laying on the ground.”
Mr. Harrington says he feels the area has become more violent. “Every week it’s someone else,” he says. “It’s retaliation, this person for that person, and it doesn’t stop. Every time there’s a body down, there’s going to be another one and another one.”
“You’re talking about poverty and families broken up and people not having opportunity and losing their way,” he says. “Violence is what we talk about in these chairs. We talk about it. We analyze it. But we don’t have easy answers.”
Saturday, May 28, 19 shootings and 28 victims
Lake Michigan
WEST SIDE
SOUTH SIDE
LOOP
Saturday, May 28
Fatal shooting
Nonfatal shooting
Sunday, 9 a.m.
Sunday, 7:12 p.m.
Sunday, 9 p.m.
Sunday, 10:46 p.m.
Sunday, 4:06 p.m.
Sunday, 1 p.m.
Photos by: Sam Hodgson; Todd Heisler; Brent McDonald; Whitney Curtis; Joshua Lott; Sam Hodgson
Sunday
‘I Got to Leave This City’; Chaos and Vulnerability; ‘There’s Always Retaliation’; A Shifting Gang Structure
Sunday, 2:00 AM
A 34-year-old woman watches as an ex-boyfriend, his arm wobbly from alcohol, holds a gun to her cousin’s head. Their dispute is over money.
The cousin, Dontae Brock, pushes the gun away. They think it is a joke. But the ex-boyfriend pulls the trigger, she tells the police, the shots striking Mr. Brock in the torso. The woman, at the wheel of her Ford Explorer, says she sees what looks like a flash of fire on the floor of her car as the blasts hit.
Moments later, she jerks the Explorer into reverse, then speeds to a nearby hospital, where Mr. Brock, who was shot in the passenger seat, is told he will survive. Returning to her mother’s rowhouse later, next to the scene of the shooting, the woman — a mother of four, her cousin’s blood streaked across the back of her white T-shirt — says she has made up her mind: “I got to leave this city.”
Her 56-year-old mother, wearing bright pink pants, plops down on her stoop, the John Hancock Center looming in the skyline about a mile away. For about six years, she has lived on this street of old sand-colored brick rowhouses that were part of Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green housing project just north of downtown. She was cleaning ribs in the kitchen when she heard the gunfire and dropped to the floor. Now she smokes a cigarette and sinks her head into her hands.
“I hate the person that invented guns,” she says.
Police scanners announce Chicago’s crime problem in staccato bursts, over and over, with the same words: “Shots fired.”
Many of the gunshots here hit no one, but they still leave a sense of worry and vulnerability. Since the start of the year, Chicagoans have called the police 28,000 times to report gunfire. Some are multiple calls about a single shooting and others turn out to be fireworks, but the possibility of being shot leaves its mark, even beyond those killed and wounded.
At his home on the South Side, Rod Reeves, 42, turns on the spigot and shows how his garden hose, punctured by bullets, now leaks. Mr. Reeves says he and his family ducked behind a brick wall in their home to avoid stray shots when gunfire broke out on his block.
“I guess it’s good to have a brick house,” Mr. Reeves says.
Police tape being removed from the scene of a Sunday shooting. Over the course of the Memorial Day weekend, 64 people were shot.Whitney Curtis for The New York Times
Sunday, 5:14 AM
The police don’t know exactly what led to a shooting in Roseland, on the city’s far South Side. But the residents are fairly certain.
“There’s always retaliation,” says one resident near where a 17-year-old was shot in the arm, insisting that her name and photograph not be published. “I don’t want them to come back and kill me.”
Retaliation drives a good share of Chicago’s violence, scarring bystanders and relatives and, in a notorious case last year, killing a 9-year-old boy whose father was in a gang.
Residents say it has gotten worse in recent years as gang structure has shifted. Some are vast and highly organized, while others span only a few blocks. New gang names pile on top of old ones, and they can change rapidly. So can their boundaries. And while once the violence associated with gangs was largely related to drug disputes, lately it is driven more by basic rivalries over turf and dominance, the police say.
“Why did I gang bang?” asks Johnathan Hallman, 28, who lives on the South Side. “Just to be around something, like just to be a part of something, man. Because when you growing up, man, you see all these other people, older people that’s in the gang life or whatever. They making they little money and they doing they thing. You see the little ice, the car they driving. It’s just an inspiration, man.”
Mr. Hallman says he joined a gang at a young age, but eventually decided it was not all he thought it would be. He got out, he says.
Sunday, 11 p.m.
