Eight people were killed in Chicago over Mother’s Day weekend. Another 43 people in the city were injured in gun violence.
Mother’s Day 2016 was the most violent weekend in the city since September 2015, a new Chicago Tribune police data analysis has found. The paper reports that so far this year, at least 1,225 people have been shot in Chicago, “as violence continues at a pace not seen in the city since the 1990s.”
Skimming through the stories behind the statistics is gut-wrenching reading. Each one of these numbers was someone’s child, brother, sister, father, mother, loved one, or friend. Each one of these numbers was a human being, killed in civilian gun violence in the United States in 2016.
This past weekend’s shootings were spread across the city, from Roseland to the south to West Rogers Park to the north. Two people were shot on Chicago highways, including a 35-year-old man who died after being shot in the back on Lake Shore Drive.
The weekend’s youngest homicide victim was 16-year-old Nathan Hicks, who was shot in the chest as he stood on a sidewalk in East Garfield Park. The oldest was 58-year-old Andres Rivera, killed at his dinner table in Archer Heights when a bullet pierced the front door and hit him in the head, police said.
In just 3 1/2 hours early Saturday, a 30-year-old man was killed and 14 other people were wounded — the equivalent of someone shot every 14 minutes.
From Friday evening to Saturday morning, two people were killed and 25 were wounded; from Saturday afternoon to Sunday morning, three were killed and 15 were wounded. On Sunday morning the pace began to slow, and six people were shot, three fatally.
Faith Davis hugs her grandmother during a news conference by “Purpose over Pain”, a group of mothers who lost children to gun violence, calling for a stop to shootings in Chicago, Illinois, May 6, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Young
The bloody 2016 Mother’s Day weekend follows recent reports that the city remains starkly divided along racial lines. Some 41% of black Chicagoans who participated in a poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the New York Times said they felt “not safe at all” or “not too safe” compared with just 17% of white respondents. 44% of black people in Chicago rated their neighborhoods as a poor place to raise kids, compared with 16% of white people.
Chicago Poll Results: “Complete polling data from Chicago poll conducted by The New York Times and the Kaiser Family Foundation from April 21 through May 3, 2016.” [documentcloud via nytimes]