From top left, clockwise: Mourners react to a shooting at 4747 S. King in Chicago on Sept. 3, 2015; authorities at the scene of a fatal shooting in South Shore; police and residents at the scene of a shooting of five people in Back of the Yards; a car crash at the scene of an Englewood shootout.View Full Caption
DNAinfo
CHICAGO — September 2015 will end as Chicago's worst
so far this decade when it comes to gun violence.
Through midday Tuesday, at least 250 shootings resulted
in 55 people getting killed and 288 other people getting shot,
according to data compiled by DNAinfo.
Compared with September last year, shootings are up 38
percent, gun deaths are up 66 percent and the overall number
of people wounded is up 47 percent.
But the two biggest incidents occurred this week,
including one in which a dispute over gang territory likely
led to the shooting of five people, including a baby, and
led to the deaths of the baby's grandmother and pregnant mother.
"You have an innocent family coming home from a family
outing, and somebody opens fire on two women, a child and two
adults," said Deputy Chief Eugene Roy from the scene Monday
night. "Coming home from a family outing, that's important.
This family was attacked by unknown individuals."
Hours later in Fuller Park, five people were shot, three fatally,
in a separate incident.
Anthony Guglielmi said the Deering police district had
"a ton" of officers on the street through the weekend, which
serves the area in which both of those incidents occurred.
"You can't ask any more of these cops," Guglielmi said.
"They have their hearts and souls in this."
On Tuesday, Police Supt. Garry McCarthy held a news
conference where he gave impassioned comments about Illinois' gun laws,
which he has repeated throughout his tenure as Chicago's top cop.
"Because the sanctions from the gangs for losing the gun
is greater than the sanction for being caught by the police and
getting put through the criminal justice system," McCarthy said,
"criminals are not held accountable."
Gang Shooting Friday night at Gas Station at Touhy and Sheridan.
The driver, a 22-year-old man, was shot in his head and taken to St. Francis Hospital in serious condition. The passenger, a 29-year-old man, received lacerations from broken glass and was taken to St. Francis Hospital, police said.
Bishop James Alan Wilkowski, advisory director for the Rogers Park Chamber of Commerce, was at the site Friday night after he and chamber president
Bill Morton heard gunshots from the nearby chamber office. They
arrived around the same time as the police, and were told that the
shooting victim had died. Police and morgue officials did not confirm
the death Saturday morning.
"I did have the opportunity to comfort the young lady who was
literally standing in the center of all the shooting," Wilkowski said.
He said she had been talking to the shooting victim right before
shots were fired and was so shaken she couldn't dial her own phone.
Police had surrounded the area with yellow and red tape, Morton
said: "I saw a young man crying and screaming hysterically behind
the tape with the police officers, saying, 'That's my brother!'"
A handful of people had gathered around the crime scene, but Wilkowski
said a police officer told him that "he's beginning to notice at these
shootings that people are not coming to look because of fear of somebody
coming back and shooting at bystanders."
He added that people at the scene Friday night would crouch and
look around every time there was any popping sound: "It's just no
way for people to live their lives."
The area near Touhy and Sheridan is becoming all too familiar
with violence, Morton said.
"Ever since we came to our office over a year ago, we noticed
that this has been a dark corner, dark section of this street," Morton
said, "so we put our own flood lights facing outwards from our
windows to the gangway." They added an eight-camera security
system as well.
Morton, who also is part of the Leone Beach Park Advisory Council,
said the council is in early talks with the Chicago Park District
about adding flood lights facing west from the field house to
help illuminate the area.
An NYPD housing officer was killed Tuesday night, shot in the head by a trigger-happy perp during a chase and gunfight on a pedestrian overpass above FDR Drive in East Harlem, police said.
Officer Randolph Holder, 33, was shot in the forehead by the callous gunman, who had stolen a bike and was being pursued by cops along the promenade hugging the East River around 8:30 p.m., Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said. The brave officer died at 10:22 p.m. at Harlem Hospital.
A suspect, shot in the legs, was arrested.
Holder, who emigrated from Guyana, was a third-generation police officer, following in his father and grandfather’s footsteps in the line of duty, Bratton said during a somber press conference at the hospital.
The unmarried immigrant joined the NYPD in July 2010 and worked in Police Service Area 5, wearing Shield No. 13340 as he patrolled the public housing projects of East Harlem.
“I think all of us will tell you this is the hardest thing that we do,” Bratton said. “That we mourn one of our own. I’ve been doing this for 45 years. It doesn’t get easier. It never gets easier and it should never get easier.”
In a letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, dated September 23, 1800, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” By any definition that Jefferson could have envisioned, today’s political correctness can only be regarded as “tyranny over the mind of man.” Forget freedom of association, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, or freedom of privacy, political correctness demands that we don’t even have freedom of thought or opinion.
If one does not have the freedom to live in good conscience with his own sense of morality, he or she is indeed the most enslaved of creatures. Listen to Jefferson again, “To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”
Forcing men to pay taxes “for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors” is indeed sinful and tyrannical enough. But to compel a man to actively PARTICIPATE in ideas he disbelieves and abhors is even more so. And, that, my friends, is exactly what modern political correctness forces us to do--or at least tries to force us to do. Political correctness attempts to strip us of our own sense of right and wrong. It is not only tyranny of conduct and behavior; it is tyranny of the mind and heart.
All six officers charged in the police-custody death of Freddie Gray were indicted by a grand jury, a prosecutor said Thursday.
The indictments were very similar to the charges Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced about three weeks ago. The most serious charge for each officer, ranging from second-degree "depraved heart" murder to assault, still stood.
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Gray suffered a critical spinal injury after police handcuffed, shackled and placed him head-first into a van, Mosby has said. His pleas for medical attention were repeatedly ignored, she said.
Mosby said prosecutors had presented evidence to the grand jury for the past two weeks. Some of the charges were changed based on new information, but she didn't say what that new information was. She also did not take question
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