There is a routine in place whenever violence breaks out around the all-night laundromat in North Lawndale, on the West Side, which it frequently does. The employee on duty calls a co-worker, Frederick Clark, and says “attack.” Mr. Clark, 54, then alerts the police and heads into work. He has fielded about 20 such calls in the last six months, he says.
“I myself have been attacked 13 times in eight years here,” Mr. Clark says. “Never with guns, but I’ve had to defend myself.”
So when two men are shot just outside the laundromat, on South Harding Avenue, around 11 p.m. on Sunday, the business barely skips a beat. It doesn’t close or even slow much.
For all the trauma, pain and anxiety that the illegal use of handguns has caused people in communities like North Lawndale, there is also a practical response: This is where people live and work. And so they do.
Milk to pick up? Work to get to? Laundry to do? When the police secure the area after the shootings, reporters stand outside the perimeter and watch. But one man lifts the police tape to get to the laundromat.
Another man grows angry when police officers stop him from doing the same.
“It’s yellow tape, not red,” he shouts at the officers, so familiar with the rules of crime scenes that he knows red tape signals crucial evidence.
Sunday, May 29, 13 shootings and 16 victims
Sunday, May 29
Lake Michigan
WEST SIDE
SOUTH SIDE
LOOP
Saturday, May 28
Fatal shooting
Nonfatal shooting
Sunday, 9 a.m.
Sunday, 7:12 p.m.
Sunday, 9 p.m.
Sunday, 10:46 p.m.
Sunday, 4:06 p.m.
Sunday, 1 p.m.
Photos by: Sam Hodgson; Todd Heisler; Brent McDonald; Whitney Curtis; Joshua Lott; Sam Hodgson
Sunday
‘I Got to Leave This City’; Chaos and Vulnerability; ‘There’s Always Retaliation’; A Shifting Gang Structure
Sunday, 2:00 AM
A 34-year-old woman watches as an ex-boyfriend, his arm wobbly from alcohol, holds a gun to her cousin’s head. Their dispute is over money.
The cousin, Dontae Brock, pushes the gun away. They think it is a joke. But the ex-boyfriend pulls the trigger, she tells the police, the shots striking Mr. Brock in the torso. The woman, at the wheel of her Ford Explorer, says she sees what looks like a flash of fire on the floor of her car as the blasts hit.
Moments later, she jerks the Explorer into reverse, then speeds to a nearby hospital, where Mr. Brock, who was shot in the passenger seat, is told he will survive. Returning to her mother’s rowhouse later, next to the scene of the shooting, the woman — a mother of four, her cousin’s blood streaked across the back of her white T-shirt — says she has made up her mind: “I got to leave this city.”
Her 56-year-old mother, wearing bright pink pants, plops down on her stoop, the John Hancock Center looming in the skyline about a mile away. For about six years, she has lived on this street of old sand-colored brick rowhouses that were part of Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green housing project just north of downtown. She was cleaning ribs in the kitchen when she heard the gunfire and dropped to the floor. Now she smokes a cigarette and sinks her head into her hands.
“I hate the person that invented guns,” she says.
Police scanners announce Chicago’s crime problem in staccato bursts, over and over, with the same words: “Shots fired.”
Many of the gunshots here hit no one, but they still leave a sense of worry and vulnerability. Since the start of the year, Chicagoans have called the police 28,000 times to report gunfire. Some are multiple calls about a single shooting and others turn out to be fireworks, but the possibility of being shot leaves its mark, even beyond those killed and wounded.
At his home on the South Side, Rod Reeves, 42, turns on the spigot and shows how his garden hose, punctured by bullets, now leaks. Mr. Reeves says he and his family ducked behind a brick wall in their home to avoid stray shots when gunfire broke out on his block.
“I guess it’s good to have a brick house,” Mr. Reeves says.
Police tape being removed from the scene of a Sunday shooting. Over the course of the Memorial Day weekend, 64 people were shot.Whitney Curtis for The New York Times
Sunday, 5:14 AM
The police don’t know exactly what led to a shooting in Roseland, on the city’s far South Side. But the residents are fairly certain.
“There’s always retaliation,” says one resident near where a 17-year-old was shot in the arm, insisting that her name and photograph not be published. “I don’t want them to come back and kill me.”
Retaliation drives a good share of Chicago’s violence, scarring bystanders and relatives and, in a notorious case last year, killing a 9-year-old boy whose father was in a gang.
