Four people were killed and at least 53 more wounded in shootings over Memorial Day weekend as Chicago neared the end of a particularly deadly month.
The latest homicides, which included a 15-year-old girl killed as she rode in a vehicle on North Lake Shore Drive with two older men whom police described as gang members, means at least 60 people were shot and killed this month as May saw summerlike levels of gun violence.
If the Chicago Police Department could point to a positive, it was that heading into Monday evening, eight fewer people were killed than last Memorial Day weekend, with no shooting deaths for more than 48 hours starting late Saturday afternoon.
On Monday afternoon, police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi noted the lower fatality numbers but stressed the department will “never say it’s good until we can go an entire Memorial Day weekend without a single shot being fired.”
The holiday weekend was police Superintendent Eddie Johnson’s first since Mayor Rahm Emanuel picked the veteran cop to lead the embattled department in late March. The department sought volunteers to work overtime over the weekend, although Guglielmi did not release figures on how many officers worked. Instead of hiring more cops during a city budget crunch, Emanuel instead has relied heavily on overtime to try to tamp down violence.
Where shootings occurred Memorial Day weekend in Chicago
As the weekend progressed, the department boosted officers working along Lake Shore Drive and in the Harrison District on the West Side, the latter of which saw the majority of shootings in or near it. Among the officers working the weekend were the department’s two highest-ranking. Johnson worked night shifts, while First Deputy Superintendent John Escalante worked day shifts.
During his Sunday night shift, Johnson told the Chicago Tribune that the department’s strategies appeared to have helped but noted “there’s no way for us to measure what we actually prevent.”
“We’ve had a rough start to the weekend, but it’s kind of leveled off,” he said at the time. “So I don’t want to jinx it, but if we keep trending that way, we should be fine.”
The weekend shooting scenes played out from a gas station in Dunning on the Northwest Side to a narrow tree-lined street in the South Side’s West Pullman neighborhood. Residents and passersby at times grabbed towels and ice packs to aid the wounded. Others tried to figure out if the victims were friends or loved ones.
Left mourning were family members, including those of Veronica Lopez. The 15-year-old was the youngest of the murder victims, shot as she rode with two older men police identified as known gang members along Lake Shore Drive near Fullerton Avenue about 1:30 a.m. Saturday. One of the men also was hit but survived.
That afternoon, her mother, Diana Mercado, wept outside her family’s home above a storefront in the Belmont Cragin neighborhood. She said she had begun planning to move with Veronica to Florida in a year because of the city’s violence.
“Now they took my baby,” she said.
Later that day, in the Lawndale neighborhood, the mother of another teen, Shequita Evans, walked up to a scene of a woman who was shot in the neck while driving down Lexington Avenue near Pulaski Road. Evans lamented that she had to get through “one more summer” until her 17-year-old could graduate high school and attend college outside the city.
At another scene in the Back of the Yards, a woman had to explain to a small boy how the loud pops they had heard weren’t fireworks from the White Sox game. The boy smoothed the cape of a Superman doll as he asked officers if they had gotten the bad guys.
As of Monday afternoon, there was no record of an arrest in that shooting of two men, which police said appeared to be gang-related. Police expected to have better details on weekend arrest figures Tuesday, but confirmed no arrests had been made of any of the suspected killers.
In addition to Lopez, the homicides included:
*Mark Lindsey, 25, shot while sitting in a parked car in front of his mother’s house in the 3700 block of West 75th Place in the Ashburn neighborhood around 11:20 p.m. Friday.
*Garvin Whitmore, 27, shot in the head about 5:20 p.m. Saturday in the South Side’s Fuller Park neighborhood. He was sitting in a car with his fiancee, Ashley Harrison, 26, who picked up a gun and fired warning shots in the air. She was charged with a felony.
*Damien Cionzynski, 25, was shot by one of two men with whom he was arguing inside a BP gas station at Narragansett and Montrose avenues around 5:15 a.m. Saturday. Police have issued arrest warrants for two men.
The tally doesn’t count a woman run over on Lake Shore Drive early Sunday. Her boyfriend, who also was hit in traffic, told police they were fleeing a group of armed robbers, and detectives have located evidence of a group of men in the area.
By Monday afternoon, the tally of those shot in Chicago this year was at least 1,492, according to data compiled by the Tribune, with at least 250 killed. By this time last year, 957 had been shot, with 164 killed.
So far, shootings are up more than 50 percent this year, although the pace of increased violence had slowed from earlier this year, when Chicago was on track to see shooting victims nearly double.
Chicago police have said the violence has been fueled by gang conflicts and a proliferation of guns, mixed with weak gun law enforcement. The department has blamed most of the violence on a core group of about 1,300 people whom they have used data analytics to pinpoint — whom the department has termed “strategic subjects.”
It can be tougher to pinpoint exactly when that violence can explode, with spikes that can spring up on any warm weekend. Over Mother’s Day weekend, more than 50 people were shot, eight fatally, in the most violent weekend in Chicago since September.
The 60 homicides this month have outpaced those in each of the previous three years in Chicago, according to Tribune data. By May 30, 2015, there had been 45 homicides, with 41 by the same date in 2014 and 47 in 2013.
Police put a particular focus on curbing violence during the three-day Memorial Day weekend, considered the traditional start of the summer and potentially one indicator of how bloody the season could get.
Earlier this month, police conducted what it termed its largest raid in recent history, arresting more than 115 people on the “strategic subject” list with mostly weapons and drug charges.
Memorial Day marked the first warm three-day holiday weekend since the fallout from the release of the Laquan McDonald video showing an officer shooting the teen to death as prosecutors said he was walking away.
The video’s release became the catalyst for waves of protests, the ouster of a police superintendent and a U.S. Department of Justice investigation of alleged systemic abuses by officers in a department that continually looked the other way.
The Tribune earlier this year reported how a drop in morale among Chicago officers led some to be less aggressive out of fear that even basic police work could be unfairly construed to get them in trouble. It coincided with new policies requiring more paperwork, which also could cost officers time on the street, with the Tribune finding arrests in January were down a third from a year earlier and documented street stops at just a fraction of what they were a year earlier.
Experts cautioned they couldn’t prove lower police activity had led to higher crime, and department officials said they doubted morale had dropped significantly. They have since said they have improved the paperwork issues and documented more engagement.
Another test will come the July 4 weekend, which traditionally has had the highest violence toll of any holiday weekend in Chicago. Last year, shootings left 10 dead and 55 others wounded over the Independence Day weekend, which was lower than the 14 dead and 68 others wounded from shootings that same weekend in 2014.
Guglielmi said the department will continue using its summer deployment program, which will include more officers patrolling on foot and bicycles, as well as more raids with other police agencies targeting those suspected of fueling the violence.
Chicago Tribune’s Deanese Williams-Harris and Dan Hinkel contributed.
