Residents of Chicago can’t even have a picnic without people getting shot.
On Saturday evening, three people were shot and another beaten at a back-to-school “peace picnic” held on a playground at Seward Park on the city’s North Side.
The event was intended to promote peace and a sense of community, organizers said.
“It’s senseless and should have never happened,” event organizer Raymond Hatcher told reporters, Fox News reported. “We were doing well. Everything was going swell and then a group of guys who were not associated with us, came to the event intoxicated.”
Nineteen-year-old Trayvon Hatcher came with his two nephews to the park on Saturday.
“Everyone was trying to get away,” he told reporters.
Hatcher said when he heard the shots, he grabbed his nephews and left.
On Friday, a 3-year-old boy was shot, one of 25 people shot in Chicago over 14 hours from Friday into early Saturday, the Chicago Tribune reported. It all happened again Saturday into Sunday, when 23 more people were shot, one fatally, the Tribune reported.
Two weekends ago, 71 people were shot, 12 fatally, in a single weekend. “The violence reached a peak Sunday, when 30 people were shot during a three-hour span between midnight and 3 a.m. Eight shooting incidents that morning had three or more victims. A single shooting in Gresham wounded eight people, including four teenage girls, as they stood in a courtyard,” the Chicago Sun Times wrote.
After that bloody weekend, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff to Barack Obama, said, “There are too many guns on the street, too many people with criminal records on the street, and there is a shortage of values about what is acceptable.”
He said what needs to change is “the culture that condones rather than condemns.”
“All of us know that this is not Chicago — what we saw — therefore all of us who love this city and call it home have a responsibility to heal our neighborhoods,” he said.