Residents say it has gotten worse in recent years as gang structure has shifted. Some are vast and highly organized, while others span only a few blocks. New gang names pile on top of old ones, and they can change rapidly. So can their boundaries. And while once the violence associated with gangs was largely related to drug disputes, lately it is driven more by basic rivalries over turf and dominance, the police say.
“Why did I gang bang?” asks Johnathan Hallman, 28, who lives on the South Side. “Just to be around something, like just to be a part of something, man. Because when you growing up, man, you see all these other people, older people that’s in the gang life or whatever. They making they little money and they doing they thing. You see the little ice, the car they driving. It’s just an inspiration, man.”
Mr. Hallman says he joined a gang at a young age, but eventually decided it was not all he thought it would be. He got out, he says.
Sunday, 11 p.m.
There is a routine in place whenever violence breaks out around the all-night laundromat in North Lawndale, on the West Side, which it frequently does. The employee on duty calls a co-worker, Frederick Clark, and says “attack.” Mr. Clark, 54, then alerts the police and heads into work. He has fielded about 20 such calls in the last six months, he says.
“I myself have been attacked 13 times in eight years here,” Mr. Clark says. “Never with guns, but I’ve had to defend myself.”
So when two men are shot just outside the laundromat, on South Harding Avenue, around 11 p.m. on Sunday, the business barely skips a beat. It doesn’t close or even slow much.
For all the trauma, pain and anxiety that the illegal use of handguns has caused people in communities like North Lawndale, there is also a practical response: This is where people live and work. And so they do.
Milk to pick up? Work to get to? Laundry to do? When the police secure the area after the shootings, reporters stand outside the perimeter and watch. But one man lifts the police tape to get to the laundromat.
Another man grows angry when police officers stop him from doing the same.
“It’s yellow tape, not red,” he shouts at the officers, so familiar with the rules of crime scenes that he knows red tape signals crucial evidence.
Lake Michigan
WEST SIDE
SOUTH SIDE
LOOP
Monday, 5:58 a.m.
Monday, 11:50 p.m.
Monday, 10:54 a.m.
Monday, 10:54 a.m.
Monday, 3:14 p.m.
Monday, 11 p.m.
Photos by: Whitney Curtis; Brent McDonald; Sam Hodgson; Joshua Lott; Todd Heisler; Sam Hodgson
Monday
Many Crimes, Few Arrests; ‘We Can’t Get Along’; A Final Pair of Deaths
Monday, 10 a.m.
More than 200 men and women are crammed into cells at the Cook County jail, awaiting their first appearances in court. Some sit with their eyes closed, trying to sleep. Others bounce their knees and stare anxiously from the cells.
The police are still in the early stages of their investigations into the weekend’s shootings, and not one of the people being held in the cells awaiting an appearance in Cook County bond court has been charged with shooting anyone over the weekend. Analyses of crime data in Chicago suggest that while violence has gone up in recent months, arrests remain low. As of Friday, the police had issued warrants to arrest two people in one of the weekend’s shootings, and one of them was in custody. They had a person of interest in another shooting and leads in others.
Monday, 10:54 a.m.
Peter McDaniel is cleaning up behind a three-story apartment building in the 11th Police District on the West Side, the hardest hit area of the city this weekend. Signs of distress are everywhere, with brick and stone homes in decay, their expansive porches crumbling and windows boarded up. Many people have reinforced their homes with chained and padlocked gates. Signs warn of mean dogs. Streets are pockmarked by vacant and overgrown lots.
Over the course of the weekend at least nine shootings took place in the 11th, one right near Mr. McDaniel.
He hit the ground and emerged unhurt. But two men had gunshot wounds and the assailants, driving a black car, escaped.
This year, at least 32 killings have occurred in this area of about six square miles.
Mr. McDaniel blames a bitter and violent rivalry between two gangs, including one he says he has left. “We can’t get along,” he says. “It’s just always been that way.”
Monday, 11 p.m.
The holiday is winding down. People toss out garbage from sidewalk parties. Coolers go back into car trunks for the rides home from the lakefront. The city gets ready to go back to work.
Then a flurry of chaos bursts over the police scanner: Two men have been shot, on opposite sides of town, and neither one will survive.
On the South Side, on a block of boarded businesses and apartments along Calumet Avenue, a woman wanders up to a police line. The body of James Taylor, 44, hit by multiple bullets, lies beside a car. The woman, a relative, asks if she can see the body, but an officer says no. “It’s not the way you want to see that person,” he tells her.
