Chicagoist Weekend Blotter
By Shannon in News on Nov 12, 2006 10:30PM
As we nurse a post-club bodyache, we offer you this weekend's crime rundown:
- A 15-year-old boy was the victim of a drive-by shooting on the West Side Saturday afternoon. Dante Curtis was standing near the intersection of Laramie & Ferdinand when a light-colored van fired shots, hitting him in the chest and back. He was pronounced dead at Loretto Hospital.
- Proviso East High School student Gerardo Garcia, 18, was found in an alley in Maywood with a gunshot wound to the head Friday morning. Garcia had been trying to graduate while working nights in Forest Park; he'd been planning on getting married next year. His death comes on the heels of a Proviso East grad dying in a car crash on Nov. 2, and two Proviso West students dying in another car crash two days earlier.
- Police on the South Side are searching for a hit-and-run driver that struck a two-year-old boy Saturday night and dragged him for at least a block. A dark-colored Nissan Altima hit the toddler as his mother was dropping him off at a relative's house. The boy is in stable condition with head injuries.
- Parents thought there was something strange about the middle-aged man watching their young boys play football Thursday in Oak Lawn. He went out of his way to retrieve errant balls and give them back to the boys. Turns out the man was convicted preteen sex offender Fred Morris, 46. Morris was arrested by police, on a tip from the parents, and charged with contact with a child.
- A 25-year-old man from Downers Grove was sentenced to two years in prison Thursday for having sex with a 14-year-old Naperville girl he met in an online chat room. (People still use those?) Juan Martinez Jr. claims the girl told him she was 17. She says she told him she was 15, then later admitted she was 14. It seems like the girl's mother ratted Martinez out by finding indecent text messages on her daughter's phone.
