On the south side of Chicago, a 6-year-old girl was shot in the chest in the evening of July 19, while she was riding on a scooter with a group of children, the Chicago Tribune reports. She was taken from the location of the crime on 105th Street to Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, where she was said to be in critical condition.
A 52-year-old woman was also shot in the leg in the same incident. The Chicago Sun-Times reported TV news said the woman was the girl’s grandmother, and the Tribune reported the woman was related to a man being honored at the block party who was killed in a shooting five years ago. The Tribune went on to list several shootings in Chicago, most on the far south side, which it called “Trouble City.”
“It’s sad. It’s real sad,” the Tribune quoted one eyewitness as saying. “They need to do something out here. Call the national guard in.” And one comment on a petition drive last year, purportedly written by Ramel Werner of Illinois, put the city’s anguish—and hope—to music and poetry:
Well, today’s topic, self destruction
It really ain’t the rap audience that’s buggin
It’s one or two suckas, ignorant brothers
Trying to rob and steal from one another
You get caught in the mid
So to crush the stereotype here’s what we did
We got ourselves together so that you could unite and fight for what’s right
Not negative ’cause the way we live is positive
We don’t kill our relatives
Andrew Holmes of the organization Stop Killing Our Youth has been an activist around Chicago for several years, and he described the shooting of the girl and woman as arising out of an altercation between two men in which shots were fired.
Most of the homicides in Chicago result from shootings, according to data reported on the site DNAinfo.com. Data show 185 (85%) of the 217 homicides that have occurred so far in 2013 resulted from shootings, 17 (8%) from stabbings, and 15 from all other causes.
It is our hope that this 6-year-old isn’t listed among the homicide statistics of the city, but it’s our bigger hope that homicides stop cold.