Officers investigate a fatal shooting late Monday on the North Side. A dispute at a Target store earlier in the day may have been the cause.Joshua Lott for The New York Times
On the far North Side, in a neighborhood of sari shops and kebab houses, police officers scan flashlights through bushes and behind buildings along North Rockwell Street, looking for evidence and for an assailant who is still on the loose.
Johan Jean, 39, has been struck in the neck, and the police say a dispute earlier in the day in a Target store might have led to the shooting. In the alleyway where he has died, smoke still swirls from an outdoor grill.
Lake Michigan
WEST SIDE
SOUTH SIDE
LOOP
Monday, 5:58 a.m.
Monday, 11:50 p.m.
Monday, 10:54 a.m.
Monday, 10:54 a.m.
Monday, 3:14 p.m.
Monday, 11 p.m.
Photos by: Whitney Curtis; Brent McDonald; Sam Hodgson; Joshua Lott; Todd Heisler; Sam Hodgson
Photos by: Sam Hodgson; Todd Heisler; Brent McDonald; Whitney Curtis; Joshua Lott; Sam Hodgson
Sunday
‘I Got to Leave This City’; Chaos and Vulnerability; ‘There’s Always Retaliation’; A Shifting Gang Structure
Sunday, 2:00 AM
A 34-year-old woman watches as an ex-boyfriend, his arm wobbly from alcohol, holds a gun to her cousin’s head. Their dispute is over money.
The cousin, Dontae Brock, pushes the gun away. They think it is a joke. But the ex-boyfriend pulls the trigger, she tells the police, the shots striking Mr. Brock in the torso. The woman, at the wheel of her Ford Explorer, says she sees what looks like a flash of fire on the floor of her car as the blasts hit.
Moments later, she jerks the Explorer into reverse, then speeds to a nearby hospital, where Mr. Brock, who was shot in the passenger seat, is told he will survive. Returning to her mother’s rowhouse later, next to the scene of the shooting, the woman — a mother of four, her cousin’s blood streaked across the back of her white T-shirt — says she has made up her mind: “I got to leave this city.”
Her 56-year-old mother, wearing bright pink pants, plops down on her stoop, the John Hancock Center looming in the skyline about a mile away. For about six years, she has lived on this street of old sand-colored brick rowhouses that were part of Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green housing project just north of downtown. She was cleaning ribs in the kitchen when she heard the gunfire and dropped to the floor. Now she smokes a cigarette and sinks her head into her hands.
“I hate the person that invented guns,” she says.
Police scanners announce Chicago’s crime problem in staccato bursts, over and over, with the same words: “Shots fired.”
Sounds From The Scanner
1:24
Many of the gunshots here hit no one, but they still leave a sense of worry and vulnerability. Since the start of the year, Chicagoans have called the police 28,000 times to report gunfire. Some are multiple calls about a single shooting and others turn out to be fireworks, but the possibility of being shot leaves its mark, even beyond those killed and wounded.
At his home on the South Side, Rod Reeves, 42, turns on the spigot and shows how his garden hose, punctured by bullets, now leaks. Mr. Reeves says he and his family ducked behind a brick wall in their home to avoid stray shots when gunfire broke out on his block.
“I guess it’s good to have a brick house,” Mr. Reeves says.
Police tape being removed from the scene of a Sunday shooting. Over the course of the Memorial Day weekend, 64 people were shot.Whitney Curtis for The New York Times
Sunday, 5:14 AM
The police don’t know exactly what led to a shooting in Roseland, on the city’s far South Side. But the residents are fairly certain.
“There’s always retaliation,” says one resident near where a 17-year-old was shot in the arm, insisting that her name and photograph not be published. “I don’t want them to come back and kill me.”
Retaliation drives a good share of Chicago’s violence, scarring bystanders and relatives and, in a notorious case last year, killing a 9-year-old boy whose father was in a gang.
Residents say it has gotten worse in recent years as gang structure has shifted. Some are vast and highly organized, while others span only a few blocks. New gang names pile on top of old ones, and they can change rapidly. So can their boundaries. And while once the violence associated with gangs was largely related to drug disputes, lately it is driven more by basic rivalries over turf and dominance, the police say.
“Why did I gang bang?” asks Johnathan Hallman, 28, who lives on the South Side. “Just to be around something, like just to be a part of something, man. Because when you growing up, man, you see all these other people, older people that’s in the gang life or whatever. They making they little money and they doing they thing. You see the little ice, the car they driving. It’s just an inspiration, man.”
