Sun-Times Reporter Witnesses Shooting

By Chuck Sudo in News on Jun 15, 2011 6:00PM

Sun-Times reporter Kim Janssen came face-to-face with a story separate from the story he was assigned to cover yesterday.

Janssen was covering the memorial service for Jovany Diaz, a 15-year-old from Humboldt Park who was killed in a shooting Monday. We'll let Janssen's words do the talking now.

Even when the crazed teenager standing five yards from me on the corner fired two warning shots into the sky, it didn’t sound loud enough.

Nobody in the crowd of 25 to 30 mourners seemed to believe he could be so brazen.

Then the gunman lowered his snub-nosed black revolver, aimed down Kildare and fired two or three shots, and we stopped rationalizing and ran for our lives.

A 24-year-old was wounded in that shooting. Until then, Janssen was covering Diaz's memorial like a score of others he was assigned to write about for the Bright One in the past. In the process, Janssen managed to get a birds-eye view at plays out at shootings like this throughout the city, every day.

As we bolted I glanced up at the second floor balcony above Diaz’s shrine and saw a second teenager take a running jump over the iron railing and 15 feet down into the street and towards the shooter.

Holding a semi-automatic handgun in his left hand and wearing shiny white Nike Air sneakers, the youth lept with the balletic grace of Michael Jordan at his peak. I was still marvelling at it when the original gunman ran past on the other side of the street, and a man opened his front door to me and shouted “Get in!”

A minute later I’d returned to the scene and found the tattooed victim, sitting in a plastic chair, bleeding from the leg and turning a shade of greyish green.

A tableau of friends gathered tightly around him and glared at me. I asked him his name and he shook his head, grimly, before police and paramedics arrived and his friends split in a hurry.

“Nobody’s talking,” I heard a sergeant say into his radio. As I made myself scarce, a passing dreadlocked witness said to himself, “I didn’t see nothing, I didn’t hear nothing, I don’t know nothing.”