Tragic Shooting Wounds 11-Month-Old Boy, Kills Mother And Grandmother
By Kate Shepherd in News on Sep 29, 2015 3:32PM
Tragedy struck in the Back of the Yards neighborhood Monday night when a pregnant mother and a grandmother were shot and killed. The mother's 11-month-old son and two others were wounded in the shooting, according to the Sun-Times.
The shooting happened around 7:30 p.m. near the intersection of 53rd and Aberdeen streets. A gunman in a vehicle opened fire on the group as they were exiting a car after a family outing and entering their house.
Persha Chew, 26, was carrying groceries into the house when she heard seven gunshots. She ran outside to see her 24-year-old pregnant sister Patricia Chew and Patricia's 11-month-old son Princeton Chew shot and lying on the ground.
She picked up her wounded nephew and comforted him until police arrived. He had been shot in the side but police raced him to Stroger Hospital in the back of their squad car and he was declared to be in stable condition, according to ABC.
"The police officer brought the baby in, he was holding the baby," Allen Florence, who saw the scene in the emergency room, told ABC. "They was holding him real tight. You could tell right away he had been shot the way the traffic was."
The boy's grandmother Lolita Wells, 47, was killed alongside her daughter Patricia Chew. Two 25-year-old men were also wounded and taken to Mt. Sinai Hospital where their conditions were stabilized, according to NBC.
"You have an innocent family coming home from a family outing," Chicago Police Department Deputy Chief Eugene Roy said at a press conference on the gruesome shooting. "In a second, two generations of that child's family were wiped out."
No one is in custody for the shooting and Chew didn't see a gunman and doesn't know who would target her family, she said.
Shootings and homicides are on the rise in Chicago this year and there's been a recent surge. The Back of the Yards shooting comes right after the second weekend in a row with more than 50 shootings. At least 14 people were shot within 15 hours overnight in Chicago between Monday and Tuesday, including the Chew family members, and six were fatally wounded, according to the Tribune.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel expressed his anger about the shooting and Chicago's violence problem at an unrelated event Tuesday morning, according to CBS.
"I'm going to try to control my anger. We have way too many guns on the streets of the city of Chicago, with too little values, and the penalties that don't match the values of the city of Chicago," Emanuel told reporters. "That gang bangers can get access to guns at will, without a value system, and without a sense of consequences and penalties, to indiscriminately shoot at a car with a grandmother, a mother, a child, and two individuals; it happens with a frequency that is unacceptable."