Mr. Hallman says he joined a gang at a young age, but eventually decided it was not all he thought it would be. He got out, he says.
Sunday, 11 p.m.
There is a routine in place whenever violence breaks out around the all-night laundromat in North Lawndale, on the West Side, which it frequently does. The employee on duty calls a co-worker, Frederick Clark, and says “attack.” Mr. Clark, 54, then alerts the police and heads into work. He has fielded about 20 such calls in the last six months, he says.
“I myself have been attacked 13 times in eight years here,” Mr. Clark says. “Never with guns, but I’ve had to defend myself.”
So when two men are shot just outside the laundromat, on South Harding Avenue, around 11 p.m. on Sunday, the business barely skips a beat. It doesn’t close or even slow much.
For all the trauma, pain and anxiety that the illegal use of handguns has caused people in communities like North Lawndale, there is also a practical response: This is where people live and work. And so they do.
Milk to pick up? Work to get to? Laundry to do? When the police secure the area after the shootings, reporters stand outside the perimeter and watch. But one man lifts the police tape to get to the laundromat.
Another man grows angry when police officers stop him from doing the same.
“It’s yellow tape, not red,” he shouts at the officers, so familiar with the rules of crime scenes that he knows red tape signals crucial evidence.
Sunday, May 29, 13 shootings and 16 victims
Sunday, May 29
Fatal shooting
Nonfatal shooting
Lake Michigan
WEST SIDE
SOUTH SIDE
LOOP
Monday, 5:58 a.m.
Monday, 11:50 p.m.
Monday, 10:54 a.m.
Monday, 10:54 a.m.
Monday, 3:14 p.m.
Monday, 11 p.m.
Photos by: Whitney Curtis; Brent McDonald; Sam Hodgson; Joshua Lott; Todd Heisler; Sam Hodgson
Monday
Many Crimes, Few Arrests; ‘We Can’t Get Along’; A Final Pair of Deaths
Monday, 10 a.m.
More than 200 men and women are crammed into cells at the Cook County jail, awaiting their first appearances in court. Some sit with their eyes closed, trying to sleep. Others bounce their knees and stare anxiously from the cells.
The police are still in the early stages of their investigations into the weekend’s shootings, and not one of the people being held in the cells awaiting an appearance in Cook County bond court has been charged with shooting anyone over the weekend. Analyses of crime data in Chicago suggest that while violence has gone up in recent months, arrests remain low. As of Friday, the police had issued warrants to arrest two people in one of the weekend’s shootings, and one of them was in custody. They had a person of interest in another shooting and leads in others.
Monday, 10:54 a.m.
Peter McDaniel is cleaning up behind a three-story apartment building in the 11th Police District on the West Side, the hardest hit area of the city this weekend. Signs of distress are everywhere, with brick and stone homes in decay, their expansive porches crumbling and windows boarded up. Many people have reinforced their homes with chained and padlocked gates. Signs warn of mean dogs. Streets are pockmarked by vacant and overgrown lots.
Over the course of the weekend at least nine shootings took place in the 11th, one right near Mr. McDaniel.
He hit the ground and emerged unhurt. But two men had gunshot wounds and the assailants, driving a black car, escaped.
This year, at least 32 killings have occurred in this area of about six square miles.
Mr. McDaniel blames a bitter and violent rivalry between two gangs, including one he says he has left. “We can’t get along,” he says. “It’s just always been that way.”
Monday, 11 p.m.
The holiday is winding down. People toss out garbage from sidewalk parties. Coolers go back into car trunks for the rides home from the lakefront. The city gets ready to go back to work.
Then a flurry of chaos bursts over the police scanner: Two men have been shot, on opposite sides of town, and neither one will survive.
On the South Side, on a block of boarded businesses and apartments along Calumet Avenue, a woman wanders up to a police line. The body of James Taylor, 44, hit by multiple bullets, lies beside a car. The woman, a relative, asks if she can see the body, but an officer says no. “It’s not the way you want to see that person,” he tells her.
Officers investigate a fatal shooting late Monday on the North Side. A dispute at a Target store earlier in the day may have been the cause.Joshua Lott for The New York Times
On the far North Side, in a neighborhood of sari shops and kebab houses, police officers scan flashlights through bushes and behind buildings along North Rockwell Street, looking for evidence and for an assailant who is still on the loose.
Johan Jean, 39, has been struck in the neck, and the police say a dispute earlier in the day in a Target store might have led to the shooting. In the alleyway where he has died, smoke still swirls from an outdoor grill.
