A group of about a dozen young men wandered back and forth on the northeast corner of 78th and Sangamon streets in Auburn Gresham on Wednesday evening. Smaller groups packed into parked cars. Others gathered on front porches. Some were scattered outside of homes.
As they all chatted among themselves, their eyes were all locked on the police activity down the block where a 23-year-old man had just been shot on one of the warmest days of the year.
Gusts of wind flickered the yellow tape that cordoned off nearly the entire block dotted with parked cars and small multifamily apartment buildings, a crime scene guarded mostly by uniformed police officers and their supervisors.
The victim survived his wounds, but one frustrated passerby aired out to a Chicago Tribune reporter how he thinks police and city officials should respond to outbursts of violence in communities like Auburn Gresham: “Have a plan beforehand,” he said, before walking away.
Then there were the loud pops. About 20 of them.
“They shooting again, right here somewhere!” shouted Linda Kelly, as she hurried away from the corner. “Lord have mercy.”
Kelly, whose sons were 16 and 20 when they were gunned down about two months apart in 2006, offered a warning to those sticking around: “Y’all need to be running because they’re shooting over here!”
Three police SUVs sped away from the scene, their blue lights flashed, sirens blared.
“You can’t enjoy yourself outside,” Kelly told the reporter, as one of the SUVs zoomed east down 78th, a one-way street going west. “All the shooting and all this kind of stuff, you can’t even enjoy yourself.”
Minutes later, some two dozen onlookers stood behind more yellow tape just blocks away at 80th Street and Emerald Avenue.
One man leaned on a metal pillar on the side of a desolate, grassy field. There was anger. Loud cries. Some hugged each other.
“He’s not dead!” one young woman yelled while sobbing, crouching down in the middle of the street before standing up and being consoled by friends. “I can’t even move.”
The group walked across the grassy field away from the crime scene. “I’m right here where he got shot at,” the woman told someone over the phone in a somber tone.
Over a dozen officers stood around in the middle of 80th and Emerald, the roar of a fire engine in the background.
Paramedics and a firefighter wheeled away a young man on a gurney. One of them performed chest compressions on him as he was covered in a light blue blanket, his red sneakers pointed outward.
His head was turned to his side. His eyes were shut. He was motionless.
“Gotta stay back a little bit,” an officer told a young boy who got too close to the victim as he was being wheeled into an ambulance.
“He’s still breathing,” the officer later said to the boy, apparently for reassurance, before telling him to get out of the street so the ambulance could back away.
Police said a 19-year-old man was killed in the shooting. A second person was shot in the leg but survived.
A young woman, who would only identify herself as “Angel,” said she doesn’t usually hang out at 80th and Emerald, though she knows people from around there.
That doesn’t mean the area is safe, she said. Once, a block or two over, an acquaintance from the neighborhood reached for his gun when he saw her because he wanted her to move her truck, Angel recalled.
She was puzzled by this person’s reaction to her. Angel suspects this person was on edge because that’s what the neighborhood has done to him.
“They’ve been at war,” she said. “They don’t know who to trust.”
Twitter @JeremyGorner
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