An “hours-long shooting spree” that led police across Chicago from the Hyde Park neighborhood on the city’s south side to the north side suburb of Evanston, left three dead and four others wounded according to the Chicago Police Department.
Chicago, which ended 2020 with a record-breaking number of gun-related homicides, was already on track to have nearly two dozen shootings by Saturday evening when a suspect with a long criminal history led police on a murderous chase that began with the death of a University of Chicago student near the school’s Hyde Park campus, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Chicago Superintendent David Brown said the shooter killed at least three people and wounded four more “just randomly.”
After killing the student in a parking garage, the shooter “walked into an apartment building a block away, where he shot a 46-year-old security guard who was sitting at the desk and a 77-year-old woman who was getting her mail,” Brown told media, per USA Today. “The guard was pronounced dead at a hospital and the older woman, who was shot in the head, was hospitalized in critical condition.”
“The offender proceeded to the 9300 block of South Halsted Street where he robbed a convenience store and fatally shot a 20-year-old man,” the Tribune added. “A second person inside the establishment, an 81-year-old woman, suffered gunshot wounds.”
The shooter took off, striking “a 15-year-old girl who was riding in a vehicle with her mother in the 10300 block of South Halsted Street” with his car. He returned to the convenience store where he got into his first shootout with Chicago police, disappeared, and reappeared later Saturday night in the northside suburb of Evanston, where he robbed a CVS and “subsequently fled to a nearby IHOP restaurant where he shot a woman in the head.”
The suspect died in a second shootout with police, this time with the Evanston police department.
Chicago police say the suspect documented much of his initial rampage on social media.
“In a series of seconds-long videos posted to his personal Facebook page from Friday night on, [the shooter] displays wads of cash and alcohol in a vehicle while speaking unintelligibly to the camera. In one video, he can be heard saying, ‘I’m going to blow up the whole community,'” the Tribune reported. “About 10:30 a.m. Sunday it appeared Facebook disabled the man’s page after many of the videos had been shared and commented on dozens of times.”
Brown tried to explain to the media why Chicago police had such a difficult time tracking the suspect, even though he cycled through several crime scenes.
“When you hear this whole story, it seems that you have a crystal ball of what he’s doing next, and we all know we don’t have a crystal ball where he goes next nor do we have this on any of our POD cameras,” Brown said. “We are responding to the scene as these crimes are happening, getting information, and again, he’s going to the next while we are trying to keep up with what’s happened previously.”
Chicago, like most major cities, suffered from a major spike in gun violence in 2020, and the trend seems to be continuing in 2021. Despite a drop in homicides in December and shockingly cold weather — a factor which, in other years, has stemmed the violence — the Chicago Sun-Times reports that this weekend alone, 5 people were killed and 21 were wounded in incidents of gun violence across